In his study, right on his desk, was a cup of colored pencils. Even at the age of 90, Bernard Haitink started preparing every concert series with a clean score – including pieces he could dream of. “A deviation”, he called it himself, with typical self-mockery. But a deviation that partly determined his strength as a conductor: always adjusting your vision, continuing to renew yourself, surprising the audience.
Bernard Haitink, one of the greatest Dutch conductors, passed away on Thursday. To be management announces that he passed away peacefully surrounded by his wife and family. He leaves behind his wife Patricia and five children from the first of four marriages. Haitink was 92 years old. In 2019 he said goodbye with an unforgettable concert in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, which he entered for the first time in 1939 – and thus had been a home with ups and downs for eighty years, of which 65 years as a conductor.
“I feel like a dinosaur,” he said – but he continued to conduct as long as he could. Out of a sense of duty. Because saying ‘no’ is such a hassle. But mainly out of a burning love for the music without which he found life difficult to imagine. “It is music that grabs me by the collar and lifts me above myself. Who has always saved me in my life, actually.”
Fanatic
Bernard Johan Herman Haitink was born in Amsterdam on March 4, 1929. His father was director of the Municipal Electricity Works. The family was not musical, but Haitink – then still ‘Herman’ – received violin lessons and, on the advice of his teacher Charles van de Rosière, violinist in the Concertgebouw Orchestra, also regularly attended concerts by the orchestra.
As an eight-year-old (“I was a little fanatic”), he was enchanted on the radio by the Seventh Symphony by Bruckner under chief conductor Eduard van Beinum. A year later, on April 2, 1939, his first concert followed: Bachs St Matthew Passion by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg.
He saw a lady cry at the altaria ‘Erbarme me, dich’ and realized: ‘that can cause music’. And then he kept going, even when that meant being among the German officers against his mother’s wishes. “But I had to and would hear music.”
During those war years he was a mediocre student at the Amsterdam Lyceum. As soon as he got it right, he transferred to the conservatory: first as a violinist, later as a conductor. “At school I couldn’t do anything and later on at the conservatory I was a disaster. It was only when I started conducting that people thought: hey.” Conductor Willem van Otterloo initially rejected the awkwardly shy, stiff boy with the famous words ‘I don’t need that pias’. But Ferdinand Leitner did see something in him: “He knows nothing, but he is a conductor.”
His debut for the Concertgebouw Orchestra was not long in coming. On November 7, 1956, the day of the Hungarian Uprising, when it was agreed that there would be no applause out of respect, Haitink was allowed to stand in for a sick Giulini. nerve-wracking. The applause appointment found the young Haitink – signifyingly insecure – a great relief: at least he didn’t have to be afraid of lukewarm acclaim for an imperfect debut.
Too young in the deep
In 1957 Haitink became the first conductor of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. On the poster for his first concert with a broadcasting orchestra, two years earlier, his first name was mistakenly mentioned: Bernard Haitink. He just let it be. And he retained a warm feeling for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra throughout his life.
In 1959 the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Eduard van Beinum, died, who had shown great confidence in Haitink.
In 1961, together with the much older Eugen Jochum, he was appointed chief conductor, from 1964 he was on his own.
Haitink’s first years as a chef were tough – no matter how clearly you can see from the images from then that he breathes music, radiates unwavering authority and knows exactly what he wants to hear. Perhaps the most striking thing is that the young Haitink is already so thoroughly Haitink: palpably vulnerable and emotional in his appearance, but also charismatic and unapproachable.
Conducting became easier when he had less to ‘impose’ his authority and, in accordance with his temperament, could be more one with rather than above the musicians. “Being young as a conductor is not easy,” he later said of his early years. “I started with the orchestra way too early and with too little experience. But you have to go through that. That makes you big. A good conductor.”
Falling stick
Haitink described the quarter of a century that he was associated with the Concertgebouw Orchestra as chief conductor until 1988 with a subtle understatement as “a whole process”. The development of the 1970s was followed by the “best times”: the early 1980s with – for example – the unforgettable Christmas matinees with Mahler’s symphonies. But it also started to split internally. There was a fuss about Haitink’s secondary position as music director of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London (since 1984), the extent to which he was involved in the appointment of his successor Riccardo Chailly, whom Haitink feared would lose the sound of the orchestra. change.
