Essential Guide to Home Remodeling Costs and Resources

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A year after the birth of the orchestra, at 2:50 a.m. on April 29, 1936, a son was born to Tehmina and Mehli. They gave him the ancient Persian name of Zubin, "the Powerful Sword."

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The Parsees were great believers in reincarnation as well as in astrology. They were convinced that the course of a man's life could be charted by the configuration of the stars and planets at the moment of his birth. So when Zubin was six days old, as custom dictated, Tehmina sought out a Hindu astrologer, ajotisi, to have her newborn son's preliminary horoscope cast. It was to be the first hint of what life held in store for this tiny, wrinkled "powerful sword."

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Zubin learned to sing as he learned to speak. Music was integral to the air he breathed, to the space through which he crawled. Musical instruments were his toys, and when he was only one year old his parents bought him a wind-up Gramophone. He learned to know his father's records by the colors of their labels and to point to the one he wanted to hear. The ayah who looked after him would place the records on the turntable and he would listen for hours.

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At the age of two Zubin received a pair of drumsticks, and they became his most prized possessions. Nothing in the house — pots, tabletops, chairs, or vases — was safe from the drummer boy's assault. When the sticks were taken away as punishment for some particularly inappropriate banging, he would sneak into the kitchen for two of his mother's spoons and the racket would start again. He even slept with the drumsticks under his pillow.

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His father's rehearsal studio was the family living room. There, every evening, the members of Mehli's chamber ensemble would gather to go over their programs, with little Zubin hanging on every note. He got to know many of the pieces by heart and would walk around the house

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humming melodies by the great composers, to the constant amazement of the Mehta family and their friends. Even today there is wonder in Mehli's voice as he describes an incident that occurred when Zubin was five.

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"Of course, Zubin had to come along to the radio station that night for the performance. It was at ten o'clock, and his little brother Zarin was fast asleep at home, but he wouldn't hear of missing it. So we played the two pieces and they went very well and everybody in the studio applauded. But as soon as the red light went out and we were off the air, that little monkey broke away from his mother and came running up to me, shouting, 'But Daddy, why didn't you play that part that goesya-dada-da-da-da-daaY "

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To Zubin music was like a game, to be taken no more seriously than the game of cricket he was learning to play quite well. Just as his own friends got together every day for their games, his father's friends convened with their instruments.

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Zubin watched in fascination as the Bombay Symphony Orchestra grew in quality as well as quantity. There were Indian Christians and Parsees, mostK Mehli's pupils, in the strings, along with a Prussian violinist and a Czech cellist; there was a flutist from Italy, an Albanian bass playei . and a ( .reek w ho offered to pla\ oboe and bassoon, but since neithei was available settled on the ( larinet; there were wind players and percussionists wearing the uniform of the British Navy Band. It was a wartime League <>f Nations, convened by his father and, the boy thought, .1 might) achievement foi this small, wonderful man.

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One evening in the summer of 1944, Mehli and Tehmina returned from a concert to find Zubinin bed with a high temperature. At first the) thought it was nothing more than some usual childhood fever, but the second da) he felt nauseous and continued to vomit throughout the

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"It was just at the time the sulfa drugs were coming out," Tehmina remembers. "The doctor said if we are lucky and those drugs suit him then we have hope. Zubin had an enormous strength to bear pain. Thev put huge needles into his spine and drew out the fluid. For ten days we did not know if he would live or die. It was the worst time of our lives.

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The prescribed therapy called for a month at a Himalayan sanitarium at Simla, where the temperature was much cooler than in the crowded city. For nearly a whole year Zubinhad to be kept out of school and away from his playmates while he recovered his strength. It seemed the only thing he was permitted to enjoy was his father's music.

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One of the letters that impressed Zubin most came after Mehli heard an orchestral concert conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

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Zubin was quick to lose the angular awkwardness of a boy. Even at ten, there was passion lurking in those deep, laughing eyes. His nose was not thin and hooked like those of many Indians, but was the forceful, spearlike nose of a Persian, with eyebrows arching up from the bridge in a way that made his face half a question and half a command. His unusually fair skin, inherited from his mother, was set off by thick and wavy hair, blue black, as one found occasionally in Muslim men. His personality was forceful, with a calm assurance that was disarming. Yet those who remember him as a boy speak of him also as a dreamer, as one who seemed somehow unrelated to the world about him.

