Practically everyone who has recently visited the accessible cities of Asia has noticed that the local popular songs tend to resemble American or European musical-show tunes. If he digs a little deeper, he comes across an even more striking phenomenon. Western-style symphony orchestras flourish in an astonishing number of cities in Asia. Japan has seventeen of them—six in Tokyo alone—and the Tokyo building code demands that all new office buildings include an auditorium where the employees of the various tenants can hear Western music. Of all the examples of the love of Beethoven and Mozart in the Orient, this is the most impressive, but Korea has five symphony orchestras, and China, until recent developments under Mao, had several, too. India has, with one or two short-lived exceptions, held out against this Western cultural invasion, possibly because India has a music of her own that can compete with that of the West. As a corollary to the invasion of Asia by Western music, there has been an invasion of the West by Asian musicians who perform Western music or study in Western conservatories. The concertmaster of the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin is Japanese. The conductor of the Toronto Symphony is also a Japanese—the very gifted Seiji Ozawa. The Chinese basso Yi-Kwei Sze is known and admired in concert halls throughout America. Everybody in the little world of violins and violinists has heard of the phenomenal Japanese violin teacher Shinichi Suzuki. Toshiro Mayuzumi has composed music for the New York City Ballet. Soong Fu-yuan and Chow-wen Chung are composers of some ability practicing in New York. The violinist Ma Szu-tsung recently escaped from Communist China under widely publicized circumstances. The list is almost inexhaustible.
The best known and most impressive of all these Oriental figures at the moment is the young conductor Zubin Mehta, who, paradoxically, comes from India. Mehta is not a Hindu, Sikh, Jain, or Muslim but a Parsi—that is to say, a member of that small sect (now numbering a hundred thousand or so) that left Persia in the latter half of the eighth century and eventually settled in Bombay, where it began to take a prominent place in Indian intellectual, legal, financial, and industrial affairs. As a Parsi, Mehta is a Zoroastrian by religion, and although he does not practice his religion with any particular dedication (there are not many Zoroastrian fire temples outside of Bombay), he retains something of the Parsi outlook. Like most Parsis, he is a man of the world, bourgeois by upbringing, progressive and liberal in politics, and international in his interests. After studying several branches of music, including conducting, in Vienna, he conducted orchestras all over Europe for a time, often as a last-minute substitute for older conductors. His real rise to eminence started as recently as 1961. In January of that year, he was appointed musical director of the Montreal Symphony, and in November he was made director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thus becoming the first man in North American musical history to boss two symphony orchestras simultaneously. A little later, he added a conductorship at the Metropolitan Opera to this already remarkable schedule, and he also managed to continue a considerable number of summer guest appearances with European orchestras. This was made possible by air travel; for the past several winters, Mehta has been literally commuting between Los Angeles, New York, and—until last May, when he resigned his post for simple lack of time—Montreal, often rehearsing and performing in at least two of these places during a single week.
Obviously, this busy schedule bespeaks an artist whose services are much in demand. Mehta is just thirty-one years old, but in the opinion of many he already stands at the very top of his calling. Some of the professional opinion is extravagant indeed. Josef Krips, now conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, once said of him, “The next Toscanini has been born!” Charles Munch, of the Boston Symphony, remarked after hearing him, “The torch has been relit!”—meaning, of course, more or less the same thing. “I can speak of him only in superlatives,” the eminent cellist Gregor Piatigorsky recently remarked in an interview, and the distinguished Soviet conductor Kiril Kondrashin has described Mehta as “probably the best conductor alive today.” As for the public, it has responded with even greater fervor. When he took the Montreal Symphony to Vienna a few years ago, the applause was interspersed with cries of “Furtwängler!,” which is a sacred name to Viennese. In Los Angeles, he is deified—no other word quite serves. In the second-floor lounge of the bright new Los Angeles Music Center, a larger than life-size portrait of him hangs in a dominating position, and the ushers in the auditorium wear Oriental, if not authentically Indian, costumes. After every concert, the stage entrance of the Music Center is thronged with adoring women; Martin Bernheimer, the critic of the Los Angeles Times, who occasionally thinks that all this glamour is too much of a good thing, has said, “Whenever I criticize him in print, I am inundated with letters from angry women.” For some time, Bernheimer has undertaken to serve as the loyal opposition. “He certainly has no ego trouble,” he once said. “But he has vitalized the scene in Los Angeles. He is a romantic personality, attracting people who would not otherwise go to music.” Bernheimer’s is a voice crying in a wilderness of unrestrained adulation. He believes that somebody ought to put the brakes on, and perhaps he has a point.
The focus of all this attention is a handsome, dark, muscular, middle-sized man with aquiline features and an aspect of authority that is rare in anyone his age. To audiences, he is the ideal conductor, combining the supposed mystery of the Orient with a Byronic air suggesting the dedicated hero. Women have referred to his “brutal charm,” his “hot eyes,” and “that doomed look of his.” He has often been compared in appearance with gods of the Hindu pantheon, particularly with Siva, the destroyer, and Indra, hurling the thunderbolt. Mehta rarely indulges in dramatics or acrobatics on the podium. He has a way of looking sufficiently dramatic while standing still, and any vigorous gestures or faces that he makes either are obviously unconscious or are carefully intended to have a specific effect on the orchestra. He has a natural dignity of the sort that one usually sees only in successful people of middle age.
The impression that Mehta makes on the orchestras he conducts is somewhat different from the one his audiences receive. In rehearsal, he is all modesty and affability. He knows he is younger than most of the musicians he is dealing with, and he is respectful of their accomplishments. He also manages to establish a spirit of camaraderie with his musicians, acting as though the attainment of a fine performance were in every way a joint effort, in which the contribution of the third bassoon player was nearly as important as his own. He almost never loses his temper. To restore order, he sometimes has recourse to gentle sarcasm (“Just one moment, please. Are you having fun? Thank you”), and often a mere glance will do the trick. Nothing could be further from the browbeating of the old-fashioned, terror-inspiring maestro. If he makes a mistake, he is quite frank about it, and he never tries to bluff experienced musicians with an unwarranted show of authority. At the same time, by some mysterious force of personality, he manages to keep discipline at a high level. Musicians play well for him because they like him. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is reported to be one of the happiest orchestras in the country. At the Metropolitan, after a recent performance of “Turandot,” he approached some of the musicians who were standing around backstage and asked simply, “How did I do?” The Metropolitan’s orchestra is loud in its praise of him. “This guy is the greatest,” a clarinettist remarked the other day. “He has the God-given talent for the beat. He has an ear. You can’t fool him.”
