Musings on Film Auteurism and Classical Music

 

I have long thought that the best analogy for the theory of cinematic auteurism is that of the composer, orchestra, and conductor of classical music. The score of a Mahler symphony, of course, is akin to a film script by a writer. The various players of the orchestra are akin to the technicians and crafts people who collaborate to make a film. The conductor is akin to a film director. He or she takes the score, conducts or directs the various players playing the various instruments (including the human voice) noted in the score, and produces a performance of a musical work just as a director conducts or directs the various forces that go into making a film.

Not all film directors or classical conductors, of course, are equally auteurs. On one level, there are the Leonard Bernstein's and the Herbert von Karajan's, to take two examples, who bring something of their own personalities and their understandings of composers to their conducting. They are akin to the Alfred Hitchcock's and Ingmar Bergman's of the film world. On another level, there are the mostly anonymous conductors who really don't bring much of a personality to conducting or directing. They are the Archie Mayo's of the classical music world.

Nor should we forget that interpretation is not absent from the conducting or directing of a piece of classical music. Though composers often annotate their scripts with tempo markings, for instance, there remains a degree of ambiguity about how to interpret those annotations and whether they actually "work" in practise that every conductor must make. I give you Beethoven's metronome markings. A conductor has to make a choice among various possible interpretations of a musical score in collaboration with the other musicians just as a film director has to make choices, in collaboration with others, about the mise-en-scene of a film.

Finally, it is worth noting that some conductors and orchestras specialise in periods and composers just as some film directors specialise in certain genres. Trevor Pinnock and his orchestra, The English Concert, for instance, specialise in baroque and early classical. Conductor Bernard Haitink was a fine Mahlerian while Simon Rattle is an excellent Szymanowski conductor. Very few conductors can actually do everyone in every period well.