Litnet

(This review may initially seem to be wandering aimlessly – please be patient, it does come together. Spoiler alert! And, if it seems over-detailed as to the story in the movie, this story is now commonplace, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and is threaded through many available detailed reviews.)

Classical music is an art form with its roots clearly in central Europe. If one inspects a “who’s who” of classical music composers, the following had as a home language one or another dialect of German: Bach, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Schubert, Handel, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Mahler. We are to wait until quite late in the 19th century for this pendulum to swing east: from then on and into the 20th century, we encounter Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, all speaking some dialect of Russian.

It is the same with conductors. The British Broadcasting Corporation publishes a magazine dedicated to classical music (entitled simply Classical Music) which lists the top ten conductors of the 20th century. Nine are white, Europe-born men.

But one is not. And he was rated in this BBC poll as the second most important conductor of the 20th century. His name was Leonard Bernstein, and he was a New York-born Jew, who was born in the year the First World War ended (1918) and died in 1990. Known to his huge horde of fans as “Lennie”, he was one hell-of-a-guy.

Bernstein made a living mostly by conducting, but that was just a portion of his enormous lifetime’s output. He also composed music of many sorts – he wrote three symphonies, a mass, some jazz and much else. He is probably best known for the musical score he wrote for the play West side story, and he also wrote scores for Peter Pan and Candide.

His mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1966 for the opening of the JF Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, an event that the then president, Richard Nixon, would not attend because of the anti-Vietnam War position of Bernstein. Bernstein was a humanist and espoused many humanitarian causes, some unpopular with the elite, as they always are. This hardly restrained Bernstein.

Bernstein was also a pioneer in using the (then) new media to promote his twin causes, classical music and Leonard Bernstein. Shortly after becoming the first non-Europe-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, he televised his Young people’s concerts, to great success. His six lectures at Harvard, entitled “The unanswered questions”, again televised and now on YouTube, reveal an intellectual man whose grasp of issues went well beyond music, into a fabulous realm of thinking brought down to ground. His chain smoking, which eventually ended his life at the age of 72, distracts today, although it was commonplace then.

In 1960, Bernstein fell onto another issue that was to become a life’s mission for him. It was the centenary of the birth of composer Gustav Mahler, and Bernstein, now for nine years the music director of the premier United States orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, decided to commemorate this event with an all Mahler concert. He invited Mahler’s widow, Alma Mahler, then 81 years old, to the concert. This set Bernstein off on a mission to “rehabilitate” the music of Mahler, who had died 49 years before this concert, and whose music had fallen off the list of regularly performed concert pieces.

Bernstein was also a born teacher, and he repeatedly led the Boston Philharmonic to the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, where he was part of awarding the Koussevitzky Prize to outstanding student conductors. There, in 1989, he handed that prize for the first time to a female aspirant conductor, the 33-year-old Marin Alsop. He was to become her mentor and hero, as she set off on a remarkably successful career as a conductor.

The next year, Alsop entered a relationship with Kristin Jurkscheit, a horn player who was to play in orchestras conducted by Alsop. This arrangement caused controversy when Alsop was conducting the Colorado Symphony Orchestra – Alsop stared this down by stating that their relationship predated her appointment at Colorado, and did not affect her job performance. She and Kristin later adopted a son.

In 2002, Alsop jointly founded the Taki Alsop Fellowship to promote female conductors, and five years later she was appointed as the music director for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. This contract was repeatedly extended until 2021, when she was made music director laureate.

Bernstein had, meanwhile, gone on to great glory, and became unquestionably the most famous non-Europe-born conductor of the 20th century. His determination to promote Mahler’s music was undimmed to his last days, and on his death in 1990, on his instructions he was buried with his performer’s score of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on his chest, open at his beloved adagietto, the fourth movement of this symphony. The adagietto is scored for only strings and harp, and is exquisite in its haunting beauty.

