Bernard Haitink, conductor, 1929-2021

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink cut an enigmatic figure during a career spanning 65 years at the highest levels of music-making.

A household name for well over half a century, Haitink, who has died aged 92, strenuously avoided the limelight. He decried the recording industry’s excessive habit of recycling the same canonical masterpieces, yet he left a catalogue of over 450 releases — for the most part canonical masterpieces. As music director of London’s Royal Opera in the 1990s he effectively saved the institution when it was left homeless, rudderless and without political support. Yet he had little appetite for administrative wrangling and no aptitude for politics.

A man of few words, he preferred to be left with his fellow musicians to get on with the job. Yet what his job entailed (the transformation that occurs when one musician silently waves a stick at others) he professed not to understand. Conducting is a Mystery was the title of his book of reminiscences published in 2019, the year of his retirement.

Haitink’s stellar career did not have propitious beginnings. His aspirations were dismissed early on the grounds that he had “no talent”, and his first orchestral job came, after studying violin at the Amsterdam conservatoire, when he scraped into the “back desk of the third violins” of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. But after shining during a conducting course, the orchestra appointed him conductor in 1954.

In 1957, he stepped in to replace Carlo Maria Giulini to direct the Concertgebouw Orchestra, returning for seven concerts the next season. Following the death of the orchestra’s chief conductor Eduard van Beinum, Haitink succeeded him, and retained the post until 1988.

His international career flourished too, particularly in Britain as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic from 1967-1979, and then as music director of Glyndebourne and Covent Garden. In later years, he remained sought after by numerous orchestras, among them the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, prized for his ability to bring out the best from his colleagues without words or grand gestures.

He led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra many times, becoming their principal conductor in 2006, but confessed himself ill at ease with the cult of the charismatic maestro he felt characterised American musical life. “I’m not a conductor type,” he told The New York Times in 1976.

Bernard Johan Herman Haitink was born in 1929 in Amsterdam to Willem, a civil servant, and Anna, who worked at the Alliance Française. His interest in music came from neither parent but from radio broadcasts. A shy schoolboy, he was mocked by his classmates for his passion for Bruckner. During the war, illicit broadcasts from the London Proms, which Haitink consumed avidly under the German occupation, offered a lifeline. Visits to the Concertgebouw crystallised his musical ambitions.

In Salzburg in 1947 he heard Wilhelm Furtwängler conduct Bruckner and Herbert von Karajan, Beethoven. The contrast between the natural authority of the former and the magnetism of the latter made a deep impression, as did meeting Adrian Boult, a hero from the Proms broadcasts, in 1948.

Yet perhaps the greatest influence on Haitink’s approach to musicianship was his early passion for orchestral scores, which he would take home and study with a rapt intensity and quasi-religious wonder that remained with him always. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he never thought of himself as interpreting music, or of wanting to do anything with it other than bring it to life. This could be frustrating for journalists, eager to identify the ideas which made Haitink unique, but was inspiring for players and for his many masterclass students. “Don’t think too much,” he told one. “Thinking is dangerous.”

He did think, of course, and read widely, with a boundless intellectual curiosity, focused on the attempt to discover each of the threads which held the music together. His performances changed a little with each orchestra, as well as over time, but were always characterised by a sense of unquestionable rightness. Listening to Haitink one always felt, “yes, this is how it goes”.

His repertoire was perhaps somewhat narrow, but he knew exactly what he wanted, when to hold back, when to let go, and when simply to leave it to the players, whose devotion to him reflected his faith in them. As his fellow conductor Simon Rattle put it, with Haitink the “normal problems of ensemble or balance simply vanish. If we can’t play well under Bernard, it’s time to take up another profession.”