Lorin Maazel, a former child prodigy who went on to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and several other ensembles and companies around the world, and who was known for his incisive and sometimes extreme interpretations, died on Sunday at his home in Castleton, Va. He was 84.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jenny Lawhorn, a spokeswoman for Mr. Maazel. In recent days, he had been rehearsing for the Castleton Festival, which takes place on his farm.
Mr. Maazel (pronounced mah-ZELL) was a study in contradictions, and he evoked strong feelings, favorable and otherwise, from musicians, administrators, critics and audiences.
He projected an image of an analytical intellectual — he had studied mathematics and philosophy in college, was fluent in six languages (French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, as well as English) and kept up with many subjects outside music — and his performances could seem coolly fastidious and emotionally distant. Yet such performances were regularly offset by others that were fiery and intensely personalized.
A Life on the Podium
CreditRuby Washington/The New York Times
He was revered for the precision of his baton technique, and for his prodigious memory — he rarely used a score in performances — but when he was at his most interpretively idiosyncratic, he used his powers to distend phrases and reconfigure familiar balances in the service of an unusual inner vision.
“He is clearly a brilliant man,” John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1979, “perhaps too brilliant to rest content with endless re-creations of the standard repertory. He is also, it would seem, a coldly defensive man, and perhaps that coldness coats his work with a layer of ice.
“The only trouble with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t take all the facts into account. Mr. Maazel, when he’s ‘on,’ has led some of the finest, most impassioned, most insightful performances in memory. When he’s good, he’s so good that he simply has to be counted among the great conductors of the day. Yet, enigmatically, it’s extremely difficult to predict just when he is going to be good or in what repertory.”
A Boy With a Baton
Perhaps because he grew up in the limelight, conducting orchestras from the age of 9, Mr. Maazel was self-assured, headstrong, and sometimes arrogant: When he took a new directorship, he often announced what he planned to change and why his approach was superior to what had come before. He knew what he wanted and how to get it, and if he encountered an immovable obstacle, he would walk away, also with a public explanation.
That was how he handled his brief term as general manager and artistic director at the Vienna State Opera, where he was the first American to wield such power.
“I am keen that this house again be led in the fashion of Mahler and Strauss,” he said at a news conference when his appointment was announced. “I have the full responsibility for the opera, and I have no intention of sharing that responsibility, though I may delegate it.” He added, “I will not hesitate to make changes, if I consider them necessary.”
He quickly transformed the house from a repertory company, where a different work was staged every night, to what he called a “block” system, in which groups of operas were played, with frequent repeats. He regarded this as more efficient and likely to produce better performances.
When the Viennese culture minister differed, and also complained about Mr. Maazel’s casting choices and argued that he was mainly interested in burnishing his own artistic profile, Mr. Maazel abruptly resigned, two years into a four-year term, and wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, deploring interference in the arts by government officials with no artistic background. (In September 2013, the company erected a bust of Mr. Maazel, by the sculptor Helmut Millionig. Mr. Maazel attended the unveiling ceremony.)
His tenures with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic had their rough moments, too. The Cleveland musicians voted against hiring him to succeed the legendary George Szell, who had died in 1970, because they did not consider him sufficiently accomplished to fill Szell’s shoes. Mr. Maazel told The Times in 2002 that “the relationship remained more or less rocky to the end.”
In New York, Mr. Maazel quickly won over the Philharmonic musicians. But several critics, while happy that the orchestra had engaged an American music director for the first time since Leonard Bernstein gave up its podium in 1969, were disappointed that Mr. Maazel, 70 at the time, was of the same generation as his predecessor, Kurt Masur (then 73), and that his tastes in contemporary music seemed conservative. Eventually, many of them came to admire him.
Alan Gilbert, Mr. Maazel’s successor as music director of the Philharmonic, said Sunday, “Personally, I am grateful to him, not only for the brilliant state of the orchestra that I inherited from him, but for the support and encouragement he extended to me when I took over his responsibilities.”
Lorin Varencove Maazel was born in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on March 6, 1930, to a pair of American music students — Lincoln Maazel, a singer, and Marie Varencove Maazel, a pianist — who were studying there. He showed an aptitude for music early: When he was 5, by which time the family had moved to Los Angeles, he began studying the piano; at 7, he took up the violin.
