(Fr. chef d'attaque; Ger. Konzertmeister; It. violino primo).
In modern orchestras, the principal first violinist, who sits immediately to the left of the conductor as viewed by the audience. As principal first violinist, the leader has significant but varying duties, often including the marking of parts, liaison between orchestra and management and responsibility for sectional rehearsals; but the precedence accorded to the principal first violinist over the principals of other sections is largely a product of the leader's historical role. Until the early 19th century instrumental music, regardless of the size of the ensemble, was usually directed by one (or more) of the performers. Some degree of direction from the keyboard was common during the 18th century, but there are many references to violin direction (including C.P.E. Bach's account of his father's preference for that method), and it became more pervasive with the gradual abandonment of the keyboard continuo during the later 18th century. Reichardt in 1776 (Ueber die Pflichten des Ripien-Violinisten) envisaged a violinist-director (Anführer). Dittersdorf and Haydn led their symphonies from the violin, and Clement and Schuppanzigh exercised the same role at concerts in Vienna around 1800. Even in the opera house direction from the first violin was common at the beginning of the 19th century. In some places control was shared between a keyboard player (or time beater), who paid attention to the singers, and a leader who directed the orchestra; this system survived in Italy until the mid-19th century. When Spohr went to Gotha as Konzertmeister in 1805 he found a co-Konzertmeister who directed from the keyboard in vocal music, but played viola in purely instrumental pieces; Spohr directed these from the violin and soon assumed control of vocal performances too. About the same time Gottfried Weber (AMZ, ix, 1806–7, col.805) advocated replacing direction from the violin or the keyboard with direction by the baton, as at the Paris Opéra. Spohr was among those who abandoned the violin for the baton; he employed it in rehearsal with the London Philharmonic Society in 1820 (where joint direction by a leader and a keyboard player was the norm until the 1830s), but, unable to persuade them to accept this method in public, he directed the performance as leader. At the Leipzig Gewandhaus, direction from the violin remained until Mendelssohn took over as conductor in 1835, and, in Mendelssohn's absence, concerts were still occasionally directed by the leader, Ferdinand David. The transition to baton conducting took place at different times in different parts of Europe, but by the middle of the 19th century leaders had mostly assumed their modern subordinate position.
The leader of a jazz band is the musician who ‘fronts’ or organizes the band.
A. Carse: The Orchestra in the XVIIIth Century (Cambridge, 1940/R)
A. Carse: The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz (Cambridge, 1948/R)
A. Jacobs: ‘Spohr and the Baton’, ML, xxxi (1950), 307–17
D.K. Holoman: ‘The Emergence of the Orchestral Conductor in Paris in the 1830s’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties: Northampton, MA, 1982, 374–430
C. Brown: Louis Spohr: a Critical Biography (Cambridge, 1984)
C. Brown: ‘The Orchestra in Beethoven's Vienna’, EMc, xvi (1988), 4–20
M. Chusid: ‘A Letter by the Composer about Giovanna d'Arco and some Remarks on the Division of Musical Direction in Verdi's Day’, Performance Practice Review, iii (1990), 7–57; rev. in Studi Verdiani, vii (1991), 12–56
L. Jensen: ‘The Emergence of the Modern Conductor in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera’,Performance Practice Review, iv (1991), 34–63
D. Charlton: ‘ “A maître d'orchestre … conducts”: New and Old Evidence on French Practice’, EMc, xxi (1993), 340–53
CLIVE BROWN