The God-given talent for the beat is indispensable for any conductor who expects to rise to prominence. It can’t be acquired. One is born with it or without it. Essentially, it is the ability to convey musical ideas in depth by means of gesture. It involves a continuous process of forestalling probable unwanted results and encouraging wanted ones. It also involves an intuitive knowledge of exactly how musicians will react to a given stimulus from the baton. Nobody has yet succeeded in analyzing it. It has nothing to do with the mechanical strokes of the baton; it is something superimposed upon them. It can express excitement, majestic power, serenity, scrupulous care, and many notions that lie beyond or between these things. It is—to use a fashionable word—the charisma of the conductor. Record-company advertisements that have tried to catch it in photographs usually make the maestro look like a man in a state of gibbering hysteria, and much of the public, as a result, has come to think of a symphonic performance as resembling a sort of public childbirth. And there are conductors who play up to this expectation by agonizing appropriately. Actually, however, such public frenzy has little or no effect on an orchestra. The true charisma is less theatrical, more subtle, and more interesting. A great deal of it has to do with extreme sensitivity to other people’s states of mind, and some of it has to do with the simple quality of leadership—a quality that is possessed by corporation executives, dictators, and combat lieutenants as well as by conductors.
Mehta has this talent. And he is so sure of it that he can use it playfully as well as in dead earnest. Some time ago, at the Metropolitan Opera House, he was presiding over a rehearsal of the first act of “Otello.” He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, which, with a pair of light-gray pants, is his customary rehearsal uniform. The Olympian manner that often characterizes his public performances was entirely absent. His gestures were conventional enough, except for a sort of underhand rapier-stab motion, which turned out to be a signal for a special effect he wanted. His left hand was always independent of his right except in powerful passages where the whole orchestra was involved; occasionally he would flap both hands downward in a motion that, combined with his dark, aquiline face, made him look like a vulture. Often, in fact, when things were going smoothly and no beat was needed, Mehta would merely hunch his shoulders into a shrug and stop conducting altogether. To attract more than usual attention, he had a habit of throwing his arms wide, like a man experiencing a sudden revelation. The rehearsal proceeded with dispatch and efficiency, but he was continually making little bargains and issuing little bribes. Once, for instance, he promised that if the men played a certain passage the way he wanted it he would let them off early. (He kept his promise.) He often explained things: “You know why? I want it to sound smooth. Arrange it so that it is up-bow?” The last phrase was accompanied by a shrug; Mehta takes the curse off commands by such shrugs, as if to say, “Why not do it my way? Nobody is going to lose anything by it.” At one point, he said, “If it’s good, I’ll say ‘Bravo!’ ” The passage was played, and he forgot to say “Bravo!” Immediately, a clamor arose from the orchestra. “O.K.—bravo!” Mehta responded. If, as happened once or twice, some players were late with an entrance, one eyebrow would go up on Mehta’s hawklike countenance. At another point, he said, “The trumpets are—”
The players in question interrupted him. “The cornets,” they corrected.
“All right,” Mehta replied. “The cornets are late.”
This was a highly technical point. Many of Verdi’s scores, including “Otello,” have cornet instead of trumpet parts, but nowadays these parts are practically always played on trumpets. Later, after a particularly satisfactory passage, he said, shrugging again, “If you play it this way, it becomes a memory; otherwise it is just ‘tak-tak.’ ”
As Mehta came to the end of the first act, where the score dies away in a couple of notes on the harp, he was particular about getting them absolutely precise. The last one, as everybody knew, is invariably drowned out by applause during an actual performance, but Mehta seemed anxious to savor it. “This I have never heard,” he explained. “Only at rehearsals.” He did not say whose rehearsals. Certainly they were not his own, because he was conducting “Otello” for the first time in his life.
Mehta is capable of humor—sometimes of real wit—but he does not laugh himself. He watches for the reactions of others, maintaining an Oriental imperturbability of manner. The effect is to secure absolute decorum while, underneath the decorum, everybody is aware of a current of playfulness. He is the only conductor at the Metropolitan for whom the orchestra musicians spontaneously express not merely respect but affection. His youth makes him seem like a precocious child to the older musicians, and he goes out of his way to make them feel that he is one of them. Only a slight suggestion of instinctive aloofness—what has been described as his natural hauteur—prevents them from taking advantage of his good nature. When he finishes a rehearsal, he looks exhausted. His hair stands out at all angles, and finally he resembles the ads of the record companies.
During performances, Mehta exhibits two gifts that are uncommon in his profession—or uncommon to the degree that he possesses them. One is the ability to generate excitement in both orchestra and audience. The other is the even rarer ability to induce a mood
of relaxation in which music can be performed with serene nobility. The latter gift makes him one of the very few young conductors before the public today who can come to terms with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. He also has an extremely sensitive ear for melodic line and form, and an ability to draw a light, singing tone from an orchestra. He is at all times poised, and he nearly always conducts from memory. Another of his gifts—remarkable in one who was born in the Orient—is a perfect understanding of the different styles of Western music. A friend of his, the London-based pianist Daniel Barenboim, recently recalled an occasion when he was soloist with Mehta in Montreal. The program opened with a Brahms concerto and closed with Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps,” and the following evening Mehta conducted an idiomatic Spanish-French performance of “Carmen.” Each performance was distinct in style and authentic, Barenboim says, and each reached the peak of excitement that Mehta nearly always manages to elicit from those working with him. He has not always had the finest people to work with, but he has an uncanny instinct for judging the quality of an orchestra or a chorus or a soloist and getting the maximum effect possible under the circumstances. A few years ago, he did the Brahms Requiem in Montreal. The chorus was amateur and not very experienced, but by the time Mehta was through with it, it was singing far above its ordinary standard and doing Brahms entire justice.
