Tár : The sociomaterial making and unmaking of maestro

Written and directed by Todd Field, Tár (2022) follows Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), a celebrated conductor whose authority begins to fracture just as her prestige appears most secure. As she prepares Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and launches her autobiography, the film stages not only a personal downfall but the unmaking of a gendered regime of authority. My argument is that Field’s film is most compelling when it presents authority as a craft of time, access, and coordination, while keeping questions of gender and sexuality inseparable from the exercise of command.

Upon its release, Tár sparked debate over whether it displaced structural harm into the spectacle of moral punishment. The controversy reached beyond critics, since conductor Marin Alsop, who is name-checked in the film, publicly criticized the film’s portrayal of an abusive female conductor and warned that it could reinforce damaging imaginaries at a moment when women are still fighting for legitimacy on the podium (Carras, 2023). The issue, then, is one of representation: what does it mean to cast a woman as an abusive figure in such a historically masculine space? Against this backdrop, I read Tár less as a moral verdict than as a film that makes the sociomateriality of authority newly visible. As an organization scholar rather than a specialist of conducting, I am less interested in adjudicating Lydia Tár’s guilt than in asking what the film reveals about the gendered conditions under which authority is assembled, inhabited, and revoked.

Sociomateriality infuses almost every aspect of the film. Field builds the narrative from containers (interiors, corridors, thresholds, doors, cars, soundproof rooms) so that authority first appears as an ecology of controlled environments rather than as a personality. At the same time, human actions and relationships continually inform and challenge the audience’s interpretation of maestro. A sociomaterial lens (Orlikowski, 2007) and the materiality of leadership (Ford et al., 2017) help show how legitimacy is made readable through spatial occupation, visibility, gender, sexuality, and the control of entry and proximity to the podium. What matters, then, is not only what Lydia Tár does, but how organizing occurs through entangled practices repeatedly mediated by third objects such as phones, emails, hard drives, and institutional documents. Accordingly, I foreground the sociomaterial conditions that make maestro workable in the first place, such as hierarchies, procedures, and reputational infrastructures, before later making Lydia Tár’s removal appear almost administrative. More specifically, this review seeks to highlight what organization scholars can learn about female conductors where maestro operates as an organizing concept in a historically White, male-dominated, and patriarchal professional space. Here, maestro embodies a sociomaterial regime of authority through which legitimate command is historically organized, embodied, evaluated, and legitimized as masculine. The argument, therefore, shifts attention from individual blame to the structural conditions that make authority both workable and revocable.

As the Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Lydia Tár prepares to record and conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and her authority is enacted through tightly choreographed rituals (blind auditions, rehearsals, programming meetings) and minute decisions about who gets access, time, and proximity to the podium. The film opens with Lydia Tár in a public interview, and the exchange frames conducting as temporal governance rather than mere interpretation, since Lydia Tár herself states that “keeping time is not a small thing.” Authority begins in the capacity to inaugurate a standard tempo and decide when the collective starts, and therefore who is “in” or “late,” audible or negligible. Todd Field materializes this power in rehearsals that entail stopping the orchestra, resetting entrances, policing silence, and making collective attention hinge on gestures.

Much of this logistical world runs through Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant), Lydia Tár’s assistant, who circulates schedules, calls, and invitations with a precision that sustains and quietly reveals the machinery of maestro’s power. Backstage ethical violations start to emerge as Lydia Tár fixates on a young cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), and begins bending procedures to pull her closer: adjusting casting decisions, re-routing opportunities, and reshaping the micro-ecology around her, while sharpening tensions with Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s concertmaster and Lydia Tár’s partner. Olga becomes the hinge where attraction and authority converge, raising questions of moral and ethical integrity. The point is not simply that Lydia Tár abuses power, but that the very behaviors that make authority legible in a traditional maestro can be re-read, once contested, as evidence of abuse when inhabited by a woman in a historically masculine role.

In parallel, Krista Taylor (who never actually appears in the shot), a former protégée pushed out of the field, returns less as a person than as a trace of prior harm. Emails, messages, and warnings accumulate, and when she dies by suicide, the event is handled less as a scandal than as a dossier to be contained, exemplifying how organizational violence can operate through procedural quietness as much as through overt force (Costas and Grey, 2019). By juxtaposing Olga’s engineered proximity with Krista’s procedural erasure, the film shows how legitimacy in a patriarchal space is materially composed, then re-read, contested, and withdrawn.

The Juilliard masterclass, set at the renowned music school in New York, provides the film’s clearest demonstration of authority as performance. Filmed in a 10-minute mobile take, the sequence turns pedagogy into a public exercise of command. The dispute begins over repertoire—Lydia Tár proposes a Bach work in B minor as a test case, while Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a self-described “BIPOC pangender” student, objects that Bach’s misogyny makes the music difficult to take seriously—but it quickly becomes a confrontation over the criteria by which art should be judged. What matters most is not who “wins” the exchange. It is that authority is manufactured in real time through interruption, proximity, spatial control, and exposure. Lydia Tár first narrows the interaction into an intimate micro-stage, then re-centers herself as the class becomes an audience. As Bégaudeau (2024) notes, the camera’s slow drift produces a perceptual vertigo through which discipline and authority can slide into domination. The scene, therefore, leaves a gendered question unresolved: who, in such a historically masculine role, can afford to declare identity categories irrelevant without being read as abusive?

As institutional support recedes, Lydia Tár’s downfall takes a procedural form: access is revoked, allies disappear, and she is replaced at the podium during the Mahler performance. The situation culminates in a public confrontation when she forcefully makes her way onstage but is unable to restore her authority. What follows is not simply disgrace but displacement, first back to Staten Island (New York), to the house where she grew up, and to her birth name, Linda Tarr, and then into the film’s final sequence in an unnamed Southeast Asian city. There, she continues to conduct, but under a different circuit of legitimacy and within a reconfigured authority regime. The shift in material environment—less mahogany and hushed enclosure, more plastic surfaces and ambient noise—makes the point clearly: what collapses is not only a career, but an infrastructure of access.

Ultimately, the film Tár is strongest when it shows that authority is not a personal attribute but an infrastructure of time, access, and coordination. Its weakness, however, is that this structural acuity remains attached to the spectacular figure of an abusive woman conductor, thereby risking the very simplification it otherwise complicates. For organization scholars, that tension is precisely the lesson. Maestro remains a masculine-coded, historically patriarchal organizing concept that can be inhabited by a woman, but not equally stabilized, sustained, or forgiven once conduct is contested. Field accentuates this by foregrounding gender and sexuality as central dimensions, prompting the audience to question whether and how those dimensions, underpinning the figure of the Other, played a significant role in Lydia Tár’s downfall and in the perception of her ethical violations. In this sense, Tár invites organization scholars to look beyond the person who dominates and to examine the sociomaterial arrangements through which domination becomes inhabitable, effective, and eventually revocable. What the film makes visible is not simply Lydia Tár’s abuse of power, but the material incarnation of a function: a regime of rooms, scores, schedules, thresholds, gestures, assistants, digital traces, and reputational circuits that allows authority to command bodies before it can be morally judged.