He was the most American of the last contemporary bandmasters. The strangest among serious people. Herbert Blomstedt, the Swedish-born conductor from Springfield, Massachusetts, combined the stiffness of a podium professor with the picturesque charisma of an E. T. A. Hoffmann magnetist.
When you saw him act with hunched shoulders and a wrinkled nose, ecstatically fingering and gesticulating, he seemed like an emissary from a distant world. Tense within himself, he brilliantly unleashed sound energies in Bruckner, as well as in the symphonic works of Carl Nielsen, Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg. For many years there was hardly anyone better than him when it came to Scandinavian repertoire.
Born on July 11, 1927, the son of a Swedish pastor, he was born with strict religion. Blomstedt liked to say that when a requested concert on the radio ended with waltzes and polkas, the radio was turned off at home. As a member of the Protestant Free Church of the Seventh-day Adventists, Blomstedt refused throughout his life to rehearse or even give concerts on Saturdays. “Never on Saturday” was the motto of this non-missionary believer.
He absolutely followed the rules of the classical music business. And had to pay a lot of tuition fees. From 1975 to 1985 he did not earn particularly well as chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden - by international standards. During a tax audit in Sweden, he was charged such a high debt for the income that had already been taxed in Germany that it forced him into bankruptcy. Blomstedt challenged the verdict. Won too. As a result, the laws in Sweden were changed. Which ultimately made him a tax evader. In 1984 he settled in Lucerne.
Blomstedt followed a kind of musical icebreaker aesthetic. His cool, explosive approach to sound had no inclination towards sentimentality. But in large-format works, such as Strauss, Brahms and Hindemith, it led to unexpected tension and tension release. This was a direct reflection of his fervent seriousness and a basic metaphysical trust that only a few artists have today.
After his successful performance in Stockholm, numerous orchestras in Germany were assured of the statuesque grandeur of this difficult-to-classify man. From 1996 to 1998 he was head of the NDR Symphony Orchestra for two years before moving to the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra as Kurt Masur's successor. Here he has served as honorary conductor since 2005 and was able to draw the sum of his work with an integral Bruckner cycle (on the independent label “Querstand”).
Although he said that he had become particularly at home artistically in Saxony, he had also had a close connection with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra as honorary conductor since 2006. For a long time he was one of the most hard-working elders in the industry. Discographically, his most productive period was with the San Francisco Symphony (1985 to 1995). Here he sparked a combination of freshness and precision that fully corresponded to his mix of American precision and European decision.
He accepted the role of doyen among world-class conductors rather reluctantly. You become more demanding yourself, which doesn't make the job easy. “The trick,” says Blomstedt, “is to remain dissatisfied and yet create a good atmosphere in the orchestra.” He prided himself on taking an interest in the struggles and concerns of every musician. "They tell me their story. And not just behind the scenes, but also on stage: in the music."
It was clear to him that he differed from his role models – Furtwängler, Toscanini and Bruno Walter – in that he was far more approachable. His secret, he said, was that he completely forgot himself during every concert. "The adrenaline switches everything off. I feel like I've stepped away." Herbert Blomstedt, the affable eccentric, died in Gothenburg at the age of 99.