Part of Mehta’s ability to cope with such problems is his persuasiveness. All first-rate conductors are persuasive, but Mehta is more persuasive than most. With his simplicity and modesty of manner, he can talk anybody into almost anything. “When he wants something, God help you if you don’t give it to him,” Pierre Béique, the managing director of the Montreal Symphony, said the other day. “On the other hand, with Mehta, everybody has the right of appeal. He may say no at first, and then, after a few days, come around to your point of view. Actually, he has great understanding of managerial and financial problems.” Béique, like nearly everybody else who has dealt with Mehta, feels that he can do no wrong. “He brought the Montreal Symphony from the status of a provincial orchestra to the position of a second-class international orchestra,” Béique said, with a certain modesty as well as a typically French observance of fine distinctions. “When he took the orchestra to Europe and played not only in Paris and in the Tchaikovsky Auditorium in Moscow but in the Grosse Musikvereinsaal in Vienna, where every great performer and conductor of the past had appeared, I was, frankly, quite apprehensive. But Zubin was absolutely cool about the whole thing, and we ended up a huge success.”
As a private person, Mehta is somewhat different from Mehta the conductor or Mehta the public idol. Despite his dark air of maturity, he is rather boyish. Like all successful conductors, he is basically an extrovert; perhaps the celebrated introspectiveness of the Indian mind does not apply to Parsis, or perhaps Mehta has become so completely Westernized in the thirteen years since he left India that there is no longer anything particularly Asian about him. (He has, however, refused to give up his Indian citizenship. “That would be worse than giving up my religion,” he says.) He is extremely practical, and well aware of the pitfalls and the advantages of his career, and he is remarkably sensitive to the currents of the world in which he moves. When he has the time, which is seldom, he likes to fence and play tennis. In Los Angeles, he drives a forest-green Jaguar at high speeds over the surrounding freeways, and he is regarded as something of a “swinger,” although he really hasn’t much time for swinging. The one day a week that he takes off from rehearsals and concerts he usually spends in his hotel room studying scores. He seldom reads a book. “Every time I start to read a book, I feel guilty because I am not studying a score,” he has said. He has had a wife—he married the Canadian singer Carmen Lasky in Vienna during his student days. The wedding took place in a Catholic church, but it had to be performed in the sacristy instead of before the altar “because,” he explained later, “they considered me a barbarian.” This marriage produced a charming boy and girl, who, Catholic wedding or no, were given resoundingly Parsi first names. The boy was named Merwan, which means “one who gives blessings” in Persian, and the girl was named Zarina, after Mehta’s younger brother, Zarin, whose name means “silver.” Mehta’s own first name, incidentally, means “powerful sword.” “In Arabic, though, ‘Zubin’ sounds like the word for ‘cheese,’ ” he has pointed out. “Nobody in the Near East dares to call me by my first name.” The name Mehta is ubiquitous in India (Zubin is no relation to Ved Mehta, the writer), and in the Bombay area it seems to flourish particularly among accountants. In fact, so many accountants are named Mehta that lots of Indians think the word means “accountant.” (It is a curious fact that although Parsis always have Persian first names, their last names are invariably indistinguishable from those of other Indians.) Three years ago, Mehta and his wife split up. He simply thinks that marriage is out of the question for anybody who leads the sort of life he does. Fortunately, things were resolved in a highly satisfactory manner. His brother Zarin married his former wife (“At first, my mother thought it was incest, but I explained it”), and they live in Montreal and take care of the children.
Mehta’s father, Mehli (a corruption of the name Merwan), a self-taught violinist and conductor, founded the Bombay Symphony in 1936 but later moved to England and then to Philadelphia (where he became a member of the Curtis String Quartet), and is now established with his wife, Tehmina (“sweet”), in Los Angeles, where he teaches and conducts at the University of California. He is about to become an American citizen. He is idolized by his son, who does not, however, live with his parents when he is in Los Angeles but takes a room in a hotel. He often goes to his parents’ home for dinner, however. Mrs. Mehta, a highly intelligent, warmhearted, and, in a quiet way, forceful woman who always dresses in Indian style, has been proclaimed by everyone who has visited her home to be one of the world’s truly great cooks, and she cooks something that is otherwise practically unobtainable in Los Angeles—authentic Indian food. Finding such cuisine is one of Zubin’s constant problems. He likes it the hotter the better. “Mehta eats food that would scorch the throats of ordinary people,” Jaye Rubanoff, the manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, says. “When he has to eat a steak, he drinks Tabasco sauce straight beforehand, just to warm his throat up.” In New York, where he has a choice of Indian restaurants, he goes to the Kashmir, on Forty-fifth Street, where his tastes are known. The proprietor, Peter Gomes (born in Calcutta, but into a family Christianized by Portuguese missionaries), not only feeds Mehta but keeps a collection of hot green Indian chilies on hand so that Mehta can drop in for supplies when in New York. He carries the chilies
around in his coat pocket in case of emergencies like having to eat steak or chops. Daniel Barenboim collects chilies in London for Mehta and sends them to him by mail. Jacqueline du Pré, the beautiful British cellist who married Barenboim a few months ago, used to frequent exotic marketplaces in London in order to collect chilies for Mehta. Aside from his taste for these blazing condiments, however, Mehta’s habits of eating and drinking are extremely reserved. He never touches alcohol, nor does he smoke. He never even drinks coffee or tea. A reporter recently entered his hotel room for an interview and found him breakfasting on a milkshake and two orders of ice cream. He is extremely finicky about his tailoring, and usually has a well- dressed appearance running to padded shoulders and a slimmed waist. His taste in New York leans toward light-gray suits that contrast admirably with his dark skin and hair; in California he is reported to dress more showily. Wherever he is, though, he wears next to his skin a Parsi sacred shirt, made of muslin, with a belt at the waist. There are some things about which he is rather careless. He is likely to keep money in bureau drawers or in paper bags, taking with him only a few bills in his trousers pocket. He has no manager and no secretary—not even a datebook to note down his engagements in. “I remember all my engagements in my head,” he said in a recent interview. “If I forget them, I call Barenboim in London. He has a marvellous memory.” This habit has now and then led to tardiness or total absence at least from rehearsals. The Metropolitan keeps an assistant conductor on hand in case Mehta fails to show up for a rehearsal, and its problems are exacerbated by the fact that Mehta is forever changing hotels (“because people pester me on the telephone”) and frequently neglects to inform the Metropolitan of his new whereabouts. Often, somebody in management, after frantic calls to a dozen hotels, finally hits on the right one, finds that he is out, and leaves a message. Afterward, Mehta turns up at the stage entrance with an air of combined innocence and lordliness, and inquires, “You tried to reach me?” Occasionally, the Metropolitan gets a telegram or a phone call to the effect that Mehta has just arrived in Montreal from London, or in Los Angeles from Montreal, and will get to the opera house just as soon as he can. The Metropolitan finds all this worth coping with because of what Mehta does when he finally arrives. Last March, he was able to inject a sort of excitement into Marvin David Levy’s opera “Mourning Becomes Electra” that spelled the difference between a moderate success and an utter failure. Despite all the pains he took, however, he didn’t really like the opera much. During one intermission, he overstayed his period in his dressing room, where visitors were paying him court. Several bells had rung, and finally a messenger arrived, saying, “Mr. Mehta, the audience is waiting; the curtain is about to go up.”
