On Writing The Student Conductor
a commentary by the author
There was a conductor at Yale when I was studying flute and composition, a towering German with a thick accent and a charming way of mangling English. I don’t recall him committing a single act of cruelty, but his students trembled when they were on the podium and he barked out corrections. He was brilliant—his understanding of German music, colossal. I fell in love with Brahms under his baton. A performance of the Second Symphony—and the rehearsals that led up to it—were a revelation.
This conductor took a risk on me in my first year and assigned me to play principal flute in one of the Beethoven Leonore Overtures, a piece with a long flute solo. The piece opens with a huge chord in the woodwinds, and in our first rehearsal that chord sounded ghastly—grossly out of tune. The conductor’s face went beet red, as it often did. I heard later that he blamed me, which may or may not have been true. I was devastated. You couldn’t protest a thing like that. It should have been a minor episode, and I suppose it was. Either way, the Leonore was to be my last important flute assignment.
In the early 1980's I spent a lot of time wandering around West Germany. An old girlfriend was there on a Fulbright, living in a small town on the edge of the Schwarzwald, studying flute in a conservatory in Karlsruhe. Ten or twelve years later I was enrolled in William Hauptman's fiction workshop at the University of Texas. Our first assignment was to write a love scene. My mind leapt immediately to Ettlingen, its settings still vivid in my mind, trams, towering forests, an attic apartment, public hot springs, a cafe. I wrote a scene about an American trudging through the forest on his reluctant way to a doubtful assignation. Without thinking, I made him a conductor, studying with a man similar—superficially—to the conductor at Yale. That decision released another flood of material: memories, desperations, pathologies, all about music and the study of music, all reminding me of how abruptly I'd left that world. Now that world was back, a jilted lover, demanding restitution.
Starting with that workshop in Texas, The Student Conductor went through four or five drafts and took five years to complete. Three books seemed forever to be open on my desk: Jan Swafford's brilliant biography of Johannes Brahms; Timothy Garton Ash's The File, in which Garton investigates the file kept on him by the East German secret police; and a marvellously gossip-ridden book called The Maestro Myth, in which Norman Lebrecht unmasks the great legends of conducting—a must-read for classical music lovers. Behind me on my fiction shelf? John Fowles always, especially Daniel Martin. And the brilliant Robert Stone, especially his Outerbridge Reach. And Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And fifty others.
And on the CD player anytime I went dry: Brahms, Henze, and Mahler—and Stevie Ray Vaughn, especially his brilliant cover of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing, a testament to the power of restraint.
On research. Here’s the British novelist Graham Swift: ‘I do it illogically at the end rather than the beginning, to check things and fill in gaps. I have tremendous faith in the imagination to take you where you want to go.’ Swift speaks for me. Admittedly, I pored over a dozens of conductor interviews, read biographies of Bernstein and Furtwängler, and studied Brahms scores more than I ever had in music school. I even had a baton on my writing desk (I’d studied conducting briefly at Yale, shattering once and for all a youthful fantasy about pursuing the craft—too much memorizing). Before writing the fourth draft, I flew to Germany and spent two weeks in Frankfurt and Karlsruhe just to make sure I’d gotten certain of my descriptions right. Otherwise I relied on my impressions from the six or so months I’d spent in West Germany back in the early ’80s.
The book had been sold and was in the hands of my editor at Putnam before I trepidatiously asked a conductor friend to vet the manuscript for glaring errors, intensely aware of just how much of the student conductor’s life I’d concocted in my imagination. I was lucky. ‘It was excruciating,’ my friend said, ‘to live through that part of my life again.’
- Robert Ford