Lorin Maazel: The Man Who Knew Too Much

It is startling to learn of the death of the distinguished American conductor Lorin Maazel, who died, on Sunday, at the age of eighty-four. He was called a “young 70” by the New York Observer upon his unexpected appointment to the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, in 2001; many of us had expected him to last professionally into his nineties, since his father, Lincoln Maazel, also a musician, passed away at the extraordinarily ripe age of a hundred and six. After leaving the Philharmonic, in 2009, Lorin Maazel moved to run his own festival, on his estate in Castleton, Virginia, and he was rehearsing with musicians until shortly before his death.

Late in the last decade, I did a reviewing stint at the Observer, and, since I was only too aware of Maazel’s stupendous musical technique and towering intellect, I always worked hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, looking over my review of his final Philharmonic program, of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony—a piece so complicated that only a master of the podium can manage it—I find no reason to revise my opinions:

Every conductor, even a great one, has his strengths and weaknesses, but Mr. Maazel’s seem oddly out of sync. He is a consummate musical technician whose control of the musical phrase often seems arbitrary; a committed liberal humanitarian whose reputation is that of an aloof loner; a man who has lavished money and attention on his own mini-festival in Virginia, but was never a notable presence in the life of the city from which he won, by his own admission, the “ultimate” job. If he seems to be a paragon of the overpaid superstar conductor, it not so much the amounts involved (Toscanini, at the height of the Great Depression, was also more than generously compensated) but frustration at a musician who too often seemed to think that allowing us into his presence was an achievement in itself.

Yet it is not always thus. Over the last seven years, there have been indisputably first-rate readings of music by Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Strauss, Varèse and, yes, Mahler. Mr. Maazel’s season-closing performance of the tragic Sixth Symphony, in 2005, was a tour de force, proving that there is a difference between an expressively “objective” performance and an emotionally unengaging one.

For most of us in music, technique, whether with the baton, the voice, an instrument, or the composer’s pencil, is something we strive and strain to acquire, hoping that we’ll gain enough of it to give wings to whatever artistic insights we can muster. For Maazel, a child-prodigy conductor, it was just the opposite: musical matters were so easy for him—so were business negotiations; he had no agent—that he could readily become bored, fussing with the music when he should have been shaping it lovingly and giving it life. (André Previn is a similar case: just as Maazel could catch fire in Gershwin, Strauss, or with the clockwork-precision of Ravel, Previn’s great performances have been pretty much limited to Russian and British music, brilliantly managing the emotional overflow of the former and bringing a gentle bloom to the latter repertory’s temperamental reserve.) Yes, that Mahler Six was tremendous, an event for which I remain personally grateful. But a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that I heard during his tenure was, in stunning contrast, garish and shallow: he made the work sound like the most accomplished youth-orchestra piece ever penned.

For the greatest conductors—masters like Bernstein, Tennstedt, Monteux, Levine—technique is a bridge to greatness, to the special place where perfection of spirit and execution combine, not just an end in itself. Maazel’s visits to that realm were rare but memorable, and with his passing only a handful of the big maestros of the postwar era—principally Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Bernard Haitink, and Christoph von Dohnányi, in addition to the great Russian survivor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, who last weekend conducted two stunning performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride” at Avery Fisher Hall—remain. Such men have not always lived up to their larger-than-life reputations, of course. But, more than any of them except Herbert von Karajan, Maazel made his way in the music business by his own rules, which made colleagues and critics uniquely unsympathetic to those instances when his performances failed to live up to the legend. His able successor at the Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert—to whom Maazel left an orchestra in superb shape—is the product of a more realistic age.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.