“Oh,” said Mehta languidly. “Is there another act?”
Being a much-travelled man, Mehta speaks an extraordinary number of languages, beginning with the Hindi and Gujarati of his native Bombay and going on to English, French, German, Italian, and some Spanish. Like many musicians, he is an accomplished mimic, and he can pick up a language, to a certain extent, just by listening to people on the street. This mimicry extends to idiomatic and slang expressions. When an American acquaintance remarked on Mehta’s ability to speak American English with complete facility, he replied, “Oh, I speak English English in England, Hochdeutsch in Berlin, and Austrian dialect in Austria.” Barenboim, who is an Israeli citizen of Argentine birth, remembers that when Mehta was conducting the Israeli Philharmonic a few years ago he learned a few words of Hebrew and then proceeded to act the role of an Israeli to perfection, with all the native mannerisms tacked on to his small vocabulary. “He acted more like an Israeli than I could,” Barenboim said. Pierre Béique recently recounted another example of Mehta’s sensitive ear for language. At a press conference, a rambunctious interviewer said, “Mr. Mehta, you are not being fair to Canadian music. Why don’t you play it more often?”
“Sir,” replied Mehta, “what business is it of yours? You are not a Canadian.”
He turned out to be right. The man was from the States.
Along with this multiplicity of languages, Mehta has acquired a firm set of prejudices and opinions about the people who speak them. “I like my own kind of people—Jews and Latins,” he remarked somewhat sweepingly the other day. “I like to have an immediate response.” He dislikes the English, partly because his family experienced some racial discrimination during their stay in England, and in spite of his familiarity with the Austrians during his student days or perhaps because of it he dislikes them, too, even though he still reveres Vienna as the center of the musical world. “The Viennese are false and intriguing,” he once said. “They are your friends, and yet they will cut your back. They are even your sincere friends, and they will still cut your back. They are more chauvinistic than the French, even. You cannot influence the Viennese. And yet from these people come the greatest scientists, musicians, and so forth.” He paused for a moment and then said, “The Russians are wonderful. They are so much like the Americans that it is uncanny. In one way, the Americans and the Austrians are alike, too. The Austrians are the melting pot of Europe—or were, during the empire. All kinds of people went there. But they cut their backs!” Mehta likes the Australians. “They are even more open and enthusiastic than the Russians and the Americans,” he says. But the New Zealanders stand at the bottom of his scale of approval. “No Italians! No Greeks! Only English and Dutch! New Zealand is living in the England of the last century. If you want to go out on Sunday, forget it! The food is awful. Lamb is a delicious meat if cooked well, but the New Zealanders ruin it. In New Zealand, you have to go out of town to find the Indians. They and the Maoris all live in suburban slums. I took the Israeli Philharmonic on tour there. We had to fill out forms that were insulting. There was a place marked ‘Race?’ The orchestra has a lot of Polish-Jewish violinists—the best violinists come from Poland. They filled in the question about race with ‘Human.’ ”
In regard to his own profession, Mehta has equally positive ideas. His favorite American orchestra is the Philadelphia, because its tone most nearly resembles that of the Vienna Philharmonic, which he considers ideal. He wants to create the Viennese sound wherever he goes. “I know that sound,” he said the other day, “and I know how to get it.” But he has been only partially successful. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is beginning to acquire it. At the Metropolitan, he is frustrated. “I try to get it, and I make a beginning. Then other conductors come in and the sound gets lost.” The sound is a rich, round, velvety one, according to Mehta; the orchestra should never play so loud that beauty of tone is sacrificed. Moreover, even in the loudest passages the attack should not be loud but only moderate, and then the tone should swell in power. Mehta once discussed this point in detail with an interviewer. Some conductors, including some of the most celebrated, like Toscanini and George Szell, he said, make an orchestra go “Pah!” “Pah!” is the effect of a lightning-like attack in response to the downbeat. But this is not Mehta’s aim. He wants to make an orchestra go “Vraah!”—starting with a moderate degree of force and then building up real power. “It goes well with Bruckner,” he remarked. “And it is the secret of the Vienna Philharmonic’s sound.” Mehta is probably the first young conductor hereabouts who has not been in any way affected by the Toscanini approach, although he respects Toscanini as a musician. In this departure, he may have some influence on American musicians of all kinds, who have been under the great maestro’s spell for at least a generation, and who, by imitating the superficial features of the Toscanini style—literal interpretation of the notes, unvarying and very fast tempos, surgical precision—have made a good deal of performance in America monotonous, exact, and somewhat dull. Of course, a conductor who can make an orchestra go “Vraah!” does not make it do so on every note. The effect is reserved for noble entrances of big themes and chords, and is largely restricted to nineteenth-century music. Mehta uses his rapier-stab motion to achieve this effect. When the orchestra sees it, certain things have to happen. The double basses, for one thing, have to attack a little ahead of the rest of the orchestra, because they “speak” more slowly than the other instruments. The orchestra as a whole attacks with a moderate degree of tone and immediately swells, and it must do so with a degree of unanimity that can be attained only by long practice. Certain German orchestras—the Berlin Philharmonic, for example—have a habit of attacking not when they see tha baton descend but a fraction of a second later. Their ensemble is perfect, nevertheless, and they can go “Vraah!” They usually drive “Pah!” conductors out of their wits. Even Mehta, who has conducted some of them, says that he gets pretty nervous after a downbeat, wondering whether anything is going to happen, but then the attack is made, usually with faultless precision. Mehta also firmly believes—and all musicians of two or three generations ago would agree with him—that a given composition need not sound exactly the same at each performance. A certain leeway in the interpretation of the symbols on the printed score allows for many versions of a work. And, indeed, up to very recent times composers themselves performed their music in this flexible manner, and expected others to follow their example. The method allowed for continual surprises, for the composition to be observed in different lights, and for occasional wonderfully inspired performances, which occurred on the spur of the moment.