Todd Field is an American moviemaker, with a considerable reputation. He has made only three movies: In the bedroom in 2001, Little children in 2006 and now, in 2022, Tár. In total, these few movies have garnered 14 nominations for Academy Awards (Oscars), six of which attach to Field himself, for he has written the scores for and directed and produced all three movies himself.

Tár was released at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in September 2022, scooping awards there, and is already the fourth movie in history to have been named the “Best Film of the Year” by all four of the world’s major film critics groupings: the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. It has been nominated for six Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Cinematography and Best Editing. It already has won 60 international awards.

Adam Gopnik is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine. In a recent (14 February 2023) edition of this magazine, he states that he was phoned by Field some time back, and told that Field was to make a movie which would include a character by the name of “Adam Gopnik”, and did he want to play the role? On reading the score, Gopnik felt that “I had been cast as a highly scripted and agreeably heightened version of myself”, and he gladly took on the cameo, which was to act as the interviewer of Lydia Tár, conductor extraordinaire, at a fictional version of the New Yorker Festival.

This interview is the start of Field’s film.

It begins with Tár (Cate Blanchett) in the wings of a stage at the festival. A voice onstage, which turns out to be Gopnik, is reading through the stellar CV of their guest, Ms Tár. Offstage, she hears this and is clearly nervous, and steadies herself by taking a handful of pills. The voice of Gopnik begins:

Tár has a PhD from the University of Vienna, which was the result of a five-year fieldwork programme with indigenous Peruvian musicians. She then began a conducting career at the Cleveland Philharmonic, then moved to the New York Philharmonic. There she commissioned music by contemporary female composers. She herself is an accomplished composer for stage and screen, and, incredibly, is an EGOT – a winner of each of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. She also runs a programme to provide young female conductors mentorship and residence.

In 2015, she was appointed to possibly the most admired job in classical music, for she is from that date the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, having taken the position from a retiring Brit, Andries Davis.

Bernstein was her mentor and hero, and like Bernstein she has become lost in the glories of Gustav Mahler. With the Berlin Philharmonic, she has already recorded eight of Mahler’s nine symphonies, with only the 5th still in production. She is, in fact, to return to Berlin after this event to record the 5th.

This interview has three purposes – to introduce the audience to Lydia Tár, and also to this recording cycle, and to announce the imminent release of her autobiography, Tár on Tár.

When Gopnik finishes reading this scripted CV, Cate Blanchett moves onstage and takes a seat for Gopnik’s questions. The onscreen interview lasts about seven minutes, and is a tour de force. At the end, Gopnik asks about the forthcoming recording of Mahler’s 5th. Tár replies that the symphony is a mystery, but that she has uncovered a clue for its interpretation. On the cover of Mahler’s personal score, there is a dedication to his beloved Alma, whom he had very recently married. The adagietto, which she notes Bernstein stretched out over 12 minutes at Kennedy’s funeral, is about love.

Her audience is by now in raptures. This interview is three marvellous things wrapped into one. It is magnificently scripted by Field, a fascinating combination of musical detail, personal moments and splendid thinking. And it is an out-of-the-world performance by Blanchett, who moves her eyes, body, head and particularly her hands quite magnificently in synch with her talking. If this lady was a bag of nerves a few minutes ago, she can recover instantly. She simply overwhelms her audience.

The third marvellous thing about this interview is how Blanchett presents Lydia Tár. Tár is presented as a woman at the height of her powers – brilliant, learned, dazzlingly eloquent, supremely self-confident and utterly composed.

One gets an eerie feeling that Tár is on the top of her Everest, and can only go down from here. And so it proves to be. She now begins an emotional and moral decline that lasts a very long time, for this movie is 158 minutes long. And Ms Blanchett, Lydia Tár, is on camera for every second of this marathon.

After the interview with Gopnik, Lydia moves to a restaurant with Eliot Kaplan, a New York investment banker who is her principal backer. Lydia lives between Berlin and New York, and Kaplan’s private jet makes the trips easy going. And Kaplan heads up the Tár Foundation, a foundation through which Tár trains promising female conductors.

