“It is impossible to tell when the conductor made his appearance in music,” Mr. Henderson asserts.  “At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the conductor was at first nothing more than a leader; he was one of the performers whom the rest followed.”  An inscription in verse on an engraving of a conductor, published in Nuremberg, early in the eighteenth century, declares that “silent myself, I cause the music I control.”  In the nineteenth century, the conductor had won full recognition as an instrumentalist of a new type, who, without any instrument of his own, played on the whole body of musicians under his command.  Of late, he has become so prominent in the eyes of the public, and his personality has been so insisted upon, that there is danger often lest he may distract attention from the music to himself.  As Mr. Henderson records calmly:  “We have beheld the curious spectacle of people going, to hear not Beethoven or Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl.”

What the conductor is to a performance of orchestral music, the stage-manager is to the performance of a play in the theater. (And in this paper the term “stage-manager” is to be understood as meaning the “producer” of a drama.) His art is as special, as necessary, as novel, and as difficult; and, if it is as yet scarcely recognized and rarely appreciated, this is due in part to the conditions under which his work must be done.  The conductor is not only visible but conspicuous; the audience is likely to watch him rather than any one of the musicians he is guiding; whereas the stage-manager must ever be invisible, and is, indeed, most successful if his existence is unsuspected.  When the conductor brings a concert to a close, he bows to the applause and then lays down his wand; and all is over.  The stage-manager has wrought his wonders, and his labors are practically concluded, before the curtain rises on the first act at the first performance.  In this respect, he is like the trainer of a college-crew, who cannot go into the boat with them when the pistol is fired for the race to begin.  But everybody is now well aware what it is that the trainer has done for the crew; his portrait appears with theirs in the newspapers and he shares in their glory.

Only the expert ever thinks of giving due meed of praise to the hidden stage-manager who is responsible for a more arduous victory in the theater than any ever won on the river.  His face is not familiar on the posters; and his name is not in large type on the playbill.  All the credit he gets is contained in the single line which records that the play has been “produced” by him.  Yet he has been responsible for the entire performance—­for the acting and for the costumes, for the scenery and for the properties, for the lighting and for the incidental music; not so much indeed for any one of these things as for the harmony of the whole.  If there has been a perfect cooerdination of all these elements, if there have been no jarring notes, if the spirit of the play has been brought out completely, if everything has gone right from beginning to end, if the whole performance has moved so smoothly as to seem spontaneous, the stage-manager deserves the highest praise for what he has wrought unseen.  Yet his sole reward is his own consciousness of work well done, and the chance appreciation of the scanty few who may be competent to estimate the worth of his achievement.