In all these matters, Mehta’s model has been Toscanini’s great contemporary and rival Wilhelm Furtwängler. It is a curious thing that younger artists today should be reviving the Furtwängler style in opposition to the Toscanini style, but there is no doubt but this is what is happening. In Europe, and particularly in England, there is a whole school of younger artists who make collections of Furtwängler recordings, listen to them raptly, learn points of interpretation from them, and avidly discuss them. Hardly any of these artists are old enough to have heard Furtwängler perform, but they revere his style, and they strive to emulate it. Several of them are friends of Mehta’s—among them the pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, and Paul Badura-Skoda, the violinist Ivry Gitlis, and the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. These form a close-knit group. They admire each other, and though they are often on tour at opposite ends of the earth, they communicate almost daily by long-distance telephone. All of them take along portable phonographs on which to play Furtwängler records. Sometimes they even play passages to one another over the telephone and discuss them. “That’s where all our money goes,” Barenboim has said. Some of the recordings are standard issues, others are bootleg ones made in Russia from radio broadcasts during the Nazi regime and the war itself, and still others have been presented to the members of the group by Furtwängler’s widow. “It’s not a cult,” Mehta says. (Its members, though, are always referring to “the Toscanini cult.”) “It’s a clan. There is nothing unhealthy about it.”
Mehta does not believe, of course, in imitating any given Furtwängler interpretation; it is the general style that he admires. Like most of the group, he never heard Furtwängler conduct; he once had a ticket to a performance in Vienna (it was to have been of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), but before the concert could take place Furtwängler died. During his student days, Mehta came to know the members of the Vienna Philharmonic, which Furtwängler had frequently conducted, and he learned a great deal from them about the Furtwängler approach, which he has since attempted to transfer to both the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Mehta’s encounters with opera at the Metropolitan and elsewhere have been fairly recent, even in terms of his relatively short career. Opera interests him greatly. Bernheimer, the Los Angeles Times critic, has said, “If they’d buy him an opera company, he’d stay here forever.” But when Rudolf Bing—a man always hard up for distinguished conductors who can get along with him—called him to the Metropolitan in 1965, Mehta was not terribly experienced in the medium, and he was suddenly thrown into the hurly-burly that characterizes the Met without much knowledge of how it worked. His performances there have always ended up (after one or two preliminary ones) as exciting and profoundly musical experiences, but on the way to achieving them he has been faced with problems that would stagger a less self-assured personality. His first assignment was “Aida,” which he had already conducted once in Europe. At its first performance, after Franco Corelli had sung “Celeste Aida,” Mehta was much disturbed to see the famous tenor carrying on, right before the audience, what he apparently believed to be an inconspicuous conversation with the prompter. It turned out that Corelli was asking the prompter whether or not he had been on pitch; the answer was that his pitch was fine. Mehta had never even imagined a breach of discipline like this, and he went immediately to Bing and complained. Eventually, Bing managed to calm him down. Mehta was unaware that Corelli, following an old, lordly, and execrable Italian tradition, never even notices the conductor, whom he considers merely an accompanist to his gorgeous voice; his idea is that a great singer should look only at the prompter, and that the duty of the conductor is to follow him. This prima-donna tradition is not universal even in Italy, and conductors like Toscanini would never have stood for it, but Corelli is a great box-office draw and conscious of the antiquated prerogatives. So Bing has been forced to compromise and try to find conductors young enough, or eager enough, to put up with such affectations. Mehta is young enough, greatly talented, and, at the moment, not celebrated enough to demand absolute musical authority. He was gaining valuable experience at the Met, and so he gave in.
