Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players had a whip-round and next morning Toscanini found a cheap nickel timepiece on his music stand, engraved ‘To Maestro, for rehearsal purposes only’.

Ah, the golden age. When conductors were gods, performances were divine revelations and orchestral players were serfs, drilled into machine-like precision. Fritz Reiner, the Hungarian-born music director of the Chicago Symphony from 1953 to 1962, heard his principal trumpet Bud Herseth nail a particularly fearsome octave leap in Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and instantly stopped the orchestra. ‘Again.’ Herseth hit a perfect high C. ‘Again.’ Once more: perfection. ‘Again’ – until even Reiner, the sadist’s sadist, conceded that Herseth could not be broken. ‘How long can you do this?’ he demanded. Herseth glanced at his watch: ‘Maestro, we’re here until 12.30.’

All as it should be. None of this first names nonsense; none of these youngsters, these tousle-haired scousers, these (the very thought!) women. It wasn’t so long ago, either. Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti (known to his players as ‘the screaming skull’) were active within living memory. And now the podium tyrant walks again in the person of Lydia Tár – the fictional conductor played by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s movie Tár. It’s suitably modernised, of course. The very fact that Tár is a woman acknowledges the fact that in the era of #MeToo, a male artist who behaved like Lydia Tár couldn’t hope to attract the viewer’s sympathy. You might call that progress.

Tár is a recognisably modern figure, too. The filmmakers have done their homework: she’s got her community projects, her education work, and her book of tasteful reflections on life and art. Tár gives slick interviews, and she’s unfussy and collegial in rehearsal – preferring (initially, at least) to wield her power through backstage insinuations and quiet, career-destroying words in compliant ears. That much rings unnervingly true. Elsewhere, there’s dramatic licence. The story relies heavily on the myth (and the industry, in fairness, works hard to sustain that particular illusion) that classical music is awash with wealth. In as far as it ever existed, the era of private jets and designer apartments died with Karajan more than a generation ago.

Note, too, that Tár is American. The tradition of the celebrity conductor has died hardest in the United States, where the popular image of classical music as a luxury import purveyed by temperamental, European-accented absolutists was established in the mid-20th century by Toscanini, Reiner and their contemporaries. Lydia Tár changes her name and personality to suit the demands of the US scene, with its insatiable reliance on affluent (often socially conservative) private donors, and she isn’t the first. The Marylebone-born Leopold Stokowski affected a Germanic persona and accent throughout his US career. (On a visit home to London, he was observed to gesture at Big Ben with a questioning expression: ‘Big clock: please, she is called?’)

One rather broad theory is that the European conductors who fled from oppression (and Toscanini’s courage in confronting Mussolini was real enough) to the United States were products of a pre-1914 continental tradition of court orchestras, where musicians were treated as the lackeys they technically were. (In 21st-century Russia, where Valery Gergiev rules his opera-house empire by the grace of Vladimir Putin, stories are told of recalcitrant players vanishing overnight from the Mariinsky Orchestra.) Autocracy had been part of the job description: America came to confuse it with the art.

In the UK – which never had a monarchical Hofkapelle or Staatsoper, and where orchestras such as the LSO were formed as player-collectives – the grand maestro has never enjoyed quite the same cultural traction. The classic British conductor anecdote is a Beecham witticism, rather than a tale of terror, and the very term ‘maestro’ (which Tár adopts as of right) is never used in British orchestras without a lethal coating of irony. We have our own ways of empowering monsters. When a real scumbag rises to the top of the UK classical profession, they tend to be urbane: think Oxbridge choirmaster, or something at the BBC.

But power is still power, and abuse continues, even if the cult of the untouchable genius doesn’t really fly any more. In Tár, a character splutters with disbelief at the fall of Charles Dutoit and the serial sex abuser James Levine. In my experience, the reaction in the industry was that the bastards had it coming, and why did it take so long? Well indeed: why? Part of it is certainly structural: no one makes Kanye or Beyoncé money in classical music, but when a large organisation depends for much of its income upon a charismatic frontman (or woman), it’s in everyone’s interest to circle the wagons.

Until, of course, it isn’t – though the most startling thing about Lydia Tár’s climatic act of violence is that it’s not wholly fictional. Private Eye was not alone in alleging, some years ago, that Sir John Eliot Gardiner had exploded in a physical rage at a member of a London orchestra. The early music scene is close-knit: speak to veterans and almost without fail, they have a ‘Jiggy’ horror story. One told me they’d struggled to sleep after working with him. Another talked of ‘a dictatorship’ that ‘tramples on people’s values’. Yet Gardiner continues to get bookings, he wins glowing reviews (I’ve given some myself), and his book about Bach ruminates elegantly on the humane and elevating power of art.

Is that just the price we pay for great music-making? (We’re talking here about artists whose behaviour, though detestable, is not actually criminal.) For sure, there’s a species of music-lover who really does get off on the idea of the maestro as fascist. They lurk in the comments sections of blogs, withering in their dismissal of any conductor who lacks grey hair and a Y chromosome. But what about the rest of us? John Wilson – a one-man proof that you can be a decent human being and still inspire some of the most breathtaking orchestral playing of this or any era – admires the recordings of the famously nasty George Szell. The ear is amoral. I can’t deny that hairs stand on end when I hear Reiner and his dazzling, terrified Chicago band slamming into the ‘Recognition Scene’ from Elektra, or that the finest modern recording of my favourite operetta is conducted by a man who has treated my friends and colleagues like excrement.

Ultimately, perhaps, it’s like eating foie gras: a question of finding your own ethical tipping point somewhere on the scale between outright cancellation and artistic ends justifying (delicious) means. I’ve found that a recording by a bully is more digestible once they’ve been dead for a few decades. When it comes to artists who live and work among us, it can feel more personal. I dumped my CDs – beautifully played, well-reviewed CDs – by the cellist Heinrich Schiff after he reduced a colleague to tears in front of a full orchestra. Hypocritical, maybe. Inconsistent: for sure. There are many, many sublime musicians who do not build their interpretations on cruelty, but ultimately it’s your call, and no one can force you on to their private high horse. The business of music, like all art, is damaged, contradictory and morally ambiguous. Of course it is: it’s human.