Oh Lydia ... a review of FIELDS's TÁR [2022]

Oh Lydia, Oh Lydia.

Have you met Lydia?

 

Classical musicians tend to wince at Hollywood’s depictions of their art.

 

The reasons vary, but principally it involves the painful spectacle of watching actors try to pretend to play an instrument, or conduct. It usually looks quite unrealistic to serious musicians.

 

A quick look at just a few of the successful and not-so successful efforts over the years:

• Deception (1946)
• Humoresque (1946)
• The directors had the sense to avoid the stars hands, and used doubles at appropriate moments. Still moments of disappointment in both films.
• Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
• One of my favorites, for although Rex Harrison doesn’t conduct well, the music and scenario are so well done that we have to forgive his occasional ridiculous stabs with his baton, and commend Sturges for making us laugh so hard.
• One good joke from the tailor: “Nobody handles Handel like you do!”
• The Competition (1980)
• Again, well done with only a few anguished moments when we watch Dreyfuss or Irving try to play. Hand doubles are well placed, especially in the devilishly difficult Prokofiev.
• Amadeus (1984)
• Hulce learned to do what he needed. His acting carried the rest and helped create one of the very best films about classical music.
• Eroica (2003)
• This too-little-known BBC production — in my humble opinion — is the greatest film about classical music. The viewer is privileged to sit in on the very first rehearsal of the colossal Third Symphony (“Eroica”) of Beethoven. We watch a real orchestra purposely mess up at the start (and that is hard to do, folks!) and Ian Hart is the best Beethoven on screen, ever …
• The Soloist (2009)
• Although apparently Jamie Foxx learned some rudimentary cello technique, again the filmmakers avoided shots where we would see both his face and hands at the same time, and used doubles appropriately. A severely underrated film.
• A Late Quartet (2012)
• My disappointment was hard to swallow, because the subject of this film is a work that is near and dear to my heart — Beethoven’s C-Sharp Minor Quartet, Op. 131. It was painful to watch shots where Hoffman is trying to fake it. There’s only a few, but it ruins the picture.
• Youth (2015)
• The amazing Paolo Sorrentino directed this masterpiece about a composer/conductor (Michael Caine). Caine conducts only twice during the film -- once to an orchestra of cows and cowbells (!) and once to a real orchestra (no baton, smooth hands) ...

So now let’s talk about TÁR. If you haven’t seen the film, and intend to, stop reading here. SPOILERS AHEAD:

 

Things they got right:

• Name-checking the great female conductors of our day — Marin Alsop, JoAnn Falletta, Laurence Equilbey, Nathalie Stuzmann … However, Alsop gave the film a scathing review.
• “Women who came before us; women who did the real lifting!”
• “Who, for instance?”
• “First and foremost, Nadia Boulanger.” [I studied with her for nearly two years.]
• Boulanger did conduct, but her main emphasis was always on teaching.
• “Now, my left hand shapes, but my right hand, the second hand, marks time and moves it forward.”
• This is essentially a perfect description of conducting. Blanchett does a fairly good job, in general, although on several occasions she seems to be stabbing the air without purpose.
• The Lully story … true! LT seem to have stabbed herself in the foot, as well, by the end ...
• A young girl is talking to LT about her Rite of Spring performance.
• “It’s the 11 pistol shots…”
• A pretty cool reference to one bar of music with 11 dissonant repeated chords. To my ears, it sounds more like a cannon:

 