One piece in his piano repertory was a reduction of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, and when he was 8, his father gave him a copy of the full orchestral score. Lorin studied it, along with a recording his father also bought him, and when he conducted a family ensemble in the work, his parents noted that he was adept at cues and balances. They took him to study with Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, then an associate conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
When Mr. Bakaleinikoff took a conducting job in Pittsburgh, the Maazels followed. They also sent young Lorin to music camp at Interlochen, Mich.
Olin Downes, a music critic for The Times, happened to be visiting the camp when Lorin, then 9, led the camp’s orchestra in a movement from Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. Mr. Downes, though generally skeptical of prodigies, wrote that the boy conducted “with a beat clean and firm, yet elastic and with a consistency of tempo that very occasionally was modified by a nuance absolutely in place and appropriate as it was employed.”
Toscanini and Lollipops
That summer, the Interlochen orchestra performed at the World’s Fair in New York, and Lorin conducted it twice. In 1940, just before his 10th birthday, he conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony as well, and when he was 11, in July 1941, Arturo Toscanini invited him to conduct the NBC Symphony in a concert — works by Wagner, Mendelssohn and Dika Newlin — broadcast nationally from Radio City Music Hall. The orchestra, outraged at the idea of being led by a child, greeted him at the first rehearsal with lollipops in their mouths. He won their respect the first time he stopped the rehearsal to point out a wrong note.
In the summer of 1942, and again in 1944, he led the New York Philharmonic in performances at Lewisohn Stadium. But when he turned 15, he put his baton aside and settled into his academic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
He did not abandon music entirely. In 1946, he organized the Fine Arts Quartet of Pittsburgh, with which he was a violinist until 1950, and in 1948, he joined the violin section of the Pittsburgh Symphony. An invitation from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in the summer of 1951 brought him back to the podium just before he headed off to Rome, on a Fulbright fellowship, to study Renaissance Italian music.
Mr. Maazel dated the start of his mature career to Christmas Eve 1953, when, still a student in Rome, he was invited to step in for an ailing conductor at the Teatro Bellini, in Catania. His success there led to engagements in Naples, Florence and elsewhere in Europe, and then in Japan, Australia and Latin America.
By 1960, he had conducted about 300 concerts with more than 20 European orchestras, and was sufficiently well regarded to win an invitation to conduct “Lohengrin” at Bayreuth, the German shrine that Wagner built to himself and his music. At 30, he was the youngest conductor, as well as the first American, to work there.
He was, however, virtually unknown (as an adult) in the United States. But in October 1962, he toured the country with the Orchestre Nationale de France, a Parisian radio orchestra with which he would enjoy a long relationship (he was music director from 1977 to 1991), and appeared as a guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic and at the Metropolitan Opera, where he led “Don Giovanni” and “Der Rosenkavalier.”
By the mid-1960s, he was also making recordings for two of Europe’s most prestigious labels, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. He eventually recorded for other labels as well, among them RCA Red Seal, CBS (later Sony Classical) and Erato.
Among the highlights of his discography are recordings he made for the film versions of “Don Giovanni” (directed by Joseph Losey) and “Carmen” (Francesco Rossi), as well as his cycles of the Beethoven, Mahler and Sibelius symphonies.
An Old-Fashioned Approach
Mr. Maazel’s first music directorship was that of the Deutsche Opera, in West Berlin, jointly with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1965 until 1971, when he accepted the directorship of the Cleveland Orchestra, to begin in 1972.
In Cleveland, as in Berlin, Mr. Maazel took an old-fashioned approach to the job. Instead of conducting barely more than a dozen weeks of concerts and leaving the rest to guests, as was becoming the norm, Mr. Maazel spent most of his year in Cleveland. He recorded plentifully with the orchestra, and toured with it frequently. He gave up the directorship, becoming conductor emeritus, in 1982, the year he became general manager of the Vienna State Opera.
When the Vienna directorship went sour, in 1984, Mr. Maazel declared himself liberated, free to return to the far-flung guest conducting of his early years.