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( )f ten during Mehli's absence, Tehmina would take her two sons to the beach, just a few miles from the center of town, where Zubin would imagine his father just beyond the horizon of the Arabian Sea, as immense to him .is ,m\ Pacific could have appeared to Balboa. Looking out to the West, he wondered not how soon his father would return, but how Long it would he before he could sec the wonderful places Mehli was seeing now .

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deal of ceremony. Zubin was next to his mother in the parade stand as Mountbatten shook hands with Pandit Nehru and pronounced India a free, self-governing nation.

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That family included Zubin's cousin Dady, the only Mehta besides Zubin and Mehli to be seriously interested in Western music. Dady's piano study took a great leap forward when his studies moved from Shanghai to Paris. Occasionally Dady would write of his exciting discoveries — musical and otherwise. Zubinwould lie awake long into the night, rereading those letters and dreaming of what life must be like outside India.

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Zubin was appointed to fill both positions. He helped his father arrange the chairs and the music stands and, when a saxophonist was recruited though a third horn player was needed, Zubin could write out the B-flat horn part in the key of E-flat so the Bengali with the saxophone could play it.

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Oddonne Savini, to learn music theory. Once a week Zubin would take the hundred-mile train ride to Poona where Savini had moved.

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Despite his obvious involvement with the orchestra, Zubin had to be prodded to practice his violin and piano. "Instead of practicing after school," Mehli recalls, smiling, "he would sneak out and play cricket. The whole crux of the matter was that my son had no intention of becoming an instrumentalist."

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No one ever thought seriously that Zubin would follow in his father's footsteps as a professional musician. There seemed to be no point in it. Mehli's audience in Bombay was always sparse, comprised exclusively of Europeans, Anglo-Indians, and Parsees. The Hindus and Muslims who made up the great bulk of the city's population and who had music of their own, almost never attended. To Tehmina, Mehli seemed to be "beating his head against a wall."

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"I watched my husband slave to make people understand and want to go to concerts, but it was a thankless task. I can't tell you how much of our own money we lost in making music. I didn't want that to happen to Zubin. Of course, it never occurred to me that he might not live in India all his life. Always I thought that even if we sent him abroad to study, eventually he would come back and put his knowledge to work in India."

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So Tehmina and Mehli began to prepare Zubinfor a career in medicine, just as the) were preparing his vounger brother Zarin for accounting. Health and finance — there were two fields of endeavor in whic h serious young men could be useful to themselves, their family, and their country. 1 ehmina was overjoyed when Zubin was admitted to the scientific curriculum of St. Xavier's College to begin his premedical training.

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He got along well with the Jesuits who ran St. Xavier's, particularly with Father Ramon de Rafael, the Spanish priest who headed the physics department Indeed, Zubin took an instant liking to Father Rafael when the entile fust week <>1 (Kisses was given over to discussions of the Pythagorean theorem and of the Sangita-Ratnakara, in which the Hindu Sai ngadeva, like his ( rreek c ounterpart, had demonstrated that the pitch <»l a note \ai ies invei sel\ as the length of the String between the point of attae hment and point of tone h.

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It was not long before Zubin was asking more questions in class about music than about ph\ sit s. and Father Rafael sat him down for a talk after school. Zubin was astonished to learn th.it before he took his vows his

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the famous composer Enrique Granados. Thai very afternoon, Zubin

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In April of 1952 Zubin was surprised to receive a letter from his cousin, postmarked not Paris but Vienna. Dady's piano teacher in Paris had died and he was living in Vienna by himself. He had been accepted as a student by Bruno Seidlhofer at the Vienna Music Academy.

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Dadv wrote Zubin that Vienna was a good place to be, with marvelous opportunities for making music, where the Viennese classics are played like nowhere else. As an added incentive, he noted that living in Vienna was quite cheap and it cost hardly anything to enjoy the music.

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Dady's letters from Vienna rekindled the fire that had been sparked by Mehli's letters from New York. Zubin felt there must be room for him in the world of music beyond Bombav.

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At home, in the meantime, even as his interest in a musical career was discouraged, Zubin's duties with the Bomba\ Symphony increased. Sometimes lie was required to sit in on rehearsals. If the strings were going over the Mendelssohn Octet and the second cellist was missing, Zubin had to be there to sing the part. If a certain section of a symphony could not be played without an English horn, let Zubintranspose it for one of the violas.

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To cut down on rehearsal time for the visiting musicians, Mehli decided to play the violin solos at rehearsals himself. Seeing the orchestra struggle without a leader, Zubin stepped up to the podium, picked up his father's baton, and began to conduct. It was the beginning of the end of his medical career.

