‘Tár’: A utopian portrayal of the classical music world

“There is NO more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor,” Elias Canetti says in his study of phenomena, Crowds and Power (1960). “Every detail of his public behavior throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all of its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.” He then describes how the conductor subdues the music from a standing position while the orchestra sits in front of them, and the audience sits behind. “His hands decree and prohibit [. . .] and since, during the performance, nothing is supposed to exist except this work, for so long is the conductor ruler of the world.”

Canetti was referring to conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891-1966), but his words could just as easily introduce Lydia Tár, the protagonist of Todd Field’s very long and highly acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, who received a best actress nomination for her performance. But Canetti’s beautiful and anachronistic profile, which he develops in the third volume of his memoirs, The Play of the Eyes, has little to do with the vulgar parody of a conductor portrayed in the film. Canetti’s precision in describing Scherchen, based on scant biographical data and accentuating a few character traits such as a hunger for knowledge, a passion for difficulty and an eagerness to control, contrasts with the superficial, egomaniacal, tic-ridden woman depicted at the beginning of Tár.

Field introduces Lydia Tár in an unlikely public conversation with The New Yorker journalist, Adam Gopnik. Gopnik comes over as authentic, but the interview is anything but. Aside from being a leading ethnomusicologist and a multi-award-winning composer who has won the EGOT – the four most important awards in the entertainment industry: the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar and the Tony – Lydia Tár has conducted the US’ five greatest symphony orchestras – Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and New York – and has been at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic for almost a decade. Needless to say, this is an impossible trajectory for a conductor, be they male, female or extraterrestrial. Then Lydia Tár touches on the composer Gustav Mahler and his Fifth Symphony, whose order of movements continue to cause controversy, but whose “mystery” is no less than that posed by the Sixth. But even the famous dedication of the Fifth to his wife Alma, to which Lydia Tár refers, becomes more mysterious in the Sixth: a musical portrait in F major.

She then comments on a reference to Mahler made by Leonard Bernstein, who was supposedly her teacher. She relates his view of Mahler to Judaism, but forgets the explanations he gave in his famous Norton Lectures at Harvard in which he considers him a kind of prophet who predicted the horrors of the 20th century. Most amusing, however, is her reference to the tempo and duration of Mahler’s famous Adagietto. Lydia Tár rejects Bernstein’s slowness, alluding to the rendition at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, and opts to conduct it much faster. She proposes it last seven minutes, which is faster even than Bruno Walter’s 1947 New York recording. But the tempo we hear in her rehearsal, and which is included on the Deutsche Grammophon CD featuring the film’s soundtrack, is even slower than Bernstein’s.

Much more serious is Lydia Tár’s portrayal of orchestral conducting. Apart from the easy laugh at a student’s expense, Tár speaks of a utopian world where there is no gender issue on the dais. Would it were so, but the reality is quite different. In response to Field’s film, British conductor Emma Warren used an anecdote in an article in The Guardian challenging this view: “Recently, I conducted a concert in a long-sleeved, full-length, loose-fitting dress – not that it should matter what I was wearing – and afterwards was approached by an older audience member, who told me that he liked watching my bum wiggle as I conducted.”

It was just seven years ago that EL PAÍS wrote about the appointment of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in Birmingham – who will make her debut next season at Madrid’s Royal Theater – a conductor who embodies a new female archetype on the podium. But the dominant stereotype associated with conducting is male, and the presence of a woman at the helm of a major orchestra is still news. The film Tár does nothing to address this fact if it simply reproduces the worst attributes of the egomaniacal, manipulative, alpha-male conductor in female form.

The deliberate emulation of the male conductor is clear from the start of Tár in a sequence in which Lydia Tár selects the image she is going to assume in her next recording. Among multiple Mahler LP’s lying on the floor, mostly featuring great conductors of the past – the most current being Gustavo Dudamel – she opts for the famous recording of Claudio Abbado conducting Mahler’s Fifth in Berlin.

Lydia Tár’s conducting is stilted and implausible when we see her during rehearsals in front of musicians from the Dresden Philharmonic, who are representing the Berlin Philharmonic in the movie. And the gesture that marks the start of funeral march of the first movement of Mahler’s Fifth, also used as a poster in the film, seems as overacted and superficial as Lydia Tár’s entire character.

Cate Blanchett is not credible as an orchestra conductor at any point during the film. And everything around her merely adds to a distorted image of the profession. Her assistant Francesca as a disciple is not believable, the character of Eliot Kaplan – in reference to the benefactor Gilbert Kaplan – is ridiculous, her veteran predecessor Andris Davis becomes tiresome with his saccharine anecdotes from the past, no conductor has an assistant as old as Sebastian and the relationship she has with her wife and concertmaster, Sharon, is not plausible either. Perhaps the only believable character is the mysterious Olga, played by the Anglo-German cellist, Sophie Kauer. Missing is the presence of the executive director, who manages the relationship of any conductor with an orchestra.

It is clear that the character of Lydia Tár is fictitious. Field tries to make her authentic but the result is a clumsy, old-fashioned portrait of orchestral conducting. There are simply no conductors like her anymore, male or female, however much the history of her downfall feels familiar. The myth of the maestro has been relegated to the past. And, for quite a few years now, major orchestras have been more interested in conductors who motivate and inspire, who come to the job with a mature rather than glamorous approach. This became clear in 2015 when the members of the Berlin Philharmonic chose a complete unknown, named Kirill Petrenko, as their new incumbent.

Nicholas Logie explained this change of mentality, in 2013, in The Role of Leadership in Orchestra Conducting, published by Scholars’ Press. Cristina Simón, meanwhile, is working on a doctoral thesis at La Rioja University, where she applies the theory of transformational leadership to explain the current collaborative relationship between orchestras and conductors. It is precisely this change in the conductor’s leadership style, together with the disappearance of such harmful characters as Lydia Tár, that is allowing us to see more and more women on the dais of the best orchestras in the world.

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