“Conductor and composer Victoria Bond, the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the Juilliard School, in 1977, says the only real female role models when she was doing postgraduate work at Juilliard were Eve Queler and Sarah Caldwell. Bond got her professional conducting start as music director of the Pittsburgh Youth Orchestra in 1977. “I was told over and over when somebody came backstage to shake my hand or congratulate me after a performance, ‘Oh, you’re so small. We thought you were tall,’ ” Bond recalls. “On that podium, you look tall no matter what,” Bond says. “Let’s talk about men who are iconic conductors, like Herbert von Karajan, like Leonard Bernstein, like Seiji Ozawa. They’re all short men. I didn’t realize that at first about von Karajan because in his posters he looked about seven feet tall. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin gets up on stage with these enormous opera singers, it’s a comical picture, but it’s not your size that determines your strength.” She says in Pittsburgh back in the 1970s, “people did not feel obliged to be politically correct. I’ve kept all of those articles, those demeaning, patronizing articles. I think they will be of great historical interest at some point when people say, ‘Women were always treated equally well.’ It ain’t necessarily so.”
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