Some of the experience Mehta has been gaining has been pretty hair-raising. He has had to conduct operas he has never conducted before—or, in some cases, never even heard or seen—on the basis of the very few rehearsals that the Metropolitan provides. Yet by the second or third performance he generally manages to produce a stunning effect. At that first “Aida,” however, he gave a sturdy downbeat in the wrong place at one point. He was saved by the orchestra, which knew the score better than he did. It produced not a sound, and it is a tribute to its affection for Mehta that it did so; under most conductors it would have jumped at the chance to follow a wrong beat and make the man with the baton look ridiculous. The following year, when Mehta did his first “Turandot,” with Birgit Nilsson and Corelli, something happened that even the Met’s experienced orchestra could not cope with. Mehta, who was conducting the opera for the first time in his life, and with very little rehearsal, got out of step with Miss Nilsson during ten or twelve measures, producing a state of high confusion. To be sure, he recovered and got the orchestra back on the right track—which was no mean feat—but many auditors noticed the lapse, and Miss Nilsson, of course, was furious. To make things worse, Mehta, encountering Miss Nilsson backstage after the act, is reported to have said jocularly, “Of all people, I didn’t expect to have trouble with you.” He meant it ironically, but that was not how it sounded, and the prima donna was thrown into an even greater rage. Mehta took no bows before the curtain that night, and Miss Nilsson vowed that she would never sing with him again. Later, she relented—and, as usually happens, Mehta improved his reading from performance to performance until he finally produced a “Turandot” that few other contemporary conductors could equal. Again, the following spring Mehta took over the Met’s production of “Otello” with only a couple of orchestra rehearsals and one stage rehearsal. This, too, was an opera he had never conducted before, and he naturally made errors. One of the most noticeable was in the cello ensemble in the first act, just before the love scene between Otello and Desdemona. It is a simple passage, but it went all to pieces because Mehta had not determined whether it should be conducted in four or eight beats to the measure. As usual, by the time “Otello” reached its second or third performance that season it was accurate and full of the excitement and power that Mehta would have brought to the first performance if he had had adequate time to rehearse. The episode brought to light one of the Met’s great shortcomings. Most of the time, the men on its conductor’s podium are experienced practitioners who have conducted things hundreds of times and never get out of step. But one seldom hears conducting at the Met of the inspired calibre that Mehta eventually brings forth, provided he can use a few preliminary performances as rehearsals. He is now the golden-haired boy at the Metropolitan. He is assigned the most interesting new productions. He can get along with Mr. Bing. This season, he is in charge of the new production of “Carmen,” staged by Jean-Louis Barrault, which is opening this week. It is an opera that he is familiar with, and the results will probably be magnificent.
In Mehta’s case, the Metropolitan’s tolerances by a conductor is worth it. But it is an entirely new phenomenon—something that was unheard of a generation ago. Insufficient rehearsal is, of course, one cause. But there is another reason, too. The golden age of conducting that started with Arthur Nikisch and proceeded to Toscanini and Furtwängler is now largely a thing of the past. Most of its other great figures—Kleiber, Busch, Bodanzky, Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, Monteux, and Beecham among them—are dead. There are one or two—Stokowski and Klemperer—who still live on, as shadows. There is an intermediate generation of now elderly maestros, such as George Szell, Eugene Ormandy, and Sir John Barbirolli, who carry on the grand tradition, but they are fewer in number and, by general consensus, not quite as towering—with the possible exception of Szell—as the men of the golden age. Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan are the next international figures in line, along with some of the Russians like Kondrashin and Rozhdestvensky, who are not familiar enough in America to be thoroughly judged. The period of the Second World War was generally unproductive of impressive new conducting talent. As a consequence of all this, there is an enormous demand for conductors of any ability whatever, and the rapid proliferation of symphony orchestras, particularly in the United States, has increased this demand. The managers and the boards of directors of symphony orchestras are now focussing their attention on the very young, and the world is being scoured for talent. Forty years ago, it was unusual indeed for a man of less than fifty to be found in a prominent conducting post. Many years of experience in small opera houses and with provincial orchestras invariably preceded a top assignment, and when a conductor became the head of an internationally respected orchestra he usually had a very comprehensive repertoire and an absolute knowledge of every item in it. Today, the situation has changed, and many young and comparatively inexperienced conductors hold prime posts not only in America but in Europe, relying on talent rather than on long apprenticeship. This situation applies to Mehta only in part. It has made his emergence much easier than it would have been in the days of Toscanini, but his talent is such that he would have come to the surface sooner or later in any era. As Barenboim recently remarked, “Destiny, or God, or whatever you want to call it, has been kind to Zubin, but he was better prepared than most.”
Part of any young conductor’s most necessary equipment today is the capacity to assimilate new scores with great rapidity. His repertoire is small. He may find himself conducting almost any well-known classic for the first time in his life—and this with a highly professional orchestra before a knowing public. Mehta has confessed that nearly ninety per cent of the music he has presented with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony thus far was new territory for him. When one considers that this has involved studying three or four new scores every week, memorizing them, and seeing that they are lucidly performed by the orchestra, it is obvious that Mehta’s gifts are quite out of the ordinary. His generation of maestros will probably not reach full maturity for another ten or fifteen years, but he himself is already mature. He has rebuilt two symphony orchestras according to his own specifications, and he has improved the standard of symphonic playing wherever he has been installed as permanent conductor.
The odyssey of the Mehta family is one of the more remarkable episodes of recent musical history. Zubin’s father, Mehli Mehta, taught himself how to play the violin and began a one-man campaign to introduce Western music to Bombay. He organized the Bombay String Quartet and, finally, the Bombay Symphony, which he conducted during the last few years of its existence. In its early days, he was fortunate to get the services of many German-Jewish refugee musicians who had come to Bombay and added greatly to its musical life. Touring virtuosos—among them Yehudi Menuhin, Efrem Zimbalist, and Jan Kubelik—visited Bombay, and some of them played with the orchestra; Menuhin, in particular, became attached to the Mehta family. Like all the other Parsis in Bombay, the Mehtas were bourgeois, well educated, and more or less accustomed to the British colonial way of life. Music had not run in the family. Zubin’s paternal grandfather had been the manager of a textile mill, and his maternal grandfather had managed a group of mills belonging to the Parsi-directed Tata industrial empire. The family had a home on Cuffe Parade, in a distinctly middle-class district. As a child, Zubin used to listen to his father playing string quartets, and a portable phonograph he was given by a grandfather enabled him to hear a great deal of recorded music. His father taught him to play the violin, and he had some piano lessons, too. But his mother, having witnessed Mehli Mehta’s struggle to interest Bombay in Western music, was opposed to the idea of Zubin’s becoming a musician. “Trying to be a Western musician in India was too hard,” she said not long ago. “It’s all right for foreigners to make Western music in India, but not for Indians.” Accordingly, Zubin was sent to St. Xavier’s College, a Jesuit institution, to study for the more respected profession of medicine. He got through two semesters of pre-med, but when it came to laboratory dissection he rebelled. Soon he was studying harmony and counterpoint with one of the Jesuit fathers, who had once been a pupil of the Spanish composer Enrique Granados. Later, he assisted his father with the Bombay Symphony by conducting “sectional” rehearsals—that is to say, rehearsals of the first-violin or second-violin or viola sections individually—and once or twice he conducted rehearsals of the full orchestra. The heady thrill that comes from lowering a baton and having sixty or eighty musicians respond precisely had taken strong hold of Zubin, and now there was no question but that he was going to become a conductor.