• Refusing to permit Eliot to look at her performance score, she rightly tells him: “There’s no glory for a robot.”
• I had to look this one up: “It sounds like a René Redzepi recipe for reindeer.”
• “Very Punkt contrapunkte.” This is an incredibly obscure reference to a parody from the Hoffnung Festival — one of the inspirations for Peter Schickele’s  P.D.Q. Bach … listen to it here.
• “ … standing on the podium with a 433, trying to sell a car without an engine.”
• Referencing John Cage’s famous composition 4’33”.
• Refuting Max’s comment about Bach (below):
• “What about Beethoven? For me, as a U-haul lesbian (huh?), I’m not too sure about old Ludwig. But then, I face him, and I find myself nose-to-nose with his magnitude and inevitability.”
• Blanchett — who apparently actually learned the Bach C Major Prelude — makes a fantastic musical joke about Glenn Gould, punctuated a legato passage with staccato!
• “Let’s slow this down to 60 beats a minute.” Sharon and Lydia dance to Neil Hefti’s “Lil’ Darlin’.” Sharon: “Actually, it’s 64 beats.” That’s an incredible ear to discern those extra four beats!
• [Peter Erskine tells an even more remarkable story about tempo when playing with Steely Dan, in his book No Beethoven:
• "Playing "Hey Nineteen," at 118 BPM, I noticed that the horns had a tendency to push the time a bit, so I thought it might be a good idea to bump up the tempo from 118 to 119 PBM. And so I did, in Cincinnati, without telling anyone and thinking none were the wiser. The next afternoon, Donald and Walter turned to me and said, 'that felt kinda FAST last night.' I replied, 'Wow, that's really something that you guys noticed.' They laughed a bit and then said, real serious, 'Yeah, well ... DON'T DO THAT AGAIN.'"]
• The cello auditions. The filmmakers got it right by having the applicants play behind a screen so that no judgments can be made about appearance or sex. Nevertheless, LT sees #3 leaving with women’s 👠 … ah, will this affect her decision? Hmm.
• Like her (supposed) mentor — Lenny — she speaks fluent German.
• The conversation in the recording booth rings true … whether she wants .wav files or mp3s.
• The little sounds that bother LT. So true! A humming refrigerator, a noisy car vent, in an otherwise silent environment will drive me crazy!
• “Forget the Visconti!” A reference to Death in Venice, which is saturated with music from the Adagietto movement.
• LT enters Sebastian’s office. She notices a bust on his shelves. “Is that Kalinnikov?” A wonderful reference to an obscure, but fantastic Russian composer who died at age 34.
• Andris Davis (Julian Glover): “Thank God I was never pulled from the podium like Jimmy Levine ..,. or hunted like Charles Dutoit.” Ouch.
• Good discussion about Furtwängler and Karajan re ties with the Nazi regime.
• The accordion scene is precious: Apartment for sale / your mother’s buried deep, and now you’re gonna go to hell / your sister’s in jail / you are all going to hell
• The Bernstein Young People's Concert tape she watches is the end of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. We witness the depth of feeling produced by the music. Lenny stops, just as Tchaikovsky climaxes on a secondary dominant: F-Sharp Major to B Major to E Major, the tonic ...

 

Things they got wrong:

