Word: conductor
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...American conductor - a temperamental twin to the operatic tenor - has shared the orchestra's celebrated status; some, indeed, have defined it. In Europe, many a conductor has become a stoop-shouldered civil servant or a traveling virtuosity show. But in the U.S., a first-rank conductor can settle down comfortably, find a sympathetic barber to whom it seems reasonable that he must look even better from the back than he does from the front, and seize the authority to make music in his own style...
...count on a high place in local society, and, unless he is careful, cuddling up with the dragons and dragon ladies who run so many orchestras can easily do in his music while it velvets his life. In Seattle, Conductor Milton Katims has gently urged his salary up to $37,500 a year, about as much as the mayor and the school superintendent earn together, and nearly 20 times the pay of the men who fill the back chairs of his orchestra. In San Francisco, conductors come and go at the whim of J. D. Zellerbach and his fearful board...
Refined Art. Beyond all that, a conductor has to be alert to troubles within his orchestra. Men who have gone too far in an effort to make music a democracy (as Charles Munch did in Boston and Dimitri Mitropoulos did before he was shooed away from New York in 1958) may find themselves watching helplessly as their musicians betray them in a thousand ways. The New York Philharmonic has made a refined art of ignoring any inept visitors among the conductors who substitute for Leonard Bernstein each year: the players keep all eyes studiously away from the podium in hopes...
...class warfare of musician and conductor is as old as ego. But to Szell, the whole scrap is an empty one. "We are all in the service of music," he says, "and we must approach it with all the good will possible." Because he is the most authoritarian man now conducting, this means play it his way, or else...
Divorced. By Ann Harding, 58, gracefully aging blonde cinemactress (The Girl of the Golden West): Werner Janssen, 62, world-traveling symphony conductor; on grounds of intolerable cruelty (she accused him of giving her an ulcer); after 26 years of marriage, no children; in Bridgeport, Conn...