Leonard Bernstein’s career-long involvement with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra intersected with the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of television. He first conducted the Philharmonic in 1943, at age twenty-five, and his term as music director (1958−69) is remembered as a particularly vibrant period in the orchestra’s history. On taking over that role, Bernstein embarked on an ambitious agenda both for thematic programming, including focuses on American music and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and for public-facing initiatives, such as the televised Young People’s Concerts and touring. In addition, Bernstein used his position to highlight the work of solo performers who were members of minority groups, and he oversaw the orchestra during its period of racial integration.

Puccini’s career coincided with the emergence of the concept of modern baton conducting. This chapter considers the people who conducted the premières of Puccini’s operas, as well as significant revivals during his lifetime. Particular attention is given to Arturo Toscanini, by far the most important of the conductors with whom Puccini worked personally. The two men had a close collaborative relationship, with Toscanini even pencilling revisions on to the score that were later incorporated into printed editions. As well as collaborating with Puccini in Italy, Toscanini was instrumental in getting the composer’s works better known in the USA. Other significant conductors of Puccini’s lifetime who are discussed here include Luigi Mancinelli, Leopoldo Mugnone, and Cleofonte Campanini. The chapter also discusses later conductors – many, though not exclusively, Italian – who specialised in Puccini, as well as others (predominantly German and Austrian) who were critical of the composer and refused to conduct his works. Herbert von Karajan, Zubin Mehta, and Antonio Pappano are among the Puccini specialists discussed at the chapter’s conclusion.

Group Analysis is a particular approach to group psychotherapy as developed by S. H. Foulkes. Key influences and shared ground with other approaches are noted. This brief overview focuses largely on key constituents of the setting and format of group analysis as a psychological treatment. The group analyst, referred to as the conductor, and their dual roles of group administrator and group therapist are briefly explored. Vignettes show this therapeutic approach, in both therapeutic and non-clinical settings. Some key group analytic phenomena are illuminated as is the minimally interventive, analytical approach of the conductor. We encounter ‘John’ at three key stages namely pre-group preparation, joining a new group, and a preparing to leave the group. The conductor’s responsibilities are explored, specifically their intention to help the group develop a therapeutic culture, where dependence on the group conductor is replaced by a greater connectedness to each other. The conductor’s ability to trust the group to find its way is noted while their role in helping this process is not undervalued. Communication, both conscious and unconsciously is a central concern of the group analytic approach.

A symbiosis in music between performance and composition prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. It was particularly evident among conductors. Conducting did not emerge as a distinct profession until the last quarter of the century. But even then, those who sought to make conducting a career either dabbled in composition or harboured lifelong hopes to succeed with their own music. The instincts of a fellow composer dominated the approach to interpretation from the podium.

In Johannes Brahms’s circle of close friends and colleagues, there was perhaps no better example of this link between composing and conducting than Otto Dessoff (1835–92). Dessoff is remembered only as a conductor, despite many fine works to his name. It was to Dessoff that Brahms entrusted the first performance, in 1876, of his First Symphony Op. 68Dessoff was born in Leipzig to Jewish parents; he met Brahms in 1853 but became a close friend in the 1860s, after they both settled in Vienna.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

The earliest evidence of Brahms’s activity as a conductor comes from 1847, when as a fourteen-year-old he led a chorus of school children in the small town of Winsen near his native Hamburg. His last reported appearance on a podium was with the Berlin Philharmonic in January 1896, aged sixty-two. Over a span of almost fifty years between these two moments, Brahms conducted a wide range of amateur and professional ensembles in many different locations across the Austrian Empire, Germany and Switzerland.

Brahms’s activities on the podium coincide with the steady rise of the professional conductor during the nineteenth century, embodied in the Austro-German sphere at first by Weber, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Spohr and Spontini, and later by Richard Strauss, Mahler, Richter and Bülow.