• LT is spreading records on the floor (note that most of them are Deutsche Grammaphon recordings, the company that produced the soundtrack!) She positions two recordings of the Fifth into close-up, both DG recordings: Abbado and Bernstein, both with the Berlin Philharmonic.
• Serious conductors do not listen to recordings of other conductors, once they have attained the professional standing that the filmmakers want you to believe LT has attained. Yes, in their youth they may have listened and made mental notes about what they liked and didn’t, perhaps — but a serious conductor must form his or her own ideas, without the influence of previous recordings.
• “She’s become particularly well-known for commissioning contemporary work from among others Jennifer Higdon, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe and Hildur Guonadóttir. And she’s made a point of programming their works alongside composers of the canon.”
• Oh really? Nice name checks of some great composers (who happen to be female; Guonadóttir wrote the score for TÁR) — but LT show antipathy, close to outright hatred of the modern music she hears during the Juilliard scene.
• She’s won an EGOT.
• A serious classical musician is not today and would not in the foreseeable future be a candidate for these non-classical categories. Quite ridiculous.
• The scene at Juilliard begins with the students playing a piece called Ró by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. It is delightful, but LT begins to tear it apart without much thought. “It must be a pleasure to preside over a bed of strings who behave as if they’re tuning …” Is she really a champion of modern music? By female composers? 😳 …
• Juilliard scene … Max: “I’m not really into Bach.”
• Possibly the most ridiculous scene in the film. It’s almost impossible to imagine a conducting or composition student being “not really into Bach.”
• “Honestly, as a BIPOC, pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously.” WTF??
• This entire scene blows up right then and there.
• “Have you read the Schweitzer book?” Again, a ridiculous response. She’s asking him if he’s read a book about Bach, rather than his actual music.
• She twists a Varèse quote out of context to make him seem antisemitic.
• The last few bars of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony on the radio are waking up LT. She tries to identify the conductor: “Lenny? Walter? (Bruno) … “Oh, it’s you, MTT.” (Michael Tilson Thomas). “Why do you insist on holding things up like that? Your business here is rejoicing, not screaming like a fucking porn star.”
• Now without getting too deeply into the weeds, these last few bars of DS’s most famous symphony actually are quite controversial. It is now thought that these triumphant-sounding final bars are DS imitating Stalin, hitting the people with a stick and saying, “it is your business to rejoice — so rejoice!” MTT had it right.
• Sebastian — the assistant conductor — gives LT advice on the relative dynamics of the clarinet part. Completely ridiculous and would never happen professionally … for purposes of the film, though, it gives LT an excuse to “rotate him out.”
• Her original composition which she works on at the piano from time to time is banal and uninteresting. It is all melody without a hint of any accompanying harmony. This might have been to enable CB to handle it.
• For such a supposedly important live concert recording, to wait until the last moment to decide on a “companion” piece — in this case, the Elgar Cello Concerto, which is there for purposes of plot, of course — is pretty much unheard of … Poor Gosia!
• LT & Olga (Sophie Kauer, a real cellist) are working on the Elgar. [Props to CB for learning a few chords …]. Then they take a break and Olga sits at the piano plunking out LT’s composition. She suggests changing one note, and LT can hardly contain her ecstasy at this beautiful young genius. Ugh, how terribly fake. Like a serious composer would take advice from anyone!
• The close-up on the bass drum is beautiful. Blanchett's conducting here is terrible!
• "They’re just getting caught up in the power of your glissando and trying to match it ..."
• Another ridiculous phrase. There is no glissando and no one is trying to "match" it. A better phrase might have been something like, "The orchestra is overpowering you, even though you are playing fortissimo."
• The close-up of the "For Petra" score shows simple, very juvenile music.
• From IMDb trivia:
• "According to Field, LT never met Bernstein, whom she claims as a mentor. The closest she got to him was through the VHS tapes we see in the house she grew up in. 'He was a genuine figure in her childhood imagination, a very real person for her in a non-cynical way, in a non-opportunistic way. And maybe it's something she tried on. That's how lies happen.'"
• This is all ridiculous. The Bernstein mentorship is a huge part of her resumé. I guess this is a case of George Santos.
• The scene where they are bringing up allegations of sexual impropriety is meant to remind us of LEVINE. Nowhere does the film show LT doing anything like what got JL in trouble. She may be manipulative ... perhaps playing favorites -- but she's not guilty of any sexual impropriety like JL was.

Overall, TÁR is a wonderful thought-provoking film. It is especially rewarding on a second viewing ... Fields has hidden many Easter Egg plot points in various scenes -- some for just a few frames -- which help to fill in some of the mysteries. **** out of *****

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

I add LERA AUERBACH, composer, conductor, soloist, to the renowned female artists cited in this article. She may be the only one to also be a great poet.

[Lewis Saul]

Agreed. I regret the omission. She's a true "Renaissance Woman."

[Wendy Saul]

John Belushi was a pretty good Beethoven, too!

[David Lehman]

Great to see "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" quoted: music by Harold Arlen, words by Yip Harburg. "She has eyes that folks adore so, / and a torso even more so." Here's to thee, Groucho.

[Diogenes Candle]

Reading this ruined my day! Utterly pretentious, utterly pedantic.

