Art is no longer just the work - it is inseparable from the life of its creator. In Todd Field’s Tár, the next generation challenges the authority of a celebrated conductor, and music itself becomes a battlefield.
My earliest experience with art was that in which I created myself - a drawing of a tree, the one that could be seen through the window of the living room, with my name, the one I had just learnt to spell, in large red letters at the bottom. Of course, children make mistakes; a drink spilt, a red handprint on the wall, a word said with no real understanding of its gravity. Yet, any potential mistakes I had made as a child did not make my drawing of the crooked tree devoid of worth in my parents’ eyes.
One of the blessings of that time - of being so young - is that time presented itself to you a cushioned counterfeit of real life. You could make mistakes and none of it would matter, and if it did, you hope that when you are older, you can handle the consequences. But childhood is the only artistic period in which the character of the artist is so generously overlooked. When we grow older, the work is no longer the work alone. The drawing of a tree, the writing of a novel, the composing of a symphony - each begins to carry the weight of the creator. Somewhere between the crooked tree and adulthood, the question quietly changes: it is no longer whether the art is deserving in itself, but whether the artist is deserving of our praise and admiration. Between genius and judgment lies this grey waste where culture now lives.
Art, and the question it carries in relation to its creator, does not pause for contemplation; it arrives, sometimes unexpectedly in another form. I found it in Todd Field’s film Tár. Set in the international world of Western classical music where worth is measured in perfection, ambition, and the weight of one’s reputation. The film centers on Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett, widely considered one of the world’s greatest living composers and the conductor of a prestigious Berlin orchestra - a genius whose presence is both intoxicating and terrifying.
You would be forgiven in thinking Lydia Tár was a real-life conductor and composer from the first ten minutes of the film: an interviewer on the New Yorker Festival stage recounts Tár’s many accomplishments, Tár’s face remains fixed in its facade of false humility, and when she speaks, she offers the audience a soliloquy of rehearsed lines that she knows always land well. Speaking of her ability to control the orchestra, to bring it to a crashing crescendo or a passionate appassionato passage, she says;
“You cannot start without me. See, I start the clock!”
See, Lydia, this is where you are wrong. Yes, the clock has started, your own dubious misdeeds as the catalyst, but it is ticking towards the end of your career - a fate worse than death in your eyes.
Here is a scene where creator meets creation; during a guest lecture in Juilliard, Tár looks out at the young cohort in front of her - the next generation of conductors, those who may very well come to replace and redefine the world as she knows it. Here Tár’s dogmatic tendencies and obscure genius persona - which so delights the grey-haired elitists she usually surrounds herself with - falls flat. The spaces Tár often occupies are those where Schopenhauer and Bach’s Concerto No.5 are common points of reference and where small talk or any mention of the mundane comes to a slow and humiliating death.
Tár is no longer in the safety of the sycophants that adore her, the vestiges of a time gone by - she instead finds herself facing a generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach and I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously. Old world meets new world. A new song for the new generation has begun to play and Tár does not like how it sounds. Tár takes the bait - too good not to in her eyes - and the generational battle lines are drawn.
“Old world meets new world. A new song for the new generation has begun to play and Tár does not like how it sounds. Tár takes the bait - too good not to in her eyes - and the generational battle lines are drawn.”
During this scene, a ten-minute take without a single cut, Max, the student who dared answer Tár’s question about Bach in a manner she found inexcusable, sits in the corner of the frame, nervously shaking his leg. Tár is on the defensive and is determined to win, not only to prove her point to Max, but to reestablish to herself what she knows to be true; art is art. She is confused on what the artist’s past has to do with anything, especially their music, but she sees this as less of an attack on art, and more so on herself. To find oneself being sharply redefined by the generation below you right in front of your very eyes.
Pointing to Max, Tár warns him: Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity and If Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth, country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can yours! While mounting a familiar high-horse this statement brings down on Max, for the purpose of this metaphor, her baton of righteousness which Tár believes she can hold over everyone at all times, punishing him for a view she claims he has regurgitated from the internet.
“You’re a fucking bitch,” he says.