“I worked as a music administrator as well as a conductor of 20 years,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “and during that time, I devoted almost all my attention to the organizations I was working for — six years in Berlin, 10 in Cleveland, three in Vienna. I’ve conducted 132 orchestras, but in the last 20 years, I’ve not conducted more than seven or eight of them. So I’m having a lot of fun going around the world now, meeting people who’ve gotten to know me through records and television. I’m like a child let out of school.”
He could not, however, resist the siren song of another directorship. In 1984, he agreed to become a music consultant to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. A year later, the orchestra upgraded his title to music adviser and principal guest conductor, and in 1988, he became its music director. By the time he relinquished the post, in 1996, he had upgraded its performance standards, taken it around the world, and won a Grammy with the orchestra for a recording of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev works with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Even so, he maintained his freelance career, and was given to occasional spectacles, like the 1988 marathon in London, when he conducted all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single 10-and-a-half-hour concert. He repeated the feat in Tokyo at the end of 2010.
In 1989, he was on a short list of candidates to succeed Herbert von Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic. When Claudio Abbado was chosen instead, Mr. Maazel insisted that he never had any intention of leaving his Pittsburgh orchestra, and canceled his Berlin dates — not, he said, in a fit of pique, but so that Mr. Abbado would have more time to whip the orchestra into shape.
He took over the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in 1991, at a salary reported to be around $3.8 million, at that point the highest paid to any conductor anywhere, and held its directorship until 2002, when he took over the New York Philharmonic.
(He gave the Philharmonic a price break: When he left that position, in 2009, his salary was reported as $3.3 million.)
In the 1990s, Mr. Maazel revived an interest in composing that had gripped him briefly in his youth, and which he explored rarely as an adult, apart from performing a short waltz in Cleveland in 1980, and his 70-minute orchestra-only reduction of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.
He took up a series of concerto commissions, writing “Music for Violoncello and Orchestra” for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1994; “Music for Flute and Orchestra” for James Galway, in 1995; and “Music for Violin and Orchestra,” in which he was the violin soloist, in 1997. He also set to work on an opera, “1984,” based on the Orwell book, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan. It had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2005, and was revived at La Scala, in Milan, in 2008.
Mr. Maazel celebrated his 70th birthday with a world tour in which he revisited many of the orchestras he had conducted over the decades. One stop was at the New York Philharmonic, which was negotiating with several conductors to succeed Mr. Masur as music director. Mr. Maazel threw his hat in the ring, and within a few weeks, he captured the post.
Among his accomplishments at the Philharmonic were the premieres of several major works, including John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls” and scores by Poul Ruders, Melinda Wagner and Aaron Jay Kernis, and taking the orchestra to Pyongyang, North Korea.
When the plan to visit Pyongyang drew protests from those who objected to his performing for a brutal regime, Mr. Maazel wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the visit was about “bringing peoples and their cultures together on common ground, where the roots of peaceful interchange can imperceptibly but irrevocably take hold.”
After he left the Philharmonic in 2009, Mr. Maazel set up the Castleton Festival, for classical music and opera, on the grounds of his farm in Virginia. He founded and directed the festival jointly with his wife, the German actress Dietlinde Turban Maazel, whom he married in 1986. Two previous marriages — to the composer Mimi Sandbank and the pianist Israela Margalit — ended in divorce.
His wife survives him, as do their two sons, Leslie and Orson Maazel, and daughter, Tara Maazel; and three daughters — Anjali Maazel, Daria Steketee and Fiona Maazel — and a son, Ilann Margalit Maazel, from his previous marriages.
Mr. Maazel’s life as a festival director did not diminish his wanderlust. He became music director of the Munich Philharmonic in 2010. And in a blog on his website, he noted that in 2013 — he was 83 — he conducted 102 concerts, performing 72 compositions in 28 cities in 16 countries. He added that he was looking forward to getting back in harness.
“Curiously, for someone who has a fairly good reputation for stick technique,” he told a reporter for The Times in 2002, “I don’t recognize stick technique per se. I don’t think I ever make the same motion twice in the same bar of music. The aim is to find a motion that responds to the need of a particular player at a particular moment. The player must be put at ease, so that he knows where he is and what is expected, and is free to concentrate on beauty of tone. There is no magic involved.”
