Michael Gielen
Acclaimed guest conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra
MICHAEL GIELEN, the conductor, who has died aged 91, was a major figure in postwar German and Austrian music.
He was responsible for the first performances of Ligeti’s Requiem, Stockhausen’s
Carré and Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten, and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1978 to 1981, conducting them in eight Proms.
Gielen was the antithesis of the commercial music industry, insisting on complete performances of symphonies and other works, no matter how taxing. He lamented “compilation fever” and the “fast food” mentality, both in music and the world in general. “If people don’t learn to listen in full, the day will come when full-length works will disappear from the airwaves altogether,” he said in 1996.
For Gielen there was little distinction between classical, romantic and avant-garde music. “One era of music feeds another,” he said. “It is important to conduct Schoenberg well if one wants to conduct Beethoven well.”
Michael Andreas Gielen was born in Dresden on July 29 1927. His Austrian father was a theatre director, while his Jewish mother had appeared in the premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in 1919.
In 1940 the family left for Buenos Aires. Gielen, who found his German-language school awash with Nazi sympathisers, studied piano with Erwin Leuchter and was soon working as an accompanist at the Teatro Colón. At 19 he gave a complete performance of Schoenberg’s piano works.
He had hopes of studying composition in New York, but was denied a US visa because of his politics, after being injured and arrested during anti-fascist demonstrations. Instead he moved in 1950 to Vienna, where his father was director of the Burgtheater, and became assistant at the Vienna State Opera, working with Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan and Clemens Krauss. His own music was heard at Darmstadt, but increasingly he focused on conducting.
In 1960 Gielen directed one of the four orchestras and choirs in Stockhausen’s Carré in its world premiere. Appointed chief conductor at the Stockholm Royal Opera, he conducted Ingmar Bergman’s radical staging of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in the presence of the composer and gave the first performance of Ligeti’s Requiem.
Moving to Cologne, he was responsible in 1965 for the premiere of Die Soldaten, a work that had been declared impossible to perform. After posts in Belgium and Holland he settled in 1977 as director of the Frankfurt Opera.
His time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra may have lasted only three years but it was dynamic and intense, including a performance in 1980 of his own work, Pentaphonie, in which the players were, in addition to using their own instruments, required to play the triangle, move around the platform and shout in Spanish.
His tenure ended with a spectacular Proms performance of Schoenberg’s Gurre-lieder in which, according to one critic, “the closing choral hymn to the rising sun blazed admirably.”
Gielen was principal conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1986. At first some patrons found his enthusiasm for the Second Viennese School hard to swallow, but he recalled that by the time he left “many people understood that music means so much more than it used to.”
Thereafter he often worked with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. Deteriorating eyesight led to his retirement in 2014.
Michael Gielen married Helga Augusten in 1957. They had a daughter and a son.