Word: conductor
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...hard to believe-turned 50. Still youthful in appearance, interests and energy (he now jogs with his 13-year-old son Alexander), Bernstein was starting his 1968-69 season with a five-week European tour. At season's end, he ceases to be the Philharmonic's permanent conductor, and plans to de vote most of his time to writing music; his first big project is a new Broadway production based on Brecht's The Exception and the Rule. By virtue of his achievements with the Philharmonic and as composer, author, pianist and TV personality...
...Being a Conductor...
...when Bruno Walter very nicely got the flu and I had to step in and conduct the Philharmonic, this age thing has changed. At that point, anyone in his 20s or 30s was just laughed at. It all begins much earlier now. There's something else. A conductor is no longer just a man who leads an orchestra. His job includes an educational function, a community leadership function, an institutional responsibility, the setting up of patterns and models that can be followed by other orchestras, and it involves a very complicated set of relationships with the members of your...
Today, the conductor is a sort of curator, and he hangs up these equivalents of masterpieces by Rembrandt, only they're by Beethoven. And he tries to light them as well as possible and put them next to the right other picture, and that's called programming. The whole idea of the concert hall grew up with the idea of the symphony. It began in the 18th century and finished with the beginning of the 20th century: from Mozart to Mahler, roughly. The symphonic form is dead, finished. But why despair about it? Just accept it. That tremendous...
...Oddly, composers as a group seem to be unusually prone to bizarre deaths. Among others: Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) died of gangrene after smashing his foot with a heavy, canelike conductor's baton while leading an orchestra; Charles Valentin-Alkan (1813-1888) toppled a bookcase over on himself while reaching for a copy of the Talmud; Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) came down with cholera after drinking a glass of tap water; and Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961) suffered fatal brain damage when he became entangled in the leashes of two fighting dogs and fell on a sidewalk...