You might think that a composer conducting his own work would have a unique authority. Far from it. Where there's an established classic score, everyone involved implicitly acknowledges the fact and quietly gets down to the job of playing it as well as possible. But when a composer is conducting his own composition, he must always be afraid that the musicians are thinking "Well, if you can't make it sound any better than this, why don't you change it?" And so it appears here.
Scherchen, who had less than a major reputation, had made his orchestral version of Bach's last major work after playing two other versions for orchestra and finding them unsatisfactory. He then spent the last 12 years of his life performing his creation with whoever was willing play it.
In the rehearsal seen here the musicians are clearly skeptical, and Scherchen finally blows his top when someone lights up during a break. A personal insult, he declares, of which he'd never seen the like in an orchestra before! It's not as bad as Toscannini's outburst on the CD of rehearsals of Verdi's Falstaff, but in both cases it's the result of artistic work proving problematic, and the tension this produces. It's made the more embarrassing here because Scherchen clearly doesn't know the English word "smoke" and keeps using the French "fume" instead.
Everything flows smoothly by the end, however, with the caption "The fugue is unfinished but these are the last bars Bach ever wrote" scrolling up the screen as the music fades.
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