For Martin Fischer-Dieskau, the two-year period since his last engagement in the USA feels like a remarkably long gap. The peripatetic maestro loves interacting with musicians and audiences around the world, so he's excited by the prospect of returning to the New World to helm an all-Berlioz programme at the Round Top Music Festival in Texas on 13 July.
“It's a little funny they chose a German conductor for this programme of French music, which pays homage to the 150th anniversary of Berlioz's death,” Fischer-Dieskau remarked in a Skype interview while at home in his native Berlin. “But he played a powerful role for Richard Wagner, especially with Roméo et Juliette, an obvious influence on Tristan und Isolde,” he adds, referring to Berlioz's vast, original, deeply affecting reinterpretation of Shakespeare's play as a “dramatic symphony,” the centrepiece of the programme.
Another point of fascination is that Berlioz was himself a pioneer of conducting – “against his will, because no one else dared to perform these intricate scores. To this day, they are very hard to realise,” he explains. Fischer-Dieskau has studied the history of his profession in depth: understanding how the role and its expectations developed is for him essential to improving his own practice as a conductor. In 2016, Fischer-Dieskau published a book on the evolution of conducting in Italian opera houses during the early 19th century, and he recently finished writing an intriguing essay about how the proper qualifications to be a conductor are sorely misunderstood in today's musical scene. These are ideas he looks forward to sharing with the emerging musicians with whom he will work at the Round Top Festival Institute (founded in 1971).
“This is a wonderful chance for me to do exactly what I want to do. To work with younger musicians is always a test of whether you can make yourself understood,” he says. In addition to the intensive work on the concert programme, Fischer-Dieskau enjoys discussing his ideas about the role of the conductor and demystifying the power that audiences today often ascribe to a visually arresting podium personality.
“Body movements and gestures are merely the tip of the iceberg – but this isn't conducting,” he explains. “Even if the audience mistakes it for that. Yet that is also what is being taught as conducting at schools and festivals, even by great teachers when they correct the arm motions of their young students. All of that can only be meaningful after the person is already a real musician. Nowadays, many people start off with the body movements and forget about the instrumental preparation. In my own work as a professor [at the Academy of the Arts in Bremen], I know how students prepare for auditions without even playing an instrument but already thinking about a conducting career.”
What, then, would the proper preparation entail? “For Roméo et Juliette, I play the violin and viola parts myself and with my wife, who is a cellist, so that I know about the challenges for the strings. For the song cycle Les Nuits d'été [also part of the programme, with Sasha Cooke as the soloist], I play them at the piano and consider how the keys have to be transposed when there is only one singer, as we have, since Berlioz wrote them for different vocal ranges. Only after this detailed work can the gestural preparation begin.”
Ultimately, Fischer-Dieskau is a firm believer in conducting the score from memory. Otherwise, he finds, insufficiently prepared conductors tend to fall back on superficial gestures as a way to conceal their lack of intimate knowledge of a score's details. “As a conductor, you need to make the architecture – how the music leads to the climaxes – clear to the audience so that it is not just a random array of sounds. They will have a sense of euphoria when the performance is authentic in this way. They feel it intuitively. The actual body gestures are irrelevant.”
Conducting arose, according to Fischer-Dieskau, as a merely practical, “logistical” issue of coordinating musicians. It wasn't meant to be an end in itself “and certainly not an individual discipline isolated from the participation of others.” But in today's scene, the hectic pace of concert planning and careerism – as well as the public's willingness to be dazzled by “the optical effect of conducting, the mime and gestural dance onstage” – have obscured the hard work that past generations of conductors understood to be essential to their role. In fact, he is convinced, this expertise is necessary to justify the existence of the conductor as a speciality.