The author (who is it?) is showing off their nit-picking knowledge of musical minutiae, classical and otherwise, rather than their understanding of what is a great work of cinematic art. This "review" is the equivalent of a medieval historian saying that there is no record of a tavern called The Boar's Head in East Cheap or that there never was a Londoner named John Falstaff.

The "reviewer" also gets many goose eggs wrong -- one after another. For instance, the scene of Lydia spreading the album covers on the floor has nothing to do with her listening to other conductors. She is choosing a prototype for the cover of her own DG recording.

The Juilliard scene is what we in the theatre call character exposition. It takes place early in the movie and exposes the fundamental generational conflict that will bring Lydia down in the end.

As for the EGOT credentials, Todd Field had a field day with that one, reminding us that LT was a fictional character, not real. The four awards are also fictional, not real.

https://www.slashfilm.com/1170397/todd-field-reveals-how-lydia-tar-got-most-of-the-awards-in-her-egot/

Helll, if Mel Brooks can be an EGOT,why not Lydia. Tár?

The Elgar Cello concerto? Well, yes, of course the companion piece might have been chosen earlier. But this choice is about seduction, not programming. This is what we call artistic licence.

It is true that Leonard Bernstein could never have been Lydia's mentor, except indirectly. That bit of anachronism is excusable (as is the clock in Julius Caesar). To compare the fictional character Lydia to George Santos, a flesh-and-blood fabulist is -- well -- silly.

Jimmy Levine? Well, yes, Todd Fields chose not to shoot Lydia hopping into bed with Krista Tayler. The specifics of her tryst with Krista is not the point of the film. Krista appears from the back of the house in the first shot of the Gopnik sequence. She is Tár's nemesis, not her porno queen. The whole point of the film is that the tragic heroine's catastrophe is orchestrated (sic) from afar -- phone screens, YouTube edits, incomprehensible aspects of the Me-Too culture she does not understand.

Tár is a work of fiction. It is a work of art. It is about verisimilitude not accuracy.

[Bobby Potato]

Whoever you are, Diogenes Candle, you picked a greaat pseudonym. On the minus side, everything you write is bogus. The difference between verisimilitude and accuracy demonstrates that you are an expert on pretentiousnes.

[Diogenes Candle]

Allow me to explain (as pretentiously as possible):

Verisimilitude is defined as the appearance of truth. Accuracy is the condition or quality of being true.

A film or a theatrical production may strive for verisimilitude without being completely accurate. This is true especially if the work is fictional (documentaries may strive for “accuracy” although that goal is elusive).

Tár has, to Todd Field’s credit, convinced many viewers that LT is, indeed, a real person. But she is not. She is a persona crafted brilliantly by Cate Blanchett within a screenplay for the ages. Ms Tár is, not to belabor the term, “bogus” by intent.

Therefore, the film’s artistic obligation is to create the appearance of truth rather than actual truth. Rather like Shakespeare created the appearance of truth at Elsinore without meticulously reproducing the actual court rituals, of which he probably knew very little.

Sorry to be so patronizing, but if you say everything I write is bogus without being specific, you deserve my condescension.

Oh, and Bobby Potato is a splendid nom de spud.

[Kenneth Braxton]

While I haven't seen the film and cannot adjudicate the dispute between Messrs Candle and Potato, I do find the column to be not pedantic but stimulating, and the proof of its power is that it seems to have prompted such strong responses.

[Leah Martinson]

In all cheekiness, I wish Profesor Saul would discuss "Cheek to Cheek" the same way the presentd the manyh versions of "All the Things You Are."

[Stacey]

I loved this! I saw the film with a musician and she was, in general, quite impressed all around. Your breakdown has made me want to see it again. Thank you! Also, I'm going to look for the films "Eroica"and "Youth. Thanks for the recommendations. Stacey

[David Lehman]

Having finally seen the movie, I can read this piece with the attention it deserves. It's brilliant! Mega kudos.