Relatively few studies have focused on Franz Liszt’s pivotal role in shaping the emerging art of orchestral conducting in the nineteenth century, in part because his gestural style was thought to be so unusual; as Hermann Uhde put it in 1870, ‘some find it very strange’.1 Vivid contemporary accounts of him repeatedly mention with astonishment (or disdain) his physicality: how he looked ‘gigantic [and] seemed to be soaring above us all’; how for ‘a big crescendo he would suddenly spread out his long arms like an eagle spreading his wings’, but ‘[f]or a sudden piano his whole body seems to sink down’; how he ‘contented himself with indicating the rhythm of the opening bars with his finger, then, folding his arms, [let] the orchestra continue alone, making no more conducting gestures save at pauses or at changes of tempo’; and ‘how we feared that at any moment he might be carried away by the force of the music … [h]is whole being trembles and throbs’.2 Reading these reports, one would think Liszt’s approach was so unorthodox as to be without merit, and one might infer, without influence. And yet, his extreme gestural range and physicality foreshadowed many later conductors. One thinks of Leonard Bernstein, whose conducting was described by his players in strikingly similar ways: how ‘music was pouring out of his body’ and he ‘danced’ on the podium; how he ‘often did nothing. Like, literally, nothing’; and ‘Whether he conducted with his nose or his hands or with his eyes, it didn’t matter what the gesture was …. [T]he gesture told us what decision to make.’3