n of conducting has a fairly short history. Although there had always been someone to take charge whenever large groups of musicians played together this was not regarded as a particularly important duty, and certainly not as one that had any substantive effect on the nature of the group's performance. So long as everyone did indeed play together such leaders were generally satisfied. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the expansion of orchestras, new expressive demands made by composers, and the development of a standard repertoire necessitated an expanded leadership role.
It was Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) who, between 1835 and 1846, first thought about orchestral conducting as a distinct, musically vital role and formulated a synthetic approach to the task. Berlioz saw the conductor's role as essentially recreative in nature, however, and understood performance as the faithful transmission of an authoritative work to an audience. This notion was radically altered by Richard Wagner (1813-1888) who conceived of conducting as a creative act of interpretation based on the conductor's vision of the work. Wagner's influence was enormous and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century through approaches taken by the Austro-German conductors who dominated music for many decades. Yet even among those who were most heavily influenced by Wagner there was no uniformity of approach. One second-generation follower who exemplified the tendency to support and question Wagner's notions of conducting was Felix Weingartner (1863-1942), who modified several aspects of Wagner's extremely personal approach to interpretation but never gave up the notion that the conductor's interpretation was the main focus in orchestral and operatic performance. All three of these important conductors wrote treatises which are given the common English title, "On Conducting": Berlioz in 1855, Wagner in 1869, and Weingartner in several editio...