Who Is Afraid Of Lydia Tár?

“Tár” is a hit, having won some 60 international film awards and six Academy Award nominations. It has also engendered passionate conversations, articles and interpretations.

The film, written and directed by Todd Field, stars Cate Blanchett as the fiercely ambitious conductor Lydia Tár. Throughout the film we are never sure what is “real” and what is imagined. She is constantly sanitizing her hands and popping pills and walking in her sleep. Like Lady Macbeth, she is a work of fiction.

But some of my fellow conductors, as well as a few music critics, are not so happy. Some of their objections are aesthetic; some refer to errors of jargon, like calling Mahler’s Fifth Symphony “the Mahler Five.” One conductor is more personal: “I was offended as a woman,” wrote Marin Alsop. “I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”

Many of the complaints within the classical music community seem to grow out of a concern that if you write a fictional drama depicting unsavory characters (Lydia is accused of abusing a young female student — though that is never proved in the film), moviegoers who do not generally attend classical concerts will be driven even farther away.

But audiences are smarter than that. “Tár” was released last October. That month, streams of Mahler’s Symphony Number 5 — a work that looms large in the film as one Lydia has yet to record with a major orchestra — were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by Apple. Compared with the previous October, that number had more than tripled. A “Tár” concept album on Deutsche Grammophon hit Number 1 on the Billboard classical charts.

Fiction or not, the sort of backstage backstabbing depicted in “Tár” is very real. We conductors do not generally like our colleagues, and we delight in denigrating one another. For instance, Arturo Toscanini called Leopold Stokowski “il Pagliaccio” (the clown) for appearing in Disney’s “Fantasia” and shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand.

There are many reasons for this. Conductors are competitors. But judging how “good” we are is complicated because we live in a world of opinions, not scorecards. Critics respond to the ephemera of our performances with indelible printed words, and far more people read those words than attend our performances. We appear to be all-knowing, grandly wielding a stick and controlling the greatest expressions of humanity, but we are truly in charge only when we are permitted to be in charge.

Our leadership, in reality, is about relationships — a kind of alternating current between the players and ourselves, as well as between the sounds we are making and our audience. When we see Lydia before the orchestra, she is charming, friendly and demanding. We strive so passionately to succeed — to at least be competent — because the job is inherently impossible. There is no field that has more variations in technique, ability and training. That is its art and alchemy. We are easy to lionize, and to denigrate.

Not all conductors have come out against “Tár,” and especially not all female conductors. After all, the film features a female maestro leading one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, with a female concertmaster and a female soloist playing the fiendishly difficult

Audiences will not shun classical music because of a movie.

Elgar Cello concerto. One of the most arresting scenes revolves around a composition by a woman, Anna Thorvaldsdottir. The person who wrote the accompanying music to the film, Hildur Gudnadottir, is a woman. Natalie Murray Beale, who has conducted operas at the Royal Opera House in London, trained Ms. Blanchett. Other successful female conductors have supported the film, including Alice Farnham and Simone Young.

We want every story to tell every story, making storytelling all but impossible. But when metaphor is mistaken for reality, creativity, imagination and joy are extinguished.

So, let us all take a deep breath. (The Times’s Joshua Barone called “Tár” “the comedy of the year”: “The less seriously you take this movie, the better.”) “Tár” is not actually about any of us. Lydia is a fiction. We are all — composers, conductors, musicians and audience — merely human. The lie some of us cling to, that the artistic greatness that pours through us makes us great, is the truth at the heart of “Tár.”