“And you are a robot!” In Tár’s mind, proximity to numb conformity is the biggest joke of them all.
Back in Berlin, Tár surrounds herself in beauty, in music - a marble penthouse where she controls what music can be played and what meaning it is allowed to have. The creators of said music, and their own devious behaviour that has made many an audience member turn their back and close their ears to their work, is simply detail for Tár. An inconvenient one at that. She is blindly unaware of the idea of actions having consequences in relation to her - that’s just something that happens to other people, what I ‘did’ wasn’t wrong? She may say to herself. We are in the schoolyard of her daughter’s private school, Tár’s Porsche Taycan slightly parked on the path, when we see her use her power again. Even dressed casually, by her standards, authority clings to her as she walks through the yard. She bends down to meet an eight year old girl at eye level, she has been bullying Tár’s daughter:
I know what you’re doing to her. And if you ever do it again, do you know what I’ll do? I’ll get you. And if you tell any grown-up what I just said, they won’t believe you. Because I’m a grown-up. But you need to believe me: I will get you. Remember this, Johanna: God watches all of us.
Tár does not simply control the orchestra, but every aspect of her life and everyone else around her. Geniuses can get away with almost anything - or at least they have been allowed to believe that they can. For centuries, especially in recent decades, we have built a peculiar moral exemption around brilliance, a quiet agreement between artist and audience: give us greatness, and we will look the other way. But this arrangement, like all arrangements between power and admiration, relies on the audience choosing to continue to listen. She has reached the pinnacle of career during the rise of a young generation that does not tolerate abuse of power. Now, when an accusation is made, and whispers begin, then the audience stops listening, the genius discovers something they had long refused to believe: the simple fact that the orchestra can play without them. God watches us all indeed, but who is watching Lydia Tár?
“Tár does not simply control the orchestra, but every aspect of her life and everyone else around her. Geniuses can get away with almost anything - or at least they have been allowed to believe that they can.”
Over the course of the film, scene by scene, we begin to piece together the story of Krista: once Tár’s prized favourite in the orchestra, briefly elevated through her patronage, used for entertainment, and then abruptly discarded once Tár grew tired of her. Emails are sent from Tár’s assistant to other orchestras, warnings dressed as ‘professional’ concern: I must warn you of the danger of [Krista’s] behaviour. If you decide to take her on, I must warn you of the risk she poses to your orchestra. There is a Russian saying: Lie like an eye-witness.
The result of this quiet extortion and careful cover-up leaves Tár’s reputation, for a time, intact and Krista committing suicide. The real danger for any orchestra, it turns out, is Lydia Tár standing behind the podium.
When truth comes to light, as it so rarely does, we see Tár lose everything. In her world this means the respect of her peers, not so much the love of her family. Tár’s peers, fearing outrage from the generation that she is so abundantly and openly disgusted by, becomes the very reason for her fall. She travels to Southeast Asia to conduct what we think is a prestigious orchestra, but as the camera slowly pans to the audience we see a crowd dressed in hero and animal costumes and we see what Tár has reduced herself to. Her time has passed yet she refuses to put the baton down and admit any wrongdoing. It is a hard thing to be the last one dancing to music that stopped long ago, even more crippling to realise you are the last one to realise. Although facing one’s actions, as we all know, is an uneasy affair at best, we must all eventually turn our back on the orchestra to face the audience, to face the real music; the truth, as ugly as it may sound.
“Although facing one’s actions, as we all know, is an uneasy affair at best, we must all eventually turn our back on the orchestra to face the audience, to face the real music; the truth, as ugly as it may sound.”
The scene fades to black and I think again of the tree I drew as a child. My parents did not ask who I was when I drew it. They did not wonder if the person I would become would be worthy of admiration, or if some future mistake might make the picture less deserving of its prized place on the wall. The work was enough. Perhaps this is where culture now finds itself: standing uneasily on the precipice between admiration and accusation, unsure whether to listen to the orchestra or turn to dissect the conductor, worried to fall into the darkness of complicity.
The new generation would sooner shove Lydia Tár into that darkness and never hear a single note written by her again - washing their hands clean of her to pass the baton to the next trembling hand.