RELAXING on a warm afternoon many years ago in his dressing room

at the Ravinia Festival--the North Shore suburban summer home of

the Chicago Symphony Orchestra--Pierre Monteux was discussing con-

ducting with his old friend Walter Piston. "You go like this," he said,

giving his characteristically firm downbeat, "and they begin. It s very

simple." Then his bright little black eyes became more serious. "I re-

member once I conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the Beethoven

First Symphony. No matter how I tried to beat it, we couldn t begin

the first movement together. You know, it is very hard. Even in the

concert it was not good. A while later, the Berlin Philharmonic came

to Paris with Furtw~ingler. The Beethoven First was on the program,

so I went--just to see. You know how his downbeat was--a sort of

shudder sometimes. That s what he did, and they all came in perfectly."

As an art reaching beyond technique, conducting can no more be

explained in precise terms than can Horowitz s piano tone or the light

in Rembrandt s painting. Real conducting, that is, as opposed to beat-

ing time. All one needs for the latter is some technique and a certain

physical facility. Real conducting involves a lot more. Call it charisma,

if you will--not necessarily the charisma that merely excites the audience

but the commanding personal magnetism that so controls one hundred

musicians that their performance communicates musical excitement to

the audience, despite the fact that every player may regard himself as a

better musician and have a quite different concept of how the music