On the back wall of a little wooden concert hall near his home in Hancock, Maine, the conductor Pierre Monteux posted 20 rules for students attending his summer school, L’École Monteux.
Some rules related to baton technique, stipulating that the first beat of a bar should always be clear, the last always notched higher than the first. Some spoke to the trust that a conductor needed to place in the players of an orchestra, and others to the faith that one should try to keep in audiences. Several insisted on the dignity of the profession; no fewer than three mandated that a conductor should never, ever bend down.
John Canarina, Monteux’s biographer and a regular pupil in the 1950s, pointed out that there was “nothing philosophical or metaphysical” about these strictures, that they offered merely “practical advice.” Only a few of the rules, indeed, were explicitly aesthetic. “Don’t permit the orchestra to play always a boresome mezzo-forte” was one. “Don’t adhere pedantically to metronomic time” was another. Perhaps the most crucial was also the most opaque: “Don’t fail to make music.”
However you define music, Monteux rarely failed to make it.
One of the most important musicians of his or any era, Monteux became widely known in 1913, after he stayed “nerveless as a crocodile,” in Stravinsky’s words, while conducting the turbulent Ballets Russes debut of “The Rite of Spring.” His career, and his life, were still three years from their end when, as “a lovable old penguin with the mustache of a gourmet,” in the telling of one English writer, he signed on as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1961, at age 86. Throughout, Monteux had a reputation for making music with balance, with energy, with decency and with taste — for “pure glow and luminosity, loveliness, brightness, and sheer auditory incandescence,” the critic Virgil Thomson once wrote.
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The post The Conductor Who Set the Course of Music in the 20th Century appeared first on New York Times.