Through the meal, we learn three things: Kaplan is also an enthusiastic amateur conductor; he would love to see Tár’s score of the Mahler Fifth Symphony to assess her conductor’s notes, but neither Tár nor Tár’s ever-faithful assistant, Francesca, will make this possible; and, ominously, while the Tár Foundation has managed to place all of their students in positions on completion of their courses, one girl (no name given) has not been placed. Tár responds, “She had issues,” and Kaplan replies that he is to meet her father, as he has formally complained (about what exactly we are not told).

Being in New York, Lydia has been invited to meet with a small group of music students from the famous Juilliard School. This she does the next day.

A student, Max, admits he pays no attention to Bach, being disgusted by Bach’s abusive attitude to women. Bach, Max says, fathered 20 children, and this, in today’s terms (although Max does not use this term), has led Max to “cancel” Bach.

Never one to hold back on her opinion, Lydia proceeds to lay it on Max. If he can reduce Bach to gender issues, then how would Max feel should one of his examiners score Max, on his rating sheets, on issues other than his music proficiency?

The Lydia monologue continues, both subtly worded and also highly abusive. Eventually, Max has had enough, and grabs his bag and starts walking for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“You fucking bitch!” Max storms out.

Lydia is never one to miss a parting shot: “And you are a robot – the architect of your soul appears to be social media.”

Then a phone call from Kaplan.

He has received a “weird” email from the student they talked about yesterday, the one who has never been placed, Krista Taylor. “Don’t reply,” advises Lydia. Kaplan replies that the email is “especially desperate”.

On Kaplan’s plane flying back to Berlin, Lydia takes the by now regular handful of pills and then, in the plane toilet, opens a wrapped gift that was left anonymously for her at her hotel reception in New York. The gift is, in fact, a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s novel, Challenge, the story of a girl who commits suicide when abandoned by her lover. The gift is from Krista Taylor. In a panic, Lydia stuffs it into the plane toilet disposal bin. The plot is clearly thickening.

Back home in Berlin, we meet Sharon Goodnow, Lydia’s partner/wife. Sharon is the first violin and leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra Lydia conducts and runs. Together they have an adopted daughter, Petra, possibly five or six years old. The homecoming between Lydia and Sharon is affectionate and loving, and it is clear that they share a magnificent apartment, filled with books, art, special furniture, Persian carpets and, of course, a marvellous piano.

Sharon admits a concern – Petra is returning from school with bruises that she refuses to explain. Lydia offers to take Petra to school the next day.

On arriving at Petra’s school, Lydia gets Petra to point out the child who is bullying her. Lydia approaches this child and tells her, in an unambiguous tone, that if this bullying happens again, “I will get you.” This is repeated and expanded on, and Lydia then walks calmly off. The bullying stops.

As if her life is not complicated enough, Lydia is next in the ablutions at the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall awaiting the beginning of a selection process for a new cello player, when a young and beautiful woman walks in to use a toilet. Lydia’s attention is immediately aroused, and she notices the girl’s boots. She leaves to do the selection.

As the three candidates for the one position perform behind screens and are marked by the panel without their identities being known, Lydia scores them all as per normal. Then she notices that the last candidate is wearing the boots (all Lydia can see under the screen) she previously noticed. She immediately changes her mark for this candidate. The Berlin Philharmonic clearly has an impulsive chief director with a dangerous willingness to indulge in sexual intrigue.

That evening at home, we see the first evidence that Lydia is beginning to unravel. She hears a continuous ticking sound that is disturbing her composing, but can’t find its source. Then she takes a run, and in the deserted park she hears a woman screaming. Again she searches for the source, but to no avail. From now on, insomnia that is triggered by strange sounds and knocks on her door that yield no knockers, begin to haunt her. Once, however, she finds a metronome ticking away in a cupboard in her study in the middle of the night. It appears to bear the logo that was in the book Krista gave her. Her anguish mounts.

