The wokeness of Tár

& the woes of the toxic male

Tár is a film about a classical music conductor who is also a lesbian (2022). Lydia Tár has mastered the traditional disciplines of classical music, which she prefers to new music. She has many untraditional sides, but she is fiercly disciplined. There is even a brief scene in a boxing gym, as if her tough side needed emphasis.

Tár was a critical success, earning six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress for Cate Blanchett.

However, like many artsy pictures, Tár never developed into a hit. The subject matter alienated audiences on two fronts—lesbianism and classical music. Wiki also somewhat apologetically also notes that the number of domestic “art houses” that were likely to screen the film had been reduced by 40% because of COVID-19. Art films tend to draw older audiences, which in the first year of post-pandemic recovery (2021-22) were reluctant to go out.

The film’s success was no doubt cramped by the decision—admirable, I think—to present Tár as a contradictory and unattractive figure. It would have been fully in keeping with the wokeness of Hollywood and the entertainment world (including the fine arts) to celebrate Tár’s sexuality and then to reward her, either with a musical triumph or with the coveted status of victim. Either approach, I believe, would quickly have built a social media following and sold tickets.

Tár does not achieve heroic status as a woman pacesetter, nor is she seen as a martyr. Her rocky road does not end in a triumphal comeback—as it might if she were, say, a boxer who had lost and then recovered his touch. We will see that Tár has more to do with masculinity than this.

The film’s notable achievement is to explore a familiar woke scenario—a female battling a male world—without immediately taking the woke side. The weaknesses of the high-powered lesbian are candidly portrayed. Not unexpectedly, they mirror the conventional flaws of the high-powered professional man: toxic because he is too ambitious, too concerned about success, and too busy to be a good family man. Egocentric and competitive, he is sexually driven, a philanderer. In the end, out of control, he becomes a victim of his success, acting, as has many a prominent CEO, against his own interests, chiefly by having an affair with a subordinate. This is Tár’s misstep as well. She has many other toxic flaws.

It is not an attractive portrait, to be sure, but it has psychological depth. Tár also has musical depth, thanks to writer-director Todd Field and to the film’s music supervisor, Lucy Bright, who, in an interview with Hannah Edgar, commented that it is “rare to have classical music on screen” in the way Tár presents it.

Music is the subject of Tár, rather than an element in the background. Some music was performed by the Dresden Philharmonic (standing in for the Berlin Philharmonic), in a Dresden concert hall from the 1960s. It was available for the number of days required for filming the music scenes; more famous locations were not.

Tár does not tame either her professional ambition or her sexual needs. Her ambition is not to change the music world—as the first female music director of a world-class orchestra, she has already made history—but to record a live performance of Mahler’s fifth symphony and thereby to complete her recordings of all ten of his symphonies. Her life changes when an attractive young Russian cellist named Olga arrives. We discover that Tár is no match for her.

Mahler’s fifth symphony, written 1901-1902, is considered his most famous work. One reason is that its fourth movement, the Adagietto, is among the most familiar 12 minutes in classical music. In Tár the Adagietto is used for only a few seconds, for reasons I suggest below. It has been argued that Mahler’s fifth was chosen for Tár because it was written at the height of his career. When we meet Tár, she is at her peak.

The connection that matters the most, I believe, is not one between Tár and Mahler’s fifth but one between Tár and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). The Adagietto is used in Luchino Visconti’s eponymous 1971 film, based on Mann’s novella. In the film, Mahler’s music underlines the homosexual longing of Gustav von Aschenbach, a world-famous writer, for Tadziu, a pretty but inconsequential boy he sees in Venice. Tár and Aschenbach are subject to the same kind of romantic desire.

When we meet Aschenbach, the famous man has begun to doubt his powers. At the end of a long morning of work in Munich, he finds his inspiration lagging. He takes a disturbing walk that will, eventually, prompt him to look for renewal and relaxation. Soon he is bound for Venice.

The city falls into the grip of a plague. Aschenbach is repeatedly warned that he is in danger, but he thinks otherwise. He has fallen in love, and his obsession with Tadziu and the deadly infection advance together, showing how the most formidable talents can be rendered powerless. The contrast between the magnificence of Mahler’s music and the pathos of the Aschenbach’s decline is painful. He trails the boy through the city and resorts to dying his hair and wearing make-up to look youthful.

Tár thrives on conflict and on her reputation as a cutting-edge conductor. Most of the tension baked into the film arise from her mix of sex and power. During a very long two hours and 37 minutes, Lydia Tár is relentlessly confrontational. She us a standard-bearer for feminism and gender diversity, but much of her success depends on the toxic masculinity that feminists love to hate.

Tár is competitive, vengeful, domineering, and blunt. Her personal and professional worlds constantly collide. Her wife, Sharon, is concertmaster of the orchestra; they have an adopted daughter named Petra. Parts of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s full-length, orchestrated composition, For Petra, are heard through the film. It seems that Tár’s work comes first. When Oga appears, we see that Tár, like many busy professionals, male or female, makes time for a mistress—or, at least, for time to recruit one.

