The fight over ‘Tr’ shows how much we hate each other

Amazon Prime: The Musical Conductors of Hailey Rutledge, or What Have They Really Done About Us During the Last Three Seasons?

Not too many years ago, the funny and freewheeling Amazon Prime series “Mozart in the Jungle,” which ran for four seasons, depicted classical musicians engaging in a whole range of morally questionable behaviors. I’m not sure if anyone in the classical music community took any of it too seriously, as far as I can tell. Real classical music stars such as Lang Lang, Alan Gilbert and Joshua Bell appeared in the series alongside the cast of actors. The incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, himself, showed his good sense of humor with a brief appearance as a stage manager. By the final season, the fictional musician Hailey Rutledge, played by the actress Lola Kirke, had become a conductor (Episode 2: “Hailey continues to lie about her current career path.”) If a thoroughly irreverent show such as that didn’t raise a false positive, what is the uproar over Tr really about?

The Academy Awards are still a week away, but at least one verdict is in, which is that the movie “Tr” has a hit, having already won 60 international awards and six Oscar nominations. It has engendered passionate conversations and articles.

The film, written and directed by Todd Field, stars Cate Blanchett as the fiercely ambitious conductor Lydia Tár. Throughout the film we are never sure what is “real” and what is imagined. She is constantly sanitizing her hands and popping pills and frequently walking in her sleep. Like Lady Macbeth, she is a work of fiction.

But some of my fellow conductors, as well as a few music critics, aren’t so happy. Some of their objections are aesthetic, some refer to errors of jargon, like calling Mahler’s Fifth Symphony “the Mahler Five.” One conductor in particular is more personal: “I was offended as a woman,” wrote Marin Alsop, “I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”