Mr. Mauceri is a conductor and author, and was the musical adviser to the filmmakers of “Tár.”
The Academy Awards are still a week away, but at least one verdict is in: “Tár” is a hit, having already won some 60 international awards and six Oscar nominations, including for best picture, best directing and best actress in a leading role. It has also engendered passionate conversations, articles and interpretations.
The film, written and directed by Todd Field, stars Cate Blanchett as the fiercely ambitious conductor Lydia Tár. Throughout the film we are never sure what is “real” and what is imagined. She is constantly sanitizing her hands and popping pills and frequently walking in her sleep. Like Lady Macbeth, she is a work of fiction.
But some of my fellow conductors, as well as a few music critics, aren’t so happy. Some of their objections are aesthetic; some refer to errors of jargon, like calling Mahler’s Fifth Symphony “the Mahler Five.” One conductor in particular is more personal: “I was offended as a woman,” wrote Marin Alsop. “I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”
Not too many years ago, the funny and freewheeling Amazon Prime series “Mozart in the Jungle,” which ran for four seasons, depicted classical musicians engaging in a whole range of morally questionable behaviors. No one in the classical music community, as far as I can find, complained or took any of it too seriously. Real classical music stars such as Lang Lang, Alan Gilbert and Joshua Bell appeared in the series alongside the cast of actors. Even Gustavo Dudamel — now the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic — showed his good sense of humor by making a cameo appearance as a stage manager. By the final season, the fictional musician Hailey Rutledge, played by the actress Lola Kirke, had become a conductor (Episode 2: “Hailey Continues to Lie About Her Current Career Path”). So if a thoroughly irreverent show like that didn’t raise a false upbeat, what’s the uproar over “Tár” really about?
Many of the complaints within the classical music community seem to grow out of a concern that if you write a fictional drama depicting unsavory characters (Lydia is accused of abusing a young female student — though that is never proved in the film), the members of the moviegoing public who don’t generally attend classical concerts will be driven even further away.
But audiences are smarter than that. “Tár” was released on Oct. 7, 2022. That month streams of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 — a work that looms large in the film as one Lydia has yet to record with a major orchestra — were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by Apple. Compared with the previous October, that number had more than tripled. Streaming of Mahler’s Fifth also jumped on Spotify after the release of the film. The “Tár” concept album on Deutsche Grammophon hit No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts. And you can count on it: When my friend Marin Alsop next conducts Mahler’s Fifth, the press will celebrate what surely will be a brilliant performance — and also refer to “Tár.”
Historically, movies about badly behaving classical musicians were met with about the same suspension of disbelief as were noir mysteries and mobster movies. (Some movies portrayed the maestro as a savior. See “A Hundred Men and a Girl” from 1937.) In 1946, Warner Bros. released “Deception,” about a fictional composer-conductor, played by Claude Rains, who leads the not-mentioned New York Philharmonic. He is a predator and a sadistic genius, and the concert pianist who is also his much younger lover, played by Bette Davis, shoots and kills him. That year also saw the release of “Humoresque,” about a young violinist and an older patroness and lover, played by Joan Crawford, who ultimately commits suicide. Around the same time, moviegoers were treated to the thriller “Hangover Square,” which begins with a classical composer stabbing a shop owner to death and setting his establishment on fire.
Fiction or not, the sort of backstage backstabbing depicted in “Tár” is, alas, very real. We conductors do not generally like our colleagues, and we delight in denigrating one another — that is, until one of us dies. (I am now old enough for the younger set — 50 and under — to say nice things about me, which I find somewhat troubling.)
Yet there are surprising exceptions, Leonard Bernstein among them. In the 18 years I worked with him, the closest I heard him engaging in what the Germans call a dirigentenkrieg — a conductors’ war — was to say of his archrival, Herbert von Karajan, “I don’t think Herbert has ever read a book.” More typical was Arturo Toscanini, who called Leopold Stokowski “il Pagliaccio” (the clown) for appearing in Disney’s “Fantasia” and shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand.
