Tár (2022)

Lydia Tár is one of the greatest living composers/conductors, and first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. In an interview with Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival in New York City, she promotes several new projects, including most prominently, her upcoming live recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Lydia relies on her attentive personal assistant, Francesca, and her sickly wife/concertmaster, Sharon. Lydia has lunch with Eliot Kaplan, a conductor who also manages a fellowship program she founded for aspiring women professional conductors and talks of her plans to replace her assistant conductor, Sebastian, presumably with Francesca, as well as fill an open cello position in the orchestra.

Later, Lydia guest teaches a class at Juilliard. She ridicules a student’s lack of interest in conducting the classical masters on the basis of identity politics, encouraging the students to look past superficial differences to the music underneath from which they can learn. The student storms out. In Berlin, Lydia receives Vita Sackville-West’s novel Challenge, sent by Krista Taylor, a former member of her fellowship program. It is suggested through dream sequences and email interactions that Lydia groomed Krista into a sexually transactional relationship that later fell apart. Lydia attempts to blacklist Krista, encouraging Francesca and other conductors to delete any emails from or about Krista. During a blind audition for a new orchestra cellist, Lydia sees one hopeful, the Russian Olga, in the bathroom.