Tár’s most dangerous attribute is one that is often charged against men of the Me-Too generation. She has a reputation for using sex to control co-workers. We meet Olga, a young cellist, when she auditions behind a curtain (as per the rules) for an opening in the orchestra. After Olga performs, Tár sees Olga’s shoes beneath the curtain and realizes that the candidate is female. Tár changes the score she had given Olga to ensure that Olga gets the position.

That done, she then gives Olga a coveted cello solo, a spot that would ordinarily be reserved for the orchestra’s first cellist. The orchestra is shocked by this flagrant unfairness and rightly sees it as sexual favoritism. Orchestras are unionized and highly vertical. Departures from custom breed hostility and destroy esprit de corps. Whereas many of Tár’s precedent-shattering moves are praised, this one will lead to trouble.

Olga knows how to play Tár, who is eager to have a protégé. When they have dinner, Olga grabs food out of the server’s hand and eats like a starving rube. When they travel for a performance, Tár invites Olga into her room. Olga declines, pleading a headache. Tár later sees Olga leaving her own room in a party dress, headed out for the evening. Olga exposes the gap between Tár’s desire and her power to fulfill it.

The clearest revelation of the contradictions within Tár, the collision of her strengths and her weaknesses, comes in a master class. Tár identifies herself as a “U-Haul lesbian,” meaning that she is inclined to rush into committed relationships (i.e., pack up and move in with her friend), a weakness that explains one of the movie’s central plot points, her need for women she can dominate. That Tár both makes fun of the term and uses it as a label for herself is typical of her uncomfortable cynicism and self-awareness.

Tár plays up her sexual preference, wearing baggy pant suits and white shirts unbuttoned at the cuff. Her loping movements bring a gangly young man to mind. In the master class, she senses that the students are shallow and uncertain. Her response is to become blunt and forceful. Having all the power, she then throws it around.

As part of the class, a student named Max has been leading an orchestra in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ro, “an ecosystem of sounds,” someone has called it. Tár stops Max and asks him why he has come to Julliard. She brushes off his answers, which are insubstantial and hesitant, and sends him to his seat. Then she asks the students how they prepare to conduct. Do they know what the music is “actually doing” to them? She poses the question to Max, who is at a loss.

Tár asks the group how a conductor can find “a point of view” in music. She refers to a silent composition by John Cage (1952) called “Four thirty-three,” which redefines music as random atmospheric sound. No instruments play during the piece. Tár compares it, wittily, to “a car without an engine.” She obviously finds such music—Cage’s, Thorvaldsdottir’s—empty. As an advocate of history and tradition, she tells the students that “now is the time to conduct music that actually requires something from you” (emphasis in original, p. 18).

She suggests Bach to Max, the “Kyrie,” perhaps, from the great Mass in B Minor. That would be something that would make demands on him that go beyond “stick technique.” Could he dig into it? Could he discover and then express what it meant to him? Tár is thinking of the demands of traditional music, with its depth and formal complexity, and, of course, its familiarity to orchestras and audiences, whose expectations when such music is performed are high. Along with Bach, she refers to Beethoven.

Max responds that he is “not really into Bach.” Tár asks if he has ever played or conducted Bach (she must know the answer). Smart as he is, Max has no idea that he has entered dangerous and deep waters. “Honestly,” he says, “as a BIPOC [black, indigenous, person of color] pangender-person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously.” Max adds that Bach “sired like twenty kids.” That’s it for Bach!

Tár acknowledges Bach’s “skills in the marital bed” but wonders what they have to do with the Mass in B Minor (she really should give credit to Bach and his wife for perseverance). She admits that many orchestras pick and choose what can be played and that they discriminate and “silo” what is acceptable from what is not. She herself is not too crazy about Beethoven, she admits, seeming to side with Max’s views on dead white males, but then—point, counterpoint—admits that when she faces Beethoven she finds herself “nose-to-nose with his magnitude and inevitability” (p. 19). His magnitude and his inevitability: not hers. The message to Max is to put his ego in second place.

Tár invites Max to the piano and plays a few bars of the famous first prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. He begins to bounce his knee, a metronome of a sort that tries Tár’s patience. She stops this (below).

Max’s music lesson begins, quite appropriately, with Bach’s prelude, the start of the most famous exposition of harmonic progression ever written. It’s not until the music changes, Tár says, playing this familiar and seemingly simple work, “that you see what it really is.” She presents the prelude as an ongoing series of questions and answers. “It’s the question that involves the listener,” she says, referring to a change in the established pattern, “never the answer.”

In music, we are more familiar with “tension” and “resolution” as the operative terms. In the bars from the prelude below, the notes of the C-major (C E G) chord are played in succession (an arpeggio). Then Bach begins a B-minor chord as E drops to D (3rd measure, C D F#). This is the “question”—change that demands another change. It is not answered until the C drops to B natural in the next measure, not given here: B D F#). The move from C major to B minor sounds inevitable once it is completed: the question has been answered. Musical dialogue has begun.

