Conflicted....

Lorin Maazel (1930-2014)

As conflicted as I am about the happenings at the Metropolitan Opera (I really don't think that stage hands should earn $400K/year) or the state of our art in general, a big recent happening has me more so.  No sooner had I read Norman Lebrecht's column regarding the improvement in the health of conductor Lorin Maazel and his continuing work at his summer festival at Castleton, VA, was his death announced throughout worldwide media.  The maestro had been absent from concert stages for many months, having been recovering from surgery.  The cause of death has been listed as "complications from pneumonia."  Regardless of the cause, Mr. Maazel, who died at 84, had lived a long and highly productive life.

He was a performing and conducting wunderkind, having led a broadcast concert when he was eight years old (that's right-8!).  He was the first American (and Jewish no less) to lead a performance at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.  He would go on to lead three major American orchestras: Cleveland (replacing George Szell, 1972-82), Pittsburgh (1986-96), and New York (2002-09).  He also served a short stint as Music Director of the Vienna State Opera, and also with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Munich Philharmonic.

Maazel was renowned for his amazing memory, capable of leading Lulu without a score and, particularly his remarkable efficiency in rehearsal.  But his performances never seemed to add up to a body of work to place him in the pantheon of first-rate conductors.  Mr. Lebrecht wrote in today's Slipped Disc blog:

Lorin belonged everywhere and nowhere. He was never embraced as an American marvel, as Bernstein and Previn were, nor was he ever allowed to feel wholly at home in Berlin, Vienna or Munich, his three European bases. In Vienna, he faced an onslaught of xenophobia that was part anti-American, part anti-semitic. Lorin never acknowledged these currents (to me), but his isolation was, in 1984 Vienna, absolute.  Munich may have been a little warmer, Berlin a little worse.  After being voted down by the players as Karajan’s successor, he swore he would never conduct the (Berlin) Philharmonic again. He relented, once. It went badly and he vanished again.

My own personal experience with Maazel came but once, as the mighty Clevelanders visited East Lansing, Michigan (and that horrible 3600-seat monstrosity) while on tour in early May, 1976.  A student friend had called me and said she could get discounted student tickets but wanted to know if the orchestra was any good....I had to laugh.  We managed tenth row, center.  Fabulous seats even in that behemoth.

The Philadelphia Orchestra at Hill Auditorium
University of Michigan, May 1974

For many years I'd forgotten the program and one day it suddenly came back to me.  Only two works were performed, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and the Seventh of Dvorak (I'm quite sure).  Of course, the orchestra played well; the many years under Szell had turned it into an almost unparalleled virtuoso machine.  And that's what it seemed to be to me--a machine.  I left the concert feeling more than a bit cold and under the impression that I'd witnessed a concert that was just going through the motions.  Of course my memory has to be tempered by the fact that I heard the Philly Orchestra in the same hall at the end of that month, a concert that closed with Mahler's First, my introduction to that composer.  A fair comparison?  Probably not, but those are the facts.

Through his tenure in New York, Maazel was viewed as a conductor capable of brilliance and outright mediocrity.  Perhaps his great mind just sometimes got in the way.  Needless to say, I have to (unfortunately) admit that I'd caught him on a bad day.