Meanwhile, these detractors do not give credit to “TÁR” for its fierce humor, which is refracted through classical musical motifs. Lydia took a page from Berg’s opera Wozzeck, whose antihero is driven mad by lines of accordion music. In order to anger the relatives who are trying to sell their dead mother’s house next door, Lydia takes an accordion and sings loudly and discordantly: “Sell the apartment! You are all going to hell. Your apartment is for sale!” And when rehearsing Mahler’s Fifth with his Berlin orchestra, Lydia instructed them in German: “Forget Visconti!”—referring to the use of the Adagietto movement from that symphony in Luchino Viscontimovie by”Death in Venice” (1971), where it can be heard throughout evoking a sense of sadness. (Lydia, however, sees the Adagietto, as Mahler does himself, as a declaration of love, without the mournful tempo heard in Visconti’s film.)
Whether she bullies her neighbors, dominates subordinates, or indulges in more depraved behavior, description is not the same as endorsement, of course, and through her mistakes, Lydia becomes the master of her own mortality. . At one point, before she goes completely off the rails, Lydia announces: “Don’t be so eager to be offended. Narcissism over small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity. “
Field and his film certainly do not promote conformity. Some may wonder whether Field took his protagonist’s name from the iconoclastic Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr—and whether he shares the director’s creative principles. After all, Tarr once famously stated: “I don’t care about stories. I never have. Every story is the same… I don’t think at all, if you’re going to make a movie, that you should think about the story. The movie not the story. It’s usually a picture, a sound, a lot of emotion. Stories only cover one thing. “
In an essay recently published in New York Timesconductor John Mauceri, the film’s musical adviser (and a Tony, Olivier, Emmy, and Grammy winner, best known as principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra from 1991 to 2006), says that many women conductors, including Britain’s Alice Farnham and Simone. Young, principal conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, spoke on behalf of “TÁR.”
Above all, he reminds us to keep the movie in perspective: “‘TÁR’ is not true about any of us. Lydia is fiction—made real by the performance of a great artist,” Mauceri wrote. “All of us—composers, conductors, musicians, and audience—are only human. The lie that some of us cling to, that the artistic greatness that pours through us makes us great, is the truth at the heart of ‘TÁR.'”