Several things began happening in Bombay in the early fifties. The refugee musicians started to leave for more promising spots, such as Israel and the West. The British were leaving, too, and the financial backing of the orchestra was becoming shaky. Opportunities in India had never been great, and now they were dwindling. Under the prodding of Zubin’s mother, the family proceeded to get out of India in stages. Zubin was the first to leave, going to Vienna at the age of eighteen. He had heard that Vienna was the center of the musical world, and even today he maintains that “music means Austrian and German music,” adding, “There is where the center of town is. All the rest is the suburbs.” He was followed from India a few months later by his brother Zarin, who went to England and apprenticed himself to an accountant. Then, in 1955, the elder Mehtas uprooted themselves and followed Zarin to England. Mehli Mehta at first had a hard time in England. He finally managed to get a job with the Scottish National Orchestra, in Glasgow, where, because of racial prejudice, he and his wife could not rent a house or an apartment and had to live in cheap hotels. Then he went on to Manchester, where he played in Sir John Barbirolli’s famous Hallé Orchestra, eventually becoming assistant concertmaster. In 1959, the elder Mehtas moved to Philadelphia, where Mehli became, for a time, second violin with the Curtis String Quartet. By 1965, the elder Mehtas had settled permanently in southern California, and Zarin was a long-established citizen of Montreal.
Meanwhile, Zubin was studying composition and conducting at the Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, as the Vienna conservatory is called. He had thought of Vienna as a shrine and had not yet adopted his rather critical attitude toward the Viennese. His student days coincided with the peak years of von Karajan’s career, and he attended performances at the Grosse Musikvereinsaal and the Vienna State Opera practically every night, standing in the sections allotted to students. Vienna is a city that makes special arrangements for students, and Mehta lived adequately on about seventy-five dollars a month. He studied the double bass briefly, and, for a time, managed to make a little money by playing it in various theatres, churches, and open-air park orchestras, as well as in the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, a fairly respectable group. He was also learning a lot from his conducting teacher, Hans Swarowsky. Swarowsky is probably the world’s leading teacher of the art, and his methods are efficient, though peculiar. As Mehta explains it, Swarowsky made him keep his left hand in his pocket, tied his right sleeve to the top of a desk, and said, “Now conduct!” The only thing he could move was his right wrist, and he moved it—up, down, sidewise. The device had its points. The besetting sin of most younger conductors is flapping their arms in wide, vague motions, where a mere flick of the baton would do the trick. Swarowsky’s hobbling obviated this from the start. Later on, of course, larger gestures were permitted, but only where there was reason for them. Generally, Swarowsky taught the “Pah!,” or Toscanini, way of conducting, but his pupil was already studying the “Vraah!” methods of Furtwängler.
In the summer of 1956, while he was still a student at the Akademie, Mehta conducted in public in Europe for the first time, presiding over the orchestral part of a Mozart piano concerto at a concert arranged by the Akademie at Bad Aussee. Later that summer, when there was nothing much doing in Vienna, he went to Count Guido Chigi Saracini’s palace in Siena, where he came in contact with a cosmopolitan group of young musicians, including Barenboim, the conductor Claudio Abbado, and the guitarist John Williams. The Scarlatti Chamber Orchestra of Naples was in residence, and, with some additions in the wind section, it played Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony in the Palazzo Pubblicco under Mehta’s baton. Back in Vienna, while the Hungarian revolution was taking place, he organized and conducted a concert for Hungarian refugees near the border. In 1958, he went to Liverpool to take part in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s competition for conductors, where he won first prize. The Jeunesses Musicales, an organization that fosters the careers of young musicians in many countries, was invaluable to him at this point, and he jumped at every opportunity it offered. Under its auspices, he did a difficult program of works by Arnold Schoenberg in the sacred precincts of the Grosse Musikvereinsaal. Then it sent him as an exchange conductor to Belgium and Yugoslavia. Later, he went to Tanglewood, along with Abbado. At the Tanglewood conductors’ competition, he won second prize (Abbado took first), but he attracted the attention of Charles Munch, and this turned out to be very important.
In 1960, as Mehta recalled the other day, “the works started.” He conducted part of the subscription series of the Vienna Symphony, and he made a successful début with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Robin Hood Dell. “Immediately afterward,” he says, “I came to the Lewisohn Stadium to conduct three concerts with the New York Philharmonic, and did not get even one half-favorable review from the New York critics.” But better things were going on behind the scenes. Munch had spoken to Pierre Béique, of Montreal, and soon advised Mehta to go and see him. Igor Markevitch, the conductor of the Montreal Symphony, had resigned for reasons of health, and Béique arranged a two-week guest conductorship for Mehta. A couple of months later, he was given the directorship of the orchestra—his first big job. When his second season came around, he took the Montreal Symphony on a European tour with two carefully prepared programs. But even before this took place, a rumpus had occurred in Los Angeles that was to have another important effect on his career. In January of 1961, Mehta had appeared as a guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Philharmonic Hall, substituting for Fritz Reiner and Igor Markevitch, both of whom had become ill, and Mrs. Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of the owner of the Los Angeles Times and head of the Los Angeles orchestra’s board of directors, had taken notice. The very next month, when Georg Solti, the highly temperamental Hungarian conductor who had just been hired as musical director of the Los Angeles orchestra, was away, Mrs. Chandler engaged Mehta for a number of concerts as a guest conductor. Solti, claiming that he had not been consulted, resigned in a fury before he had conducted any concerts at all. Not surprisingly, it was Mehta who ended up in his job.