Tár understands that she is merely the agent of this natural yet magical process. It is an exercise in humility. (She does not say so, but she has put her finger on the mystery and the power of many works, including Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, with its delayed resolution, one of the most “questioning” operas ever written.)

Tár tells Max that, when on the podium, he needs to extinguish himself and learn to serve the composer, not his own identity—not his ego. But there are no harmony lessons for him. “Nowadays,” he says (a curiously retro word from a woke hipster), “white, male, cis composers” are “just not my thing.” This is stupidity lurching into defiance: all ego, the opposite of humility. But it is utterly believable. How many of today’s young poets have read Shakespeare? How many of them could read Shakespeare, come to think of it? Forget Gerard Manley Hopkins! (“Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel / Thy river, and o’er gives all to rack or wrong” [“Ribblesdale,” ll. 7-8]).

If Bach can be reduced “to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on,” Tár says, then so can Max. She can see that he has no connection to Bach. But she wonders to whom he might be connected. Would it be to the “super hot young woman” whose music he was conducting at the start of the class, Anna Thorvaldsdottir? Tár implies that Max is no more connected to her than he is to Bach—unless, perhaps, that happens through Anna’s sex appeal. She implies that Max is a male chauvinist. He stomps off the stage, calling Tár “a f-king b-tch,” a chauvinist expression that hardly fits his pan-gender politics. “And you are a robot,” she replies, adding that he has “a soul built by social media.”

Tár’s critique of Max is effective because she carries the double woke credentials of  female and lesbian. Her lesson to him is that, however “diverse” she is, she is nonetheless humble. She knows how to serve composers: white, male, hetero Bach; white male, hetero Beethoven; and others. She can sublimate herself to music. She understands herself as the agent of and the partner in a searching, engaging dialogue. He cannot see himself in a comparable role. He cannot see beyond his politics, and face of his ego.

The force of the music lesson, then, is to show that Tár is, above all, deeply knowledgeable of music and music history and that she has a humanistic understanding of music as dialogue, not just talk, but as expression that requires both exchange and change. Max divides music from those who create it. His range is limited to gender and race. His racial identity (BIPOC, remember) will count for more than anything else. Tar gets tough on the wrong man and will soon find no one to defend her behavior.

The scene with Max turns out to be the rule, not the exception. Her attack on him goes viral. Called on the carpet, she proves to have a history of bullying and chauvinism. A protégé whom she used roughly committed suicide. Legal proceedings ensue. Tár’s behavior was overlooked so long as she was a winner for the orchestra and its management. But when stories start coming out, she is fired without ceremony. Thrown off her perch, she attacks her successor on stage.

Tár is a version of the toxic male, in the mold of Harvey Weinstein. As with Weinstein, when one accuser came forward, others quickly followed. In his case, ironically, Cate Blanchett was among them.

Viewer dissatisfaction and mediocre box office suggest that the makers of Tár did too much splicing and dicing. Some people enjoy the film’s take-down of woke culture, deftly captured as the conductor exposes Max’s limitations. Others are happy to see her punished as an abuser who is cast out of the lofty ranks she occupied in Berlin and New York.

Both sides, I believe, overlook what is genuinely admirable about Tár, which is her musicianship, her acute ear, her eloquence, and her deep commitment to the classical tradition. She has her reservations about Beethoven and no doubt Bach and Berlioz as well, not to mention Mozart, Monteverdi, and Mussorgsky. Even so, she admires them and could surely answer her own favorite questions about what their music is “actually doing” and what that music “actually requires” of her. The music requires her to park her ego.

When I think of Tár’s future, I think of James Levine, a victim of the Me-Too culture. He left a massive, unique imprint on the Metropolitan Opera, of which he was the artistic director for over 40 years. His work is preserved in dozens of performances that are regularly rebroadcast on SiriusXM. He has piano and orchestral recordings as well. He died shortly after the scandal about him broke. Tár was not so lucky, but when she is gone, her legacy, like Levine’s, will remain. Her ten Mahler symphonies could well find a place among great performances of these works.

Aschenbach died peacefully in a foreign country. His sorry decline will go unnoticed but his writing will continue to be revered. We might wish a similar ending for Tár. By the end of the film she is reduced to leading an orchestra of costumed players. We might think that, for her, the music has stopped. But it has not. She’d rather conduct cosplayers than nobody: music is music. And, come to think of it, were not her other orchestras, in their white ties and tails and evening dresses, also costumed players? Who is in costume these days: is it the audience, or is it the members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?

The quiet end of Tár’s career, when it comes, will renew focus on her recordings. Today’s new listeners know Levine, through his recordings, as a great conductor and accompanist. New listeners in the post-Tár era, those who hear her recordings, will know that she put her best into the music. It is, after all, Mahler’s greatness that she cared about, not her own.