Duluth Superior Magazine / February 2012 / Speak Brashly and Carry a Little Stick

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Speak Brashly and Carry a Little Stick

After much discussion amongst the principals, it has become obvious to us here at the Maestro’s Musings offices that we would fail this issue on healthy living should we not offer a column about the health benefits of a career as a symphony conductor.

It is well known that symphony conductors enjoy a particularly elevated longevity, among the highest of professionals in any career. Consider Leopold Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra maestro immortalized in the movie Fantasia, who died at the age of 95; Arturo Toscanini, legendary conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony who lived a robust 89 years; or Pierre Monteux, who led the infamous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, 90 years. Bruno Walter, protégé of Gustav Mahler, lived 85 years, as did the great Richard Strauss. Toscanini’s co-music director in New York, Willem Mengelberg, lived 80 years; Eugene Ormandy, Stokowski’s successor in Philadelphia, 85 years; the renowned choral conductor Robert Shaw, 82. Still active: Kurt Masur (84), Bernard Haitink (81), Colin Davis (84), and Pierre Boulez (86). Otto-Werner Mueller, conductor at the Curtis Institute, is still kicking at 85, and Gustav Meier, with whom I share the conducting teaching at the Peabody Conservatory, is going strong at 82.

“Why so?” as my late mentor Sergiu Celibidache (84) used to ask. First, there’s the accident of nature that the body generally deteriorates favorably, leaving the arms mobile and the brain intact as the rest resolutely goes the way of all flesh. Then there are the aerobic workouts, as much as 20 hours per week. Think it’s not taxing for us up on the podium? Ask first-desk players the world over, who are ever-vigilant against flying perspiration.

Finally, there’s the unlimited possibility exercising an acerbic wit, especially toward colleagues. Fritz Reiner (75 years) was famous for a minuscule beat; as the story goes, he responded to a bass player’s mocking use of binoculars by holding up a note: “You’re Fired” (thus missing a promising TV career by some fifty years). Or there’s Britain’s Thomas Beecham (81 years): “Why do we employ so many third-rate foreign conductors in this country when there are so many second-rate English ones to choose from!” Or the Hungarian Georg Solti (84), a newly minted British citizen, to a London orchestra following a heated argument with a Hungarian soprano, “Bloody foreigners!” Or the curmudgeonly Celibidache, who headed the Berlin Philharmonic before abdicating to Herbert Karajan (a Nazi party member who died at 81) “Karajan enthuses (begeistert) the masses…so does Coca Cola.” Or about André Cluytens, “It’s a good thing he made recordings, so the world can know just how bad a conductor he was.” Or about Ormandy, “Is he still alive? Because when I heard him in London in 1948 he was quite dead.” Ouch.

So the recipe for a long life? Aerobic exercise, and the ability to trash talk with impunity.