Now that Mehta has given up his post with the Montreal Symphony, he intends to make the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera his chief concerns. However, he will continue to spend several months a year conducting all over the world. “Zubin was made for that kind of crazy life,” his friend Piatigorsky has remarked. In 1961, he was suddenly called to Vienna, and then to Israel, to substitute for the ailing Eugene Ormandy with the Vienna and the Israeli Philharmonics. In 1962, he spent a season of several weeks in Buenos Aires, and he conducted at the Salzburg Festival each year from 1962 through 1967, and at the Spoleto Festival in 1966. He is very enthusiastic about touring with various orchestras. In addition to his trip with the Montreal Symphony in 1962, he took the Israeli Philharmonic on a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1966, and the Lost Angeles Philharmonic on an American tour last spring and on a world tour this fall, playing as far away as his native Bombay. (While there, he attended the Jashan thanksgiving ceremony of the Parsis in the Wadiaji Parsi Fire Temple.) And, of course, there are the one-night stands that he sandwiches in between all these dates. Virtually all his time is taken up, and nowadays he has to refuse all kinds of offers. “Every time I refuse an engagement, my fee goes up,” he has said gleefully.
Mehta has a special relationship with the Israeli Philharmonic. He has attempted to interest it in Wagner and Strauss (“Actually, they’re half my repertoire”), whose music has been banned in Israel because of associations with Nazi Germany, but in this he has been unsuccessful. When recent hostilities broke out between Israel and the Arabs, Mehta got to the scene as quickly as he could. He was conducting the Metropolitan Opera in Philadelphia at the time. “I must go,” he told Francis Robinson, assistant manager of the Met. “This is the time when music really counts for something.” He still had a date at the Festival Casals, in Puerto Rico, which he filled. Then he immediately took off on a plane for Tel Aviv. His plane was grounded at Rome, because the fighting was in progress, but the Israeli ambassador in Rome arranged passage for him on the last El Al plane to leave for Israel. In Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, during and after the fighting, he conducted several concerts in which his friends Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré appeared as soloists.
Mehta’s relations with people in general are warm, and particularly warm with young people, who throng his performances and seem to identify with him even though he is a good way out of his teens. He is a thoughtful host at parties, and often he takes thirty or forty people to supper at the Kashmir Restaurant after a performance—“everybody who happens to be in my dressing room.” (He eats little or nothing before performances.) In Los Angeles, he has no Indian restaurant to take them to, so he throws his post-performance parties at the Scandia, a Scandinavian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. He has been known to refuse invitations to large affairs in Los Angeles unless the whole orchestra was invited along. He has a fairly wide acquaintance among the Hollywood movie colony. Edward G. Robinson and Werner Klemperer (the Colonel Clink of the television show “Hogan’s Heroes,” and also the son of the great conductor Otto Klemperer) are close friends. Others include Vincente Minnelli, the film director, and many of the film-music composer-conductors, like Johnny Green, Bronislau Kaper, Miklos Rozsa, and André Previn (who last year succeeded Barbirolli as conductor of the Houston Symphony). He is interested in jazz, and knows a great deal about it, and about the rhythmic relation between jazz and Hindu music. A friend of the eminent Indian musician Ravi Shankar, he has often sat around while Shankar and the jazz drummer Shelley Manne and the jazz trumpeter Don Ellis have experimented with hybrid forms of jazz, using some complicated Hindu rhythms and scales.
Mehta’s attitude toward contemporary music is ambivalent. He likes the twelve-tone work of Luigi Nono and Alberto Ginastera. During one season in Los Angeles, he performed all the important orchestral works of Arnold Schoenberg. There were protests and threats of cancelled subscriptions from some members of the audience, but the threats were not carried out, and a good part of his public seemed to enjoy the experience. But about the mass of experimental music that is being turned out nowadays he is less sanguine. “I like some works in the twelve-tone system, but the trouble is that it has failed to evolve,” he said recently. “Nowadays, the younger composers all go to Darmstadt [one of the strongholds of the experimental style] and decide whether the hemlines will be shorter this year. You know: ‘Shall the electric guitar be In or Out?’—things like that. The twelve-tone composers merely change a few things once in a while. They are not going anywhere.”
Asked his opinions about theatricality as an ingredient in the conductor’s art, Mehta admitted quite freely that he is sometimes deliberately theatrical. “It all depends on the music,” he said. “Sometimes you have to help the music along with a few theatrical gestures. Beethoven’s Third Symphony is a masterpiece and needs no help. But Strauss’s ‘Ein Heldenleben,’ for example, is more superficial. You can throw in some heroics there. It goes with the music.” But, heroic as Mehta may occasionally appear while conducting, he is generally not recognized when he is off the podium, and he revels in this anonymity. “Nobody knows who I am,” he says. “Isn’t it great?” This circumstance enables him to prowl a hundred cities as Harun al-Rashid did Baghdad.
Some people, including friends, wonder whether Mehta’s sudden rise to tremendous success will spoil him. “He is king of the world,” one friend said recently, and Mehta’s lordly disregard for punctuality, among other things, leads several others to ponder the question. Friends also point out that, young as he is, he is not invariably meticulous about style and tradition. He has been known to introduce the emotional element known as schmalz in the wrong places, and once in a great while he turns in a rather eccentric performance. But the consensus is that his success will not go to his head. “He is too intelligent,” one friend remarked. “He is continually absorbing new ideas from everywhere, and he is too hard-working.” In Los Angeles, he is regarded as a great cultural leader, and he, in his turn, has a high regard for Los Angeles. “It’s a great place,” he says. “You can make your own environment. It’s a town where everybody leaves you alone. It’s the only city where Sinatra or Danny Kaye or Jack Benny can walk down the street and nobody talks to him. There are some things that bug me about Los Angeles. I wish I could find a good Indian restaurant there. And that big portrait of me in the lounge of the Music Center. And those silly Oriental costumes the ushers wear. Still, I am absolutely independent in Los Angeles. It is my orchestra. I can do what I please with programs. Besides, we have one of the finest auditoriums in the world to perform in. And southern California is becoming a very important cultural center. Heifetz and Piatigorsky live there, and Stravinsky. The climate is good, too.” ♦
