Bittersweet Symphony: The Music That Shapes & Sets The Rhythm Of Tár

GUSTAV MAHLER’s Fifth Symphony kicks off with a grim opening salvo: a lone trumpet echoes a foreboding roar of fate before strings burst into mournful chords. Each note reinforces the feeling of storm clouds brooding on the horizon. Indeed, the first movement is a funeral march and titled as such (Trauermarsch). The funeral march is the first of five movements that veer between hostile and tender, frantic and static, defeated and triumphant, solemn and hopeful. “Whatever quality is perceptible and definable in Mahler’s music, the diametrically opposite is equally so,” said Leonard Bernstein, who was the first conductor to record all nine of the Austrian composer’s completed symphonies.

Those words could also describe the film Tár, where a fictional protégé of Bernstein attempts to complete the Mahler cycle. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has scaled all but the Fifth, the opening movement of which foreshadows her own fall from grace. A fall she orchestrates, not by design, through habitual abuse of power. As we come to learn, by ennobling Lydia as a trailblazer, the world of classical music also gave her the power to oppress others. The music that made her unmakes her.

LISTENING TO MAHLER’s symphonies is to be transported into a kaleidoscopic world governed by volatile forces. Their inner logic may provoke early resistance but rewards persistence. For once the music grips you, it doesn’t let go. Tár embodies similar qualities. Like Mahler did with his Fifth, Field has composed a transfixing, virile, and angst-ridden symphony that invites plural readings.

Lydia was Linda Tarr from Staten Island, before she lived in Berlin with her concertmaster wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and their adopted daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), before she became the first woman to become chief conductor of a major German orchestra, and well before she built a brand unto herself. When we meet her, she has reached the summit of her career. She is set to preside over a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth and Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto (as the companion piece) with the Berlin Philharmonic for a Deutsche Grammophon box set to be issued in time for Mahler’s birthday. As she rehearses for the performance and simultaneously strives to compose her own music, the past catches up and threatens to cancel the maestro.

Threading together Mahler’s Fifth and Elgar’s Cello Concerto is a subliminal score from Hildur Guðnadóttir that delimits the abstraction of Lydia’s psychological unravelling. Classical music fills the role of a character and a narrator in itself, deepening our understanding of Lydia and our appreciation of Blanchett’s artistry. The actor, like the powerhouse conductor she plays, dictates the tempo of the film. In a towering performance that is by turns measured and unbound, she hits every right note playing a magnificently complex figure — and exudes an aura of sovereignty while doing it.

There is a genius and something of a killer instinct to Lydia as a conductor. When she is interviewed onstage by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (playing himself), she reveals how conducting Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring convinced her of the human capacity for murder. Music informs the psychology of the character and the choices she makes. When she instructs the trumpeter to play the funeral march solo offstage so as to achieve a distant forlorn sound, it attests to the painstaking nature of her rehearsal process. When she taunts a student conducting a piece by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir by saying it sounds like strings being tuned, we witness the casual cruelty of a woman drunk on her own importance. 

Those who challenge her or lack the authority to challenge her are “robots”. She is fickle, spiteful and manipulative. She strings Francesca (Noémie Merlant) along as her personal assistant by dangling the carrot of promotion. When the time comes, she replaces the old assistant conductor with someone else, concerned about rumours of sexual favouritism. Nonetheless, when required to pick a new cellist for the orchestra, she sets her sights on a pretty twentysomething Russian named Olga (Sophie Kauer), whom she goes on to offer private lessons for the chance to play the solo part in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Giving the soloist position to the fledgling cellist, instead of the principal cellist, in an attempt to groom her, speaks to Lydia’s predatory behaviour. As a result, the Concerto doesn’t shine in all its autumnal glory, but carries an air of almost wintry bitterness.

Though Mahler’s Fifth permeates almost every aspect of the production, we only hear teasing excerpts of it. Of all the movements, the penultimate one has perhaps enjoyed a starring role more than most. The tender adagietto (for strings and harp) is known to have been written by Mahler as a sort of love song to his wife and fellow composer Alma Schindler. Yet, over the years, treatments have slowed the movement to underscore the “aching tragedy”, as Lydia explains, citing Bernstein’s performance at the memorial service for Robert F Kennedy in 1968. Three years later, the adagietto, as used by Luchino Visconti in Death in Venice, struck a chord of longing and desire. More recently, Park Chan-wook used it to similar effect in Decision to Leave, another tale of doomed obsession. 

