Audiences can let a conductor know, any night in the week, what they think of him and his music. Last week, in separate essays, two great conductors told what they think of audience tastes, and of composers whose works they have performed.
In his 139-page Dialogues on Music, published in Zurich, Germany's Wilhelm Furtwangler, now shelved in the U.S. because of his Nazi leanings (TIME, Jan. 17), admitted to a gnawing distrust of the tastes of audiences in general. An audience, he wrote, is "a mass without a will of its own . . . which reacts automatically to any stimulus....
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