Excerpt from The Musical Educator, Vol. 5 of 5: A Library of Musical Instruction by Eminent Specialists
The Conductor's art, as we know it at the present day, is of comparatively modern growth. Conducting with a baton was a thing unknown, at least in this country, until Spohr introduced the custom in 1820, although one infers from this that the custom had been adopted in Germany some years previously. Up to this period the principal Violin was the Leader in fact as well as in name, and played and beat time alternately with his bow, while the so-called Conductors chief duties seem to have been to sit at a Piano with the score before him and fill in any missing notes or correct wrong ones. It is not difficult to imagine what the renderings of the great orchestral works of the earlier Masters must have been like under these circumstances, as compared with the performances to which we are now accustomed to listen. The development which Music generally has undergone, the ever-increasing complexity of modern orchestral works, the growth in the resources of the orchestra as well as in the individual capabilities, technical and artistic, of the players, have all gradually tended towards an equal development of the Conductors art. It is no longer a more or less mechanical thing which can be easily acquired by any musician, but it requires resources and gifts of a high order, and as such, it now stands on the same artistic level as all the other executive branches of the art of music.
I do not mean to say that there are not still a good many mere beaters of time; musicians, so called, who have adopted or have been forced into the position of Conductor, who are in a large measure unfit for, or ignorant of, their duties; men of whom innumerable amusing stories have been and still could be related, such as the Conductor who came to rehearsal with the leaves of the score uncut, or that other who prefaced the rehearsal of a piece with the candid remark to his orchestra that he "knew nothing whatever about it!"
But these bear about the same relation to the true Conductor as the poor struggling Pianist or Violinist in a restaurant band does to a Paderewski or a Kubelik, and their number is, I am glad to say, fast diminishing and giving place, with the more extended opportunities now afforded, to others who have the requisite knowledge and capability, or are sufficiently talented to be able to gain these by experience.
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