Later he understood better, he said himself, that for some orchestra musicians it must have been just ‘claustrophobic’ to work almost an entire working life under him, under one and the same chief. But at the time, feelings of offense dominated. Haitink did not want to return to the orchestra. And at his last Christmas matinee as chef – a great, hyper-emotional performance by Mahlers Ninth Symphony, on December 25, 1987 – with a much-discussed, dramatic gesture at the end of the symphony, he slipped his baton from his hand to the floor. Whether that was on purpose was never clear.
drift
Haitink was not an easy man – not even for himself. Music was the safe haven for his nervous and introverted nature, but when an orchestra didn’t realize the sound that was in front of him, frustration sometimes drove him to a frenzy.
“Stupid,” he later thought, and even “annoying and stupid”. But when he went to the psychologist as a middle man, he sent him away. “She said: ‘I’m not going to tinker with that, because then so much will come loose. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
Haitink also blossomed with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and acquired world fame in a very broad repertoire, with an emphasis on classical (Mozart, Beethoven) and romantic repertoire (Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss) and French music (Debussy and Ravel).
In the heyday of historical performance practice, Haitink left the pre-Mozart repertoire to baroque specialists such as Harnoncourt. Contemporary music did not have his heart, but it did have his attention. The archive of the Concertgebouw Orchestra has 22 world premieres under his direction, as well as 377 pieces by Dutch composers. But for composers such as Peter Schat and Louis Andriessen, Haitink was nevertheless a figurehead of the orchestra’s insufficiently progressive programming, which led to the infamous Aktie Nutcracker in 1969.
Haitink himself was especially afraid to go down in the annals as a ‘Mahler conductor’. “A lot of others are much bigger and much more important to me,” he said. Such as Bruckner (Haitink was the first ever to record a Bruckner cycle on a gramophone record) and Beethoven, whose symphonies he only performed as a cycle in the mid-1980s – for fear of being too early with them. “And then everyone was screaming bloody murder. Haitink with Beethoven, that won’t work! But as a chef you have to swim against the tide a bit. And it was quite a success, after all.”
If you asked Haitink about his deepest musical preferences, he usually looked smug. Mozart’s piano concertos, chamber music by Schubert and Beethoven. And certainly Mozart’s Da Ponte operas (Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte), which he first heard as a teenager on a study trip to Edinburgh and later conducted himself as Music Director in Glyndebourne, at which point he decided that they are “actually the highest good for me”.
Freedom
London became Haitink’s second home. In 1967 (until 1979) he became chief conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra alongside the Concertgebouw Orchestra. And on his leadership of the exclusive private summer opera festival at Glyndebourne, where he eludedly but with great success shook off the ‘symphonic conductor’ label, he took charge of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in 1987 (until 2002) – a of the top opera companies in the world.
Remarkably (and sadly) Haitink no longer led a stage opera in the Netherlands after four almost forgotten productions in the early 1960s. A highlight was the concert performance of Wagners Die Valkyre in the Concertgebouw in 1998, after which Haitink in particular was applauded long and loud. But the negotiations about Wagners immediately started by De Nederlandse Opera Tristan and Isolde came to nothing.
Haitink’s later career was one of many guest conductors. For a while (2002-‘4) he was chief of the Staatskapelle Dresden, but otherwise he cherished the freedom of guest conducting – although often in warm and close relationships, such as with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (where he played the St Matthew Passion which unfortunately did not materialize in Amsterdam), the London Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and – love of his late years – the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
unbolted
With the latter orchestra he realized a whole series of recent highlights in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw: a daring, vital and nicely unruly Brahms, exemplary Schumann, flashy Beethoven and a beautiful mix of Mahler and Mozart (November 2017). You could see again and again the power of Haitink’s conducting art: the beautiful, detailed gestures of his austere right, expressive left hand. The vulnerable looks that, totally unbolted, seemed to make a personal appeal to everyone’s best side.
He also thought it important to transfer all the insights acquired in sixty years. The annual conducting days in Lucerne were a highlight in his agenda and he devoted a lot of time, energy and aftercare to his pupils, including the up-and-coming David Afkham.
After a nasty last struggle between 2014 and 2017, he also ended the relationship with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in harmony, although it must have hurt the orchestra that he chose the Radio Philharmonic in 2019 for his farewell concert with – how could it be otherwise – Bruckners Seventh Symphony.
The final applause lasted eight minutes on that unforgettable June afternoon, after which Haitink left the Grote Zaal for the very last time with a wave of pain. And although the then 90-year-old had framed his retirement with Thomas Mannian irony as a ‘sabbatical’, in retrospect it turned out to be the real goodbye.
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