When, last year, two musicians from the Staatskapelle in Berlin left the orchestra to avoid having to endure what they considered to be the moral harassment of the musical director Daniel Barenboim, it seemed to us revealing a real evolution of the idea that we have of the maestro. Daniel Barenboim had not changed: he was always a rough boss. These are the mentalities that had changed. After the adulation of the virtuoso, a figure invented in the 19th century by Paganini for the violin and Liszt for the piano, it was the conductor who was the major figure in musical life in the 20th century. If only because of this magic power to make play a hundred people according to his musical vision by the only force of the gesture. In his book Mass and Power , published in 1960, Élias Canetti wrote: “There is no more concrete expression of power than the activity of the conductor. "
Also read: Daniel Barenboim, a conductor to take or leave
The great maestros of the past lived in a time when the orchestral musician
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