Why I am a conductor....

Charles Munch (1891-1968)

Recently, thanks to an updating of the Conductors Guild bibliography, so expertly prepared by Jonathan Green, as well as my favorite rare and used books website (abebooks.com) I have obtained three books write by or about conductors I have long admired.  These are I am a Conductor, by Charles Munch (translated by Leonard Burkat, 1955); Wilhelm Furtwangler's Concerning Music (translated by J. L. Lawrence, 1953) and Michael Charry's new George Szell: A Life of Music (2011).  I started my reading with the Munch and his words have reminded me why I share his profession, although I would never compare myself to his consummate artistry.

How many thousands of things about conducting they (the public) were unaware of.  That it is not a profession at all but a sacred calling, sometimes a priesthood, and often even a disease--a disease from which the only escape is death.  That fifteen years of work and study do not make a conductor of a man if he is not possessed by an inner exaltation, an all-consuming flame, and a magnetism that can bewitch both the musicians of his orchestra and the audience come to hear his music-making....

You perch on a pedestal in the middle of a battlefield.  You are Saint Sebastian exposed to the Roman arrows.  You are Joan of Arc ready to burn at the stake for what you love.  If even after forty years of conducting you are still struck to the heart before every concert by fear and panic that overwhelm you with the strength of a tidal wave, if you feel this formidable transport of anguish still more intensely each time, you are still making progress and every time you conduct you will understand your mission a little better....

I believe that every human being endowed with intelligence, memory, and strength of character bears within him a little of the supernatural as well.  The highest purpose of the conductor is to release this superhuman potential in every one of his musicians.  The rest is corollary, indispensable certainly, but only enough to make a professional conductor--not the combined servant and eloquent lover that music demands....

Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible.  It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define.  Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious.  Man's right to speak this language is for me the most precious gift that has been bestowed upon us.  And we have no right to abuse it....

Let no one be astonished then that I consider my work a priesthood, not a profession.  IT is not too strong a word.  And like all sacred callings, that of the conductor suppose a total self-renunciation and a profound humility.

And here is the man in action.