As does her ruthlessness. Lydia has an assistant conductor, Sebastian Brix. Sebastian has clearly concluded that Lydia is not to be confronted, and is obsequious in his deference to “Maestro”, as he unfailingly calls Lydia. This does not spare him, for Lydia has decided that he is too old and is a “robot”. He is to be “rotated out”.

Lydia approaches Knut, a representative of the orchestra members, with this news. Knut is clearly unhappy, but says that he will call a vote. (The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra members vote to appoint their chief conductor – this is their right.) Lydia will have none of it – this falls under her authority, and is her decision “only”. Reluctantly, Knut agrees with this. She asks him whether he will support her. Knut says he will, with reluctance all over his face. Sebastian’s fate is sealed.

The news is delivered to Sebastian by Lydia in his office. “This is my home – you’re not asking for my opinion, you are telling me – it’s the girl (Francesca), isn’t it? We know the things you do, the little favours you grant,” he stammers out, only to be flattened by Lydia: “You question my integrity!”

Sebastian returns to form, and begs forgiveness. It does not help. He is finished at the Berlin Philharmonic.

But now a tragedy engulfs Lydia and Francesca. Lydia arrives at her office to find Francesca in tears. She has had a message. Krista Taylor, who was a friend of Francesca’s, is dead. She has committed suicide.

Lydia shows no grief. Francesca must delete all emails from Krista. “Don’t get caught up in this intrigue. … She wasn’t one of us. … There was something not quite right about her. … You must forget her, understand?”

Francesca stammers out, “She had so much promise.” Lydia replies that she did.

We are then shown a string of emails from Lydia to many in the music world, all determinedly discouraging the recipient from employing Krista. Lydia destroyed this girl’s every chance of a future in music – for what reason we can only guess at this stage. Lydia uncovers an email from Krista that she has ignored: “I can’t do it anymore.” Her response is to go to the gym and punch the hell out of a heavy punchbag.

Now Lydia’s life is floating down three streams simultaneously: she is to be drawn deeper and deeper into the detail of Krista’s fate, and her involvement in it; her infatuation with the young cellist, a Russian girl named Olga, and her oh-so-easy disloyalty to Sharon in this process; and her ever growing psychotic moments. These three processes are described by Field superbly, and are for the viewing and not for my telling. But slowly they lead us to a chaotic conclusion, and the realisation that Lydia Tár is a ruthless sexual predator to whom personal relationships, in the ever loyal Sharon’s words, are always transactional.

Eventually, she becomes exposed as having groomed Krista and possibly others; her ever faithful Francesca, having been promised Sebastian’s position by Lydia as her deputy and then having been pushed aside, turns over the trove of her emails to the lawyers running Lydia’s deposition in New York; her next “catch”, Olga the Russian cellist, happily accepts a free ride with Lydia to New York in Kaplan’s jet, and there abandons Lydia for a more exciting option; and Kaplan pulls the plug on their foundation and his patronage of the increasingly erratic Lydia. Finally, Sharon too revolts, and pulls even their child, Petra, away from Lydia. Her ostracism becomes complete.

As with Lady Macbeth, Field first has his female villain descend into madness before her ultimate fate.

Lydia has been banned from the magnificent Berlin Philharmonic apartment and is now living in her “bolt-hole”, a humble downtown apartment. A knock on the door. The owner of the apartment and friends are there, and note that they are to sell the apartment and wish that Lydia should desist from “her noise”, which would discourage buyers. Unhinged by this phrase, Lydia slams the door in manic laughter.

In the next scene, Field has Lydia stomping around this apartment, “playing” an accordion as loudly and as discordantly as one can imagine, and “singing” (shouting?) “Apartment for sale” repeatedly as the only lyrics. (The credits promote this “composition” as jointly by Field and Blanchett.) Clearly, Lydia has now lost it.

But worse is to come in the next scene.

This scene is at the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall, and we are at a dress rehearsal of the Mahler Fifth Symphony that Tár has been training the orchestra for, for so long. The enormous hall is full to capacity, and the orchestra has begun playing.