There are many reasons for this. Conductors are competitors. But judging how “good” we are is complicated because we live in a world of opinions, not scorecards. Critics respond to the ephemera of our performances with indelible printed words, and far more people read those words than attend our performances. We appear to be all-knowing, grandly wielding a stick and controlling the greatest expressions of humanity, but we are truly in charge only when we are permitted to be in charge.
Our leadership, in reality, is about relationships — a kind of alternating current between the players and ourselves, as well as between the sounds we are making and our audience. When we see Lydia before the orchestra, she is charming, friendly and demanding. We strive so passionately to succeed — to at least be competent — because the job is inherently impossible. “No one knows how bad you are better than yourself” was a brilliant thing Michael Tilson Thomas said to me in 1971. There is no field that has more variations in technique, ability and training than conducting. That is its art and alchemy. We are easy to lionize and easy to denigrate.
Glamour and power were never the point when conducting was developed in the 19th century. Robert Schumann thought we should conduct only when the tempo changed, and otherwise just stand quietly and wait. Verdi, who saw it all — from his early operas, which were led by a violinist seated in front of the stage, to the imperious Toscanini commanding his “Falstaff” from an orchestra pit — said in a letter, “And now conductors actually take a bow, if you can believe it!”
Not all conductors, it should be said, have come out against “Tár,” and especially not all women conductors. After all, the film features a female maestro leading one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, with a female concertmaster and a female soloist playing the fiendishly difficult Elgar Cello concerto (notably, the piece was played this past week by Yo-Yo Ma, with Daniela Candillari leading the New York Philharmonic; during the past two months, the Philharmonic has been led by Ruth Reinhardt, Nathalie Stutzmann, Lidiya Yankovskaya and Dalia Stasevska). One of the most arresting scenes revolves around a composition by a woman, Anna Thorvaldsdottir. The person who wrote the accompanying music to the film, Hildur Gudnadottir, is a woman. Natalie Murray Beale, who has conducted operas at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, trained Ms. Blanchett. Other successful women conductors have supported the film, including Alice Farnham and Simone Young.
If W.H. Auden saw the last century as the Age of Anxiety, we might consider that we are living in the Age of Grievance. We want every story to tell every story, making storytelling all but impossible. But when metaphor is mistaken for reality, creativity, imagination and joy are extinguished.
So, let’s all take a deep breath. Or at least just take our cue from Gustavo. (The Times’s Joshua Barone called “Tár” “the comedy of the year.” “The less seriously you take this movie,” he said, “the better.”) “Tár” is not actually about any of us. Lydia is a fiction — made real by the performance of a great actress. We are all — composers, conductors, musicians and audience — merely human. The lie some of us cling to, that the artistic greatness that pours through us makes us great, is the truth at the heart of “Tár.”
I quite loved Tár, and like Mauceri points in his conclusion I saw it as a Comedy. Great films defy their genre labels and present so much more. It's a Psychological Drama, no doubt, but there is an ironic tragedy to the lead character's fall from grace. And I laughed very often at her put-upon trials and tribulations. It is a film about a person who thinks the world revolves around them. And she learns the world doesn't because of her singular actions and acidic tendencies towards those in her life. It's a universal story. And that's an aside to the wonderful direction on display (on a re-watch you can really take in the blocking and how body language informs so much) with sharp photography, a stellar supporting cast, precise editing, and near everything else you need to make a great puzzle of a film work.
Here, enough had been said (mostly in the negative) about Hildur Guðnadóttir's contribution to the sound of the film (there is no traditional underscore on purpose) but not much was ever said about the plot-centric use of music by Gustav Mahler or Edward Elgar. I thought this reveals a lot about people's attention span and desire to belittle a musician who was tasked with the director's request. Which makes me assume they might've seen a little bit of themselves in Lydia Tár. And then I can only assume it isn't a Comedy at all in that perspective.
Saw the film yesterday. Had some commendable values, but I didn't expect it to be so devoid of emotion and so static, visually (for the most part, characters are shot in plain americain). Perhaps to illude the character's static or self-absorbed positions. I probably had too high expectations, since my colleagues have raved about it since they saw it in Venice last year.
