The Electrician, the Magician and the Nervous Conductor

Abstract

Berlioz's essay ‘Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art’ (1855) was among the first and most widely disseminated attempts to describe the art of modern conducting. Drawing together technical with literary and scientific language, it aimed to capture the relationship between leaders and players and, more broadly, the modes of animation underpinning nineteenth-century orchestral performance. Central to the essay are notions of electricity – animal, artificial and mesmeric. For Berlioz, the conductor's job is no longer simply to marshal his orchestral troops but to galvanize them: ‘his inner flame warms them, his electricity charges them.’ Here, I examine the medical and physical technologies that underpinned these descriptions – the ways in which podium conducting became newly intertwined with theories of bioelectricity, notions of spiritual or metaphysical ‘spark’, and emerging forms of electrical communication that rewired European conceptions of the body politic. In Part I, I examine the ‘electric baton’ which allowed Berlioz to control the enormous orchestral forces of his 1855 Exposition Universelle concerts, generating a quasi-telegraphic network with imperialist resonances. Part II examines the role of nervous electricity in Berlioz's accounts of conducting, and his conception of music itself as a charged substance. Part III draws technological and medical discourses into conversation with magical cultures, showing how notions of nervous power (and peril) united Berlioz, Mesmer and the famous Robert-Houdin. The new romantic conductor, as I conclude, was a figure poised at the intersection of medicine, electric technology, and a newly charged spirituality.