Tár, dressed for conducting, is in the wings, and is filmed as she was filmed at the beginning of this movie, as we were leading up to the Gopnik interview – face on from the front. She appears even more nervous than she was then, now so long ago, and she storms onstage, rushing through the players.

As she reaches the conductor’s podium, she stumbles, crashing forwards, and knocking the conductor flying as she herself falls face down. She scrambles to her feet and yells, “That’s my score!” for, indeed, the stand-in conductor is conducting from Lydia’s own score, which went missing some time back from the magnificent Berlin Philharmonic apartment which was Lydia and Sharon and Petra’s home.

We then realise, as Lydia does, that the stand-in conductor is Eliot Kaplan, and Lydia, sensing that Kaplan has had her score stolen, becomes uncontrollable. She flies into the prone Kaplan, kicking and punching with enormous ferocity until, mercifully for Kaplan, security staff arrive and restrain Lydia and lead her offstage.

And so ends Lydia Tár’s time with the Berlin Philharmonic, her years as the darling of the European and North American concert halls, her marriage to Sharon and her relationship with their daughter, the executive jets, the magnificent apartments and the rock star lifestyle that her stellar talents so effortlessly delivered.

Shakespeare created his share of female villains, the one more horrible than the others. What they had in common was a life filling the stage with an endless flow of the blood of innocents, followed by their own grisly fate. This is a Grecian model of drama, and at the end of Lydia’s period in Berlin, we feel that her horrific sins are deserving of a Shakespearean fate.

Tamora from Titus Andronicus was party to the stage being repeatedly awash with blood. Eventually apprehended, she is fed a pie, unknowing that it is her two murdered sons that are being fed to her. After this ghoulish repast, Tamora is in turn murdered, and her body thrown out for the birds to feed on.

Thankfully, contemporary sensitivities spare Lydia such a downfall, but fall she nevertheless must.

Firstly, she journeys back to the USA and her childhood home. There she rediscovers a recording of Bernstein’s Young people’s concerts, and, on viewing this, she breaks down in tears. She seems to be softening.

Her brother arrives and tells her, “You don’t know where you come from, or where the hell you are going to.” Possibly cruelly, he reminds her that her name is, in fact, “Linda Tarr”.

Then we find ourselves in Thailand, for it is here that Lydia’s agent has found her an opportunity that is still open for her.

The flight, now in cattle class on a commercial jet, and the bus ride to her hotel, now on the back of an open truck, have left her stiff and sore, and she asks the receptionist in her tatty hotel for a recommendation of a massage parlour (meaning the real thing). This he gives her on a scruffy piece of paper, and Lydia heads off for this massage parlour (definitely not the real thing).

After paying over her US dollars, she is guided to the “fishbowl”. Here she finds a large glass window, behind which are dutifully sitting about 20 young girls, hardly older than children. Dressed in uniform white robes, each has an individual number. All look down in supplication – except number five (surprise!), who raises her eyes to Lydia. She seems to be the target.

The next scene is Lydia running through the foyer of this building, out onto the pavement. Here she wretches. For the first time in this movie, Lydia has responded morally to a horrific event. Those of us who believe in redemption will cheer this scene. Is Lydia now changing for the better?

Next we have her about to conduct a ragtag orchestra through the score of a video game named “Monster hunter”, all watched by an audience not in evening dress, but dressed as cosplayers.

Such is the fall, and the fate, of Lydia Tár. Had he been born into cancel culture, one feels that Shakespeare would approve.

And so Todd Field ends his movie.

What is one to make of this movie?

My first concern: Field has indulged in at least two episodes of portraying characters in my view closely resembling real-life people.

Field has created a character by the name of Eliot Kaplan, who is a wealthy businessperson and now a classical music aficionado. He is also a determined amateur conductor and a patron of a musical foundation, the Tár Foundation. He is more ambitious than talented, and more wealthy than he needs to be.

