Musical polymath and gifted showman led playboy life and married five times
Andre Previn, who has died aged 89, was a musical polymath who began composing for Hollywood at 16, won a quartet of Oscars, and had additional careers as a jazz piano phenomenon and major symphonic conductor. All the while, he forged a public identity as a jet setter, who counted actress Mia Farrow among his five wives.
Previn was considered something of a playboy as he leapt with swaggering allure between Hollywood and the directorship of some of the world’s leading orchestras, often using his celebrity and skill as a raconteur to bring wider attention to classical music.
He won 11
Grammy awards over half a century – for his film music, for the records he made with jazz ensembles and orchestras he led and, in 2010, for lifetime achievement. ‘‘The most impressive aspect of Previn’s career was the ease with which he moved through the full spectrum of American music – whether jazz or classical, movie soundtracks or TV scores, Hollywood or Broadway, overtly commercial gigs or artistically refined projects,’’ music historian Ted Gioia said.
‘‘And he could do this as composer, conductor or performer as the situation warranted. In some ways, he epitomises the great era of middlebrow art in America, when audiences rewarded artists who crafted popular art with a dose of aesthetic sophistication, and packaged it for crossover success.’’
Sporting a Beatles-style haircut, seemingly ‘‘hip’’ and modishly dressed, Previn was a favourite of the gossip columnists and paparazzi after he took up with Farrow, fresh from her divorce from Frank Sinatra.
He revelled in stories about the personalities and absurdities of Hollywood. While arranging and conducting music for the Lerner and Loewe musical Gigi (1958), one of his Oscar-winning assignments, he said director Vincente Minnelli ordered up 24 black swans to swim on a lake in Paris. Instead of the French word for swans, ‘‘cygnes’’, Minnelli accidentally requested ‘‘singes’’ – monkeys. ‘‘Try setting that to music,’’ Previn recalled years later.
His gossipy memoir of his years in Hollywood, No Minor Chords (1991), recounted his youthful near-dalliance with screen siren Ava Gardner, who was ‘‘the kind of beautiful that turned men into Jell-O moulds’’.
Far from a sophisticate at the time, he had arrived in Hollywood only a few years earlier without knowing a word of English. His parents – affluent and cultured German Jews – had fled Nazi-era Berlin at the cost of their possessions. Although near-penniless, they made sure their son continued his piano and composition studies.
As a pianist and as a student conductor, Previn played with radio and symphony orchestras. At 16, he cut a piano jazz album that was a surprise hit and ‘‘sold something like 200,000 copies’’, he said. He joked that success was due in large part to the fact that ‘‘it didn’t have my picture on the cover’’.
He soon began arranging for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals. ‘‘They were always looking for somebody who was talented, fast and cheap and, because I was a kid, I was all three,’’ he later quipped.
In all, Previn scored, played in or conducted more than 50 films, winning Oscars for adapting the music of Broadway shows
Gigi, Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma La Douce
(1963) and My Fair Lady (1964). Meanwhile, he took his hard-driving bebop jazz trio to the Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at the Philharmonic in Los Angeles and other major venues.
In addition, he accompanied Doris Day on an album, Duet, that brought out a sexy swinging side to a pop star. The magazine
JazzTimes called the album ‘‘exquisite’’. From 1968 to 1979, he was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where he was credited with using his drawing power to bring the classics to the masses. To promote the LSO, he appeared on the Morecambe and Wise show, allowing his name to be mangled as ‘‘Andrew Preview’’.
He was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin, on April 6, 1929, although some sources have his last name as Prewin. He was enrolled at the Berlin Conservatory until it was officially purged of ‘‘non-Aryan’’ students in 1938.
Previn’s first marriage, to singer Betty Bennett, produced two daughters. He was next married to lyricist Dory Langan, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage was ended in part by his affair with Farrow, who gave birth to twin sons shortly after she wed Previn in 1970. Before divorcing nine years later, they had another biological child and adopted three orphans, including Koreanborn Soon-Yi, with whom he severed ties after she began a relationship with Woody Allen.
Previn had a son with his fourth wife, Heather Sneddon, and was married to the German-born violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter from 2002 to 2006. –