All of the issues surrounding gender, metoo and cancel culture didn't interest me so much (I'm getting sooooo tired of seeing every single film circling around these issues, as if a straitjacket), but I DID like that it turned some of those issues upside-down. Also, I found the fabulations around elitist classical environments more interesting; film music even gets a couple of mentions. In a masterclass, the Tar character mentions Goldsmith's PLANET OF THE APES both disparagingly and lovingly. The end scene also displays something that -- to the classical elite -- would be the lowest form of orchestral music; again something I take issue with, but is in line with the film's setting.
This is a good place to mention Mauceri's recent book The War On Music, which should appeal to many film score fans here. While the bulk of the tome explains how the two World Wars reshaped the politics and culture around classical music, it also explains why pop music in general—and film music in particular—has been looked down on for over half a century.
Mauceri already demonstrated, with 16 seasons of film music programming in LA, that he was one of us. But this book is a lively, informative read that comes down heavily on the side of film music being as “important” as any classical music—and that video game scores may be following suit. (Whether the climactic comeuppance of Tár was his idea, it certainly fits his thesis.)
The finale of Tár is quite a riot, to me. I've been fortunate enough to spend a good amount of time in the circles of people involved in video game music, as well as the live concerts they produce for the fans. They are incredibly genuine, kind, inventive, and brilliant folks. And humble and real. Knowing how the film is about the facade and pretentiousness of Lydia Tár, I can only imagine how defeated a character of this type feels to now be working among "the working class" of music composition. It must wreck her to spend any amount of time with real people who have real thoughts that aren't beholden to agreeing with her every thought and whim. Philip Glass owned a moving company, and took jobs as a handyman and taxi driver following his years at Juliard and as a Fulbright Scholar.
It is a strange, offbeat ending but it's a downward spiral of her own undoing for a strange, offbeat and supposed "genius" person. She put her hubris in front of her professionalism and she was lucky enough to survive in her own way.
It is a strange, offbeat ending but it's a downward spiral of her own undoing for a strange, offbeat and supposed "genius" person. She put her hubris in front of her professionalism and she was lucky enough to survive in her own way.
The funny thing is that the scene where she is lecturing at Julliard and offends that student (the Goldsmith line is in this scene) is the most potent part of the movie for me. This is where there is a lot of meat on the bones regarding music discourse. I watched that scene on YT and immediately rented the movie because I was immersed in the character.
I watched the movie last night. I was genuinely shocked when Jerry Goldsmith was mentioned for having "ripped off" Edgard Varese's Arcana to write the Planet of the Apes score. For me the most memorable scene in the movie for the wrong reason.
Here is the scene in question. Starts at the 2:30 point:
As JG is my favourite composer he deserved better. Not since The Dude said "I hate the F***ing eagles man" have I been so offended!
I watched the movie last night. I was genuinely shocked when Jerry Goldsmith was mentioned for having "ripped off" Edgard Varese's Arcana to write the Planet of the Apes score. For me the most memorable scene in the movie for the wrong reason.
Here is the scene in question. Starts at the 2:30 point:
As JG is my favourite composer he deserved better. Not since The Dude said "I hate the F***ing eagles man" have I been so offended!
But the way she couched the Goldsmith line is key here. Yes she says "didn't stop Jerry Goldsmith from ripping him off... kind of ironic if you think about it" in the context of Varese being an anti semite.
As Tar says later in that same scene: "don't be so quick to be offended". We know that Goldsmith culled from Varese and Berg and Bartok for POTA but the brilliance of his score is how he he fused these influences into a stunning contextual work. Nothing has sounded like it before or since. Maybe superficially but not in its full totality.
Context most certainly means everything. Indeed, it was basically a throwaway line re JG in terms of an aside to support the intended irony and not a focused criticism, as if he were a conniving thief or something. But it would be interesting to have the character post here if she felt that way. Oh, the fireworks!
