In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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There are an awful lot of works that would fall apart if not for a traffic cop on the podium (excluding operatic works. They really need a benevolent dictator to keep things going!)
Most, however, were composed after 1890 and require humungous resources. That alone makes these performances costly. So, maybe, the clue to financial stability is for orchestras to pair-down, perform older (and newer!) works that don’t require so many musicians, and occasionally get someone to conduct the bigger works. The late 19th /early 20th century orchestra is truly a product of the end of the Industrial Age and the central focus of the Consumer Age. We are, I believe, in the post-ages for both. And small is good again.
Cheers
David Cavlovic
Whether or not they're overpaid is a different matter entirely (one could say the same thing about software program managers compared to the developers who actually build the darn things), but if a conductor "doesn't make a difference" to the music, then classical music, recording-wise, might as well be like rock music (or film scores), where only the first recording of a work is necessary or "valid".
Obviously it is not. The Guardian article speaks from a position of sheer ignorance and self-righteousness.