Lorin Maazel

When did your second career as a conductor start?

Well, I received a Fulbright scholarship ... to go to Italy ... to do some research in old Italian music. While doing this research in Milan I received a call from An agent in Rome ... to the effect that I had conducted uh uh a Gershwin piano concerto ... a work which was on a programme to be given in Catania, Sicily. the conductor of which fell ill ... just hours before the first rehearsal ... and I received the ... call, Well, you do know this concerto. Can you take over the concert? and I said, Well, yes. All right, what's on the rest of the programme? And I knew those works as well, with the exception of the Bottered Bride, overture which I'd never conducted, and I learned that on the train.

There must be a great temptation for the successful freelance conductor to overdo it, to find himself being talked into taking on far too much work over far too big an area.

Yes, well, uh I freelanced, as it were, in the fifties. There were no Jets then and ... Planes were rather ... tires ... Nowadays, I'm afraid uh the jet is um turning our younger musicians into They're flying saucers and uh the edge gets worn off very rapidly and uh Most singers, not to mention conductors and many instrumentalists, are simply flown out. by their thirtieth year. And uh that's why in nineteen sixty five I decided to associate myself with the Berlin Opera House as uh their artistic uh director.

Now you're married to a concert pianist, Israela Margalit. Do you work much together? Do you have that opportunity?

I have ... She's um a great artist and um I've enjoyed working with her. Uh enormously. We play uh duets at home. Uh she goes on concert tours of her own. I don't think that a a woman having a profession uh um makes her any less of of a wife, quite the contrary, I think, uh, well, you know, the uh Ghibran sense of of what a marriage is all about, uh, two pillars supporting a common structure. And I think uh a woman is uh is an equal pillar in that structure and and uh she must be creative and and be able to stimulate uh just as as the man.

What's the combination then that made you obviously a conductor?

I I have uh a good ear, I have a good memory, I uh seem to be able to communicate uh manually as a conductor. Uh that's something that uh one is uh apparently born with.

How early on did your [musical gift] emerge then?

Well, I remember becoming interested in the violin when I was five, uh mainly because I had a cousin who was younger and al was already playing the violin and I felt um you know, well, she was just a girl and I was a big strapping man of five and what she could do I could do better.

How did you feel about leaving all that [fame] behind and moving into obscurity after being little Lorin whom everybody knew?

Well, you know, I was uh bemused by the fact that I had enjoyed this fame and the day after was suddenly forgotten I was no longer a child. I was no longer of any interest and no one asked me to conduct orchestras anymore. It was a moment in of reflection, gave me an opportunity to think, well, now that I have had a career as a conductor, let's move on to the next one. What else am I going to do?

How can you pretend to know the Italian language [for the Fulbright scholarship interview]?

Well, I'm I memorized,'cause I had a good memory, I memorized three pages of conversation, which I rattled off uh trying to convince people who speak Italian that I knew the language perfectly.

Why did you choose that novel [George Orwell's 1984] for your opera?

We all had read nineteen eighty four in our teens. People in my generation. And it seemed like the stuff of opera, a doomed love affair, caught in the vice of an oligarchical system from which there was no exit, no no escape.