In real life, there was a person named Gilbert Kaplan, who died in 2016. This Kaplan had founded and grown a financial magazine, the Institutional Investor, which he had sold for plenty. Thereafter, Gilbert Kaplan had taken on the music of Gustav Mahler with a determination approaching fanaticism, and he founded the Kaplan Foundation, dedicated to promoting and publicising the music of Mahler. And he was a determined amateur conductor, but of only one work – Mahler’s Second Symphony. This he performed possibly 100 times, with orchestras and choirs he hired and in concert venues he likewise rented. He twice recorded and sold his performances of this symphony. The only other work he ever recorded was – wait for it – a studio recording of Mahler’s adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. His foundation did much excellent work, including creating a discography of all recordings of Mahler’s works, and publishing original Mahler scores and original Mahler recordings.

The “Eliot Kaplan” in Field’s movie even has a strong physical resemblance to the real Gilbert Kaplan, in his later years.

But there is a much more serious example of Field’s portrayal of a real-life person. And that is his portrayal of Lydia Tár.

I have mentioned Marin Alsop. She is a very fine conductor. (I attended a performance of Bernstein’s Mass conducted by Ms Alsop, in the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. This work calls for great resources, including an onstage brass band; Ms Alsop had the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band on stage – remember them, the movie Brassed off? – and she provided an excellent rendition of this not-so-magnificent work.) And she has, as these notes have already hinted, the following qualities: she conducts a major symphony orchestra (the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra); she runs a conducting fellowship for young female conductors; she studied under Leonard Bernstein, who was her hero; she is lesbian and is in a long-term relationship with her partner, and together they have a child; her partner plays in the orchestra Marin conducts; and Marin teaches at a major American musical conservatory.

Sound familiar? Sound like Lydia Tár?

Tár appears to be an amalgamation of Alsop’s good qualities (for all the above are good), onto which Field has stapled a large tranche of horrible and abusive qualities, to give us Lydia Tár.

If you find Field’s wholesale plundering of Alsop’s CV and his subsequent destruction of this character, concerning, well, so does Ms Alsop. In an interview with the Times, repeated in the Los Angeles Times (11 January 2023), she said that when she heard of this identity theft, she was “concerned”. Then she saw the movie and “I was no longer concerned – I was offended. I was offended as a woman, as a conductor and as a lesbian.” And so, I’m sure, should we be. Field has shown time and again that he can create, grow and sustain interesting fictional characters – why on earth did he then do this?

I do not want to end this review on this negative note, for I believe that Field has crafted a superb movie in Tár, a movie with many excellent features.

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The script is outstanding, giving us punchy pace and technical detail interspersed, both in plenty. Field has taken us backstage into the world of classical music, and, of course, some of what we see is horrible (we are, after all, a horrible, cruel, destructive and self-serving species), but all of it is fascinating.

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The script is outstanding, giving us punchy pace and technical detail interspersed, both in plenty. Field has taken us backstage into the world of classical music, and, of course, some of what we see is horrible (we are, after all, a horrible, cruel, destructive and self-serving species), but all of it is fascinating. His camera work is also wonderful, with sometimes lengthy scenes filmed from one camera point – so much more understandable than today’s reels of endless two-second clips. His creation of supporting roles is excellent: they all catch our attention and all, except for the ambitious and manipulative Olga, are great people, people we would all delight to meet. And his story is captivating – nowhere does he lose our attention.

But, of course, the cream on the cake is the extraordinary character that Field has created in Lydia Tár, and Ms Blanchett’s rendition of her is off another planet. Only vintage Streep could compete with Blanchett as Tár. It is an experience of an exceptional kind to be able to witness this performance. Field told (the real) Adam Gopnik that he had written the score of Tár with only Ms Blanchett in mind, and if she had turned the role down, he would have abandoned the project. Thank heavens she accepted!

Go to Tár; it is outstanding entertainment, and there is a lot of it for your money!

(At the Academy Awards – the Oscars – two nights ago, Tár and Field were overlooked. While I feel that Ms Blanchett was hard done by, I agree that Field should not be rewarded for a movie with such demonstrable flaws.)

Also read:

Tár: ’n filmresensie