Tár: A Masterclass in Authority and Its Abuse

I've spent over two decades conducting major orchestras and ballet companies. So, when TÁR was released, I watched it expecting to see a film about classical music. But TÁR isn’t only that. While the world-building is extraordinary, at its core, TÁR is a film about power and abuse, with classical music as the pressure cooker.

Significant spoilers ahead. This one digs into how some of the film’s strongest scenes actually work. So if you haven’t seen TÁR yet, you may want to bookmark this post until you have.

The Foundation: Unflinching Realism

The interior life of a conductor is rarely shown with accuracy, but TÁR got the details right in a way that only someone who's lived that life would notice. The way Lydia moves even when she's not conducting is characteristically economical, expressive, and captivating. Her extreme sensitivity to sound is common among composers and conductors. She hears music everywhere, in refrigerator hums, in the alarm in the next-door apartment. And the Mahler scores on her shelf - - the Universal Edition, with blue softcovers with Roman numerals - - are the actual edition most serious conductors own. Most notably, her supreme, outwardly-facing confidence masks her deep and complex neuroses.

The rehearsal scenes are where the film's realism comes alive. The first Mahler 5 rehearsal scene isn't about ensemble or technique. Rather, it's about character, intensity, and phrasing; the kinds of things that are actually discussed at the highest level of music-making. And Lydia’s fluidity between German and English is strikingly realistic for an international conductor of her stature.

But there’s one line that lands so authentically that it must have come from someone who's stood on the podium. When reaching for more spontaneity from the orchestra, Lydia simultaneously instructs and flatters the players by saying, "It really doesn't help you to know this piece so well." That's not a researched detail. It’s a conductor talking.

The film also asks some of the hardest questions still facing artists in the classical music world: Can a composer’s personal failings be separated from what they created? And should artists look past those failings and perform the works anyway? These are genuine, unresolved questions, and TÁR brings them into sharp focus through an excruciating masterclass scene. But the film doesn’t settle the debate. Rather, it portrays Lydia weaponizing it to humiliate a student, revealing far more about her deeply flawed character than about the question itself.

And then there's the audition scene in which Lydia determines which candidate behind the screen was Olga, and does so by the sound of her boots as she exits. To this day, women are advised to remove their shoes before walking into and out of the audition room, because the sound of heels on the floor changes how a committee hears you before you’ve played a note.

Finally, the casting of Sophie Kauer as Olga was a stroke of brilliance: a real cellist trained to act, rather than an actor trained to fake playing. The difference is visible in every frame she's in.

The Core: Power & Abuse

What elevates TÁR beyond a portrait of a cruel, narcissistic person's downfall is what it portrays about the mechanics of her world. A woman who insists misogyny has all but vanished in her profession while replicating every pattern of it herself. The methodical, slow-motion accumulation of consequence: the young protégé conductor's life and career destroyed, the character-assassinating viral video, and finally, a three-second shot of a boardroom that signals the outcome without a word of dialogue. And at the end, Lydia’s agency representation quietly handed off to a junior agent.

But one of the film's most extraordinary scenes is the Elgar announcement. In a seemingly democratic move, Lydia proposes a companion piece to the recording of Mahler 5, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. She waits a moment while the orchestra contemplates and ultimately approves. She then announces that the soloist will come from within the orchestra. The room responds with real warmth, tapping on stands, expressing genuine approval. But then she drops the hammer: In front of the entire orchestra, she humiliates the principal cellist by “asking” her if she agrees that there should be an audition for the solo spot. The temperature drops thirty degrees in the room in the most accurate portrayal I've seen of how a leader can turn an entire room against themselves in real time. It’s a two-minute masterclass in how the emotional and psychological work of leading an orchestra is as important, if not more important, than the artistic work.

TÁR isn't a story about a conductor or an orchestra. It's a story about what happens when absolute authority meets a complete lack of conscience. In TÁR, it just happens to be set on a podium.

I'm building stories in that world. From the inside.

What's a film or show that used your world as more than just a backdrop?

Ethan Danov

Conductor | Screenwriter

Creator, Firebirds

#Screenwriting #FilmIndustry #ClassicalMusic #PrestigeTV #Tár