Days of stolen thunder

When the artistic history of the 20th century comes to be written, one remarkable development will stand out: the rise of the middleman. As our culture became ever more mediated, we made the mistake of bestowing the aura of artistic genius upon the mediators themselves. The people closest at hand became the objects of the awe and admiration that was rightly due to the creative spirits who built the works in the first place.

The most glaring example of this is the invention of the conductor. In the early years of the 20th century, Mahler and Toscanini battled it out for supremacy in Europe, while Theodore Thomas established in America a new template for the conductor as the permanent arbiter of musical taste with the Chicago Symphony. Soon the conductor was not merely a hired hand whose job was to beat time, but a suffering genius swaying in creative ecstasy on the podium. Toscanini, von Karajan, Bernstein: these were the new musical heroes.

The institutionalisation of the cult of the conductor was a double-edged sword. A celebrated podium dancer might be able to attract audiences to music that they would otherwise shy away from; on the other hand, it was more widely the case that the orchestral repertoire became narrowed, petrified into a 19th-century Germano-Austrian tradition that is the meat of orchestral performance to this day.

But one of the worst corollaries of the now-entrenched cult was that conductors, perhaps feeling they ought to earn their new-found reputation as artists in their own right, began to play around arbitrarily with composers' scores. Now of course, a musical score is not a hard and fast blueprint for performance, and Verdi himself told Toscanini that a true musician must always know how to read between the lines. Indeed, though Toscanini's great charisma and success was largely responsible for the rise of the conductor cult, in the latter stages of his career he fiercely demanded transparency and fidelity to the composer's work, deploring the fact that conductors increasingly felt it possible, in the name of "interpretation", to ignore composers' directions and even change the music.

A prime culprit, valuable populariser of classical music though he was, was Leonard Bernstein, whose influence on orchestral performance was malign. He encapsulated the new, self-dramatising attitude to his job like this: "A conductor is a kind of sculptor whose element is time instead of marble." But where does that leave the poor sap who scribbled the notes in the first place? Bernstein's gooey, rubato-soaked performances of Tchaikovsky or Sibelius enraged as many people as they thrilled, and at times his devil-may-care attitude to what the composer actually wrote destroyed the intended effect absolutely, as when he smears out the deliberately jagged, mechanical rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in favour of a cloying lyrical romanticism.

The hubris of a conductor who thinks he knows better than the composer is quite fantastic. Some went even further, not only disregarding note values and tempi but actually rewriting the notes, as the conductor Kovarovic did with Janacek's Jenufa. Milan Kundera, in his book Testaments Betrayed, deplores this and draws an illuminating comparison: "Without a doubt, this or that sentence of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu could be better written. But where could you find the lunatic who would want to read an improved Proust?" We don't put up with it in literature; why in music?

What is to be abhorred in this phenomenon is not so much the changes themselves - creative reinvention is not an absolute evil - as the disingenuous way in which they are presented to the public. William Orbit's recent techno remix of Barber's Adagio for Strings, in all its cheesy, banging glee, is a much more honest and admirable appropriation of the composer's work than Bernstein's recording of Stravinsky.

Yet the fact is that the rise of the conductor was crucially important - not for the musicians of the orchestra, who can keep time perfectly well without anyone waving a stick at them, but for the audience. The 20th-century audience needed to be able to latch on to a visual symbol for artistic inspiration. And so, because real artistic inspiration is an ineffable, invisible mystery, and goes on behind closed doors in composer's garrets, the attention becomes focused on the conductor. In the society of the spectacle, music too had to be a spectacle in order to be understood. The conductor enabled this transformation: he was the figurehead, the living, breathing flesh, the tangible conduit through which genius flowed.

The rise of the middleman served a further purpose: it offered a useful shorthand method of understanding collaborative work. This is true not only of orchestral performance, but also of theatre. The theatre director is an invention of the mid-20th century, when the humble but crucial job of stage manager became inflated into the idea of the director as creative demiurge, following the woolly theorising of such pioneers as Peter Brook.

Just as with the rise of the conductor, the invention of the theatre director initiated a new culture of disrespect towards the originating artist. Shakespeare suddenly needed to be made relevant and accessible, and Mozart suffered the same fate at the hands of the new-fangled opera director - a mediator who often didn't even have any technical knowledge of music. A similar development occurred in the most collaborative modern art form, cinema, when a clique of self-promoting Frenchmen in the 1960s invented the wheeze of "auteur theory", according to which a film expressed the vision of one man.

Of course, this was a gift to the cultural mediators of the press and television. In the modern media, it is much easier to interview a theatre director or a conductor, letting him or her stand for the whole artistic enterprise, than to get your hands dirty in the pursuit of illuminating artistic criticism.

The most important cultural development in music of the last two decades, meanwhile, has been the rise of another seminal form of middleman, the disc jockey. Once just a canny selector of records and twiddler of the volume fader, the DJ is now a godlike presence in the club, even if, like Pete Tong or Judge Jules, he never composes a second's worth of music himself.

The reason for this is exactly the same as the reason for the rise of the conductor, even though the material conditions of performance could hardly be more different - it is the physical absence of the originating artist. The electronic composer works in his bedroom with a tower of computers and synthesisers; his music is mass-produced and distributed on vinyl. So when the music gets to be heard on the dance floor, there are waves of appreciative joy swilling round the place with nowhere to go. The guy who made it happen isn't there. The audience wants to praise him like they should, but it's impossible. The DJ is there, however, waving crazily from behind his decks, and so the adulation flows to him, for want of any more deserving receptacle.

In the end, it is clear that the rise of the middleman is inevitable when, in a society of mass production, the artist becomes so alienated from the visceral life of his work. And I am not arguing that middlemen should be disposed of; they are, of course, essential. But when a humble television director can be described, as one was recently in a national Sunday newspaper, as "a documentary maker of infinite genius", perhaps it is time to arrest this absurd taxonomical inflation.

It seems we want to believe that artistic creativity is less of a rare and fabulous beast than it actually is. But doesn't this devalue our admiration when it is heartfelt and deserved? Let us realise that conductors, DJs, theatre directors and so on are not creative geniuses in their own right but merely facilitators, who may be more or less talented in their work. The priest, after all, is not the god; he is only the messenger.