If a fourteen-year-old Polish boy becomes the object of obsession for an ageing German composer in Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella, a Chinese murder suspect and a South Korean detective are caught in a forbidden romance in Park’s film. Before his death, the murder victim — an avid mountain climber and the suspect’s husband — records a video about timing his ascent to Mahler’s Fifth so he arrives at the summit just as the adagietto reaches its climax. In Tár, Lydia instructs the orchestra to “forget Visconti” as she plans to restore the adagietto to its original tempo and tenor, claiming to choose “young love” over “aching tragedy.” Field himself doesn’t forget the Visconti connection however, given Lydia’s inappropriate obsession with the young Olga.

Olga is only the latest in a long line of young women for whom Lydia has pulled strings in exchange for sexual favours. A whole history of similar instances come to light, ultimately forcing her to face the consequences. Her downfall can be anticipated long before the allegations come out. In the very first shot of the film, her assistant is seen texting back and forth with a friend, who mockingly wonders if Lydia even has a conscience. If Lydia Tár is a fiction created by her, her predatory patterns are anchored very much in a recognisable reality. Field presents a sophisticated mirror image of the more straightforward films that have been made in the shadows of #MeToo. Through the rigid hierarchy of an orchestra, he examines how asymmetric power structures in the creative industry enable sexual abuse. As these structures that reinforce uneven power dynamics are so deeply entrenched, it has become near-impossible to dismantle them without creating new ones in their place. 

If Lydia didn’t worry herself too much about facing the music for her missteps for so long, it's because unchecked power can create an entitled sense of immunity. The film mentions the names of James Levine and Charles Dutoit, two celebrated conductors who had been accused of sexual misconduct since at least the ‘70s but didn’t really pay any price till 2017. Notwithstanding her intersectional identity as a woman and a lesbian, Lydia absorbed the attitudes of her rarefied subculture. To fit in with the men, she became one of them. Field thereby mounts a case for conversations about abuse to go beyond gender and heterosexuality.

In a powerful scene filmed as a single take, Lydia takes to task a young music student who is quick to dismiss Bach during a masterclass at Juilliard. Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a parody of woke culture if there ever was, suggests he doesn’t care for “white, male, cis composers”. As “a BIPOC, pangender person,” he claims to find Bach’s misogyny so repellent he can’t take his work seriously. Lydia, quite eloquently, criticises Max for evaluating art solely on ideological grounds. She advocates for leaving ego and identity behind, and “sublimating yourself” entirely to music. Taken to task, Max walks away, but not before calling her a “fucking bitch” — a case of a woke puritan not being able to live up to their own principles in the face of reactionary sentiment and succumbing to hypocrisy. Identity politics tends to push people into acting in bad faith.

As opposed to the pre-existing symphonies and concertos, Guðnadóttir’s original music plays almost on a subconscious level. In her own words, “It sits there like an invisible layer — like a ghost in the room, that you can’t see, but you can sense.” There lies a strange disconnect between Lydia’s public and private personas, the music she conducts and the music she composes. A discomfiting subterranean hum reveals momentary cracks in the facade. Listen closer: you will come to realise her heart lies not in conducting but in fact composing, a love for which grew from her early ethnographic field work in the Amazon studying indigenous Peruvian music. 

The score also expresses Lydia’s disorientation as memories and dreams bleed into each other. During production, Guðnadóttir wrote additional cues as a behind-the-scenes guide for Blanchett. “Because you’re hearing it on the inside, you express that tempo in your body language,” she explained. “You express the feeling of that music in the way you move.”

Time, Lydia asserts, is the most crucial element in the interpretation of a piece. “Keeping time, it’s no small thing. Time is the thing,” she says before going on to describe how her left hand shapes and her right hand marks time, moving the performance forward. As the film progresses, she practically loses the baton from her right hand, thus losing control over time and reality itself. Ghosts of sins past start to appear. The clicking of a metronome wakes her up at night. Screams of a woman alarm her while out on a run. A story comes out exposing her past indiscretions. Her score of Mahler’s Fifth mysteriously disappears. All the setbacks, imagined, dreamt or real, culminate with a violent confrontation on the big night of the performance. 

As the trumpeter begins the funeral march, Lydia begins her own so to speak. She storms onto the stage in fury, tackles the conductor (Mark Strong) who replaced her, and reclaims the podium in a desperate attempt to regain control of time, of reality, of her life. We don’t get to hear Mahler’s Fifth in all its temperamental grandeur in the end. What the film’s coda gives us can only be described as a climactic anti-climax. What Lydia imagined would have been the crescendo of her music career ends up becoming her rock-bottom.