Igor Toronyi-Lalic on Classical Music

Your first book?

Shaw’s Music: I think all these books are very good for demystifying the whole process of music-making, and George Bernard Shaw was great at that. He represented a school that was aiming at shedding the pomposity and pretentiousness in music criticism. He takes a very witty, very down-to-earth approach. He’ll spend as much time on the officiousness of provincial stewards and ushers as he will on the music and whoever is singing. He’s got a very good eye for those details that make it more relevant and interesting to the non-musical ear. His reviews are so much fun – almost every week I go back to another, and they’ve got brilliant titles as well: ‘Murder by the Bach Choir’, ‘Stuffing a Sonata’. They’re brilliantly digressive and quite arrogant in some ways, and he’s often talking about his personal inconveniences, but it’s always fun.

Shaw was also a great pioneer: he championed all sorts of composers we now take for granted, like Gluck, and he was particularly keen on the early music revival at that time, which has now become incredibly important, with a whole different audience for that music: Handel, Purcell, and early Baroque music like Scarlatti.

Quite important to the direction of 20th century music?

Yes, definitely, and that’s also why I chose The Bach Choir by Andrew Parrot. It’s detective work in some ways, dealing with the hugely contentious issue of how many people Bach wanted to sing in his great choral works: the Passions and the B Minor Mass. This may seem a very esoteric subject, but manuscripts like this essentially seem to blow away all received wisdom on how we should hear Bach. He goes through various written sources, iconographical sources, scientific analyses of acoustics and various other things to argue that Bach did not want a large choir. He most likely wanted the four soloists to sing throughout the St Matthew Passion, which is a huge task: it’s three hours long.

The book also brings out some brilliant detail, like the fact that boys’ voices used to break much later then ­– on average at around 17 or 18 ­– and this radically changes our idea that you can have these moving arias being sung by eight- or nine-year-olds. It’s always struck me as preposterous to do that – you have to have someone who’s had at least some understanding of what it is to be an adult. It’s a convincing argument that totally transforms how you have to do the Passions, so it’s a very important book in the sense it can radically change our view of some of the greatest musical works. It brings up the age-old argument of whether one follows the composer to the letter, or goes with the maestro – the interpreter of these works – and in the early 20th century the conductor often saw themselves as above the composer and what they wanted.

Tell me about The Maestro Myth.

It’s simply the best book on conductors you have: I don’t know any other that so honestly pricks the pomposity of the whole thing, and contextualises it, and introduces gossip (in the best possible way), as well as anecdotal evidence that sheds a huge amount of light on these characters we think of as mythical beings. The book’s premise, I guess, is that the conductor is a 20th-century invention, partly sustained by commercial necessity and the recording industry. The proliferation of orchestras means that you have to sustain the idea of the orchestral conductor as a full profession. Before, you had composer-conductors, and conductors who did various other things, but they were never exclusively conductors until the very late 19th century. Mainly it’s about how this monster was born, because for many orchestral players conductors are monsters, and to many ordinary punters they’re figures of complete bafflement.

What Lebrecht does is to show how some conductors did very little and just reaped a huge amount of money, and how some did a lot, but that much of that was down to charisma, psychology, and management – it’s a management role. These conductors were highly-strung individuals who had to navigate this incredibly precarious position. They were paid so much more than the average orchestral member so you have to, as a necessity, build this idea of yourself as some titan in order to sustain the sums and the wages you get. Lebrecht is one of the first to expose Mazel as being the first million-dollar conductor, and he has a table of the biggest-paid conductors of the last century.

There’s a lot of reverence shown to conductors, and this book really goes in between the cracks and uncovers all sorts of brilliant stories you’d never find anywhere else. Lebrecht has spoken to members of the New York Philharmonic, which was famously intemperate and got rid of its conductors every two years, and each one had a nervous breakdown or fled or had massive issues. Rodzinski, when he was there, conducted with a gun in his pocket. These stories are fun, but they have pertinence, because a good performance comes down to these personal relationships: a flautist won’t play well for the maestro if he’s been treated badly, and that often happens.

Has this book helped tame the monsters at all?

I think the reaction has been a lockdown on anyone leaking this sort of information, actually. At the time it was published there were quite a few exposés – classical music was a quite naive art form in many ways, they’d built this myth and hadn’t covered their tracks, and if you spoke to any orchestral members they’d just tell you the truth of it all.