| Chapter 1: | Conducting in Theory and Practice |
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She writes, “[T]o capture a work only in terms of its describable conditions (as Wagner thinks a formalist tends to do) always leaves something essential or extra out. ‘For me’, Wagner once recalled, ‘music was a demoniacal, a mystically exalted enormity: everything concerned with rules seemed only to distance it’ ”.15 Wagner would argue “that where the conditions or rules for the production of a work are employed as fully determinative of a work, where they are taken as limits to be stayed within rather than surpassed, then the works produced as a result are metaphorically speaking unmusical. In musical or aesthetic terms, rules exist to be bent, broken, or ultimately left behind”.16
While this statement refers to the production of music, Wagner’s disdain for constraint is apparent in his views on conducting and manifests itself through his notion of tempo rubato—or tempo modification. However, this approach to the score was sometimes the subject of criticism. In Dresden, some music critics found fault with his conducting. They thought his tempos were eccentric, his gestures vague, and his beat unsteady. In a review of a performance by Wagner of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Eduard Hanslick complains of excessive tempo rubato, which he claims damages the character of the finale. As translated by Erich Leinsdorf, Hanslick writes,