Dirigentka Gertrud Herliczka

The conductor Gertrud Herliczka was born 1904 in Vienna and has conducted over 100 concerts with professional orchestras between 1927 and 1939. In writing about her, I am asking myself several questions. What is the nature of a conductor’s work? How can we describe it in its complexity? There is another aspect which raises interest: Why does being a woman on the podium matter? In this paper, I reflect upon the importance of the visual for a conductor, drawing from the book by the conductor Mark Wigglesworth. I observe how Herliczka’s gender poses a challenge for critics, reviewing her performance in one concert with the Munich Philharmonic in 1938. Through Theodore Schatzki’s theory of art bundles I approach conducting as a bundle of practices. Schatzki sees conventions as a feature of an art world, which is inevitably intertwined with other social worlds. One of the conventions in the classical musical world is a male conductor. This is also a result of the polarisation of genders, as has been shown by Karin Hausen. Herliczka’s critics were impressed by her conducting, so we can suppose she fulfilled the demands of a conductor’s bundle of practices, but she had to struggle with the prejudices against her gender. This struggle is still visible in the art world, particularly in the field of conducting.