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Zubin picked up the lifeless dogfish, studied it for a moment, then on sudden impulse threw it across the room. "Cut it up yourself," he shouted and stalked out of the room.

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"I was in my bedroom that afternoon," Mehli remembers. "We would say our prayers every day, and normally we wouldn't disturb each other. It is a very private time. But suddenly I felt there was somebody behind me. I looked back and there was Zubin, standing very quietly.

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i went back to my prayers, thinking he had come into the room to get a book or a piece of music or something. But after a few minutes he was still standing there, so I said, 'Yes, darling?' He said, 4I need to talk to you.' I said, 'Of course, but not now because I'm praying.' And Zubinsaid, 'Well how long will you take?1

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In ()c tober ol 1 954, w hen the monsoon rams had gone and the Bomb.i\ ail was dr) and still, Zubin embarked b\ ship for Italy, where he would board a train to Vienna. It had been arranged for him to enter the \( adcim ot Mumc and to live with his cousin Dad) in a small apartment in the Vienna Woods. His expenses would be met In a trust fund from I ehmina's fathei ,

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I he d.i\ aftei Zubin left, Ichmina took his horoscope to an as-

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Despite his P. usee upbringing, Zubin had read the Ramayana. He knew <»f Lakshmana, who leaves hearth and home onl) for the sake of

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There was, then, no tradition to absolve Zubinfrom breaking with tradition. His self-imposed exile could be justified only by his own certainty that this was the only road for him to travel. Any doubts had to be yanked out by the roots and quickly gotten rid of, for there was only faith in himself to keep him from turning back.

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His first impressions of Vienna were not those of The Great Waltz. The Vienna of October 1954 was a scarred and pockmarked city only beginning to recover from the battles and bombings of World War II. The Sudbahnhof, the railroad station in the south of the city at which Zubin arrived, was nothing more than twisted, blackened girders and beams. As he stepped off the train, he realized for the first time how protected he had been in Bombay. There the worst effects of the war had been a general uneasiness, an occasional flyover by a squadron of Japanese fighter planes, and rationed rice. He saw immediately that life in Vienna had been something else entirely.

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War had drawn Viennese belts and purscst rings even tighter than their inbred frugality demanded, and, for a boy who had never been taught to turn off the lights when he left a room, there was a great lesson to be learned. In Vienna, one not only extinguished lights hut heat as well; the apartment house in the Vienna Woods was never cozily warm. Zubin could not repress a shiver as he undressed for bed his first night in Vienna. His apartment had only a tiny elect tic radiator, pitifully inadequate against the autumn chill. What would it he like in January, he wondered. Thinking of his warm bed in Bombay did not help, because these Vienna bedclothes were sheets of ice. How would he ever get to sleep with his knees knocking and his teeth rattling?

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"Somehow I managed to put out the fire," Zubin says, laughing. "And I did it without waking anybody else in the house. I went to sleep that night on this charred, black mattress. Of course, I was still cold. You don't know what kind of hell I caught the next morning from my landlady! Thank God I didn't understand the language yet."

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Cold water, only a few degrees above freezing, could be had in quantity; it came with the apartment. For hot water, however, Zubin had to pay the landlady two schillings. This got him the promise of five minutes' worth of warm shower. But five minutes on the landlady's inner clock turned out to be of capriciously variable duration.

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"I never did figure out how much time I really had," Zubin recalls with a shudder. "I was always overstepping my mark, and she must have been standing in the kitchen with her hand on the Geiser. Without any warning I would be showering in icy mountain water. Ach!"

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The Viennese reluctance to part with money had rubbed off on his cousin Dady after a year, and his first advice to Zubin was to ride a bicycle to the Music Academy rather than shell out the fare for the ten-mile tram ride each day.

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Though his music education had yet to begin, Zubin wondered whether he'd really been right in abandoning the security of home, family, and country for this cold, inhospitable place.

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Then, on the third day after his arrival, Zubinawoke and stepped out on the balcony to see a marvelous sight. The rolling, wooded hills, the < it v in the distance, everything was covered with a fresh blanket of snow, the first snow he'd ever seen.

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The Philharmonic was then and is today an orchestra dedicated to beauty. That dedication is handed down from one generation of musicians to the next, from professors to pupils. For the most part, those pupils came from the school where Zubin was enrolled, the Akademie fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst.

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At first, though he was struggling to learn the language and familiarize himself with his new surroundings, Zubin could permit himself a certain superiority. He could write his family that he was "a step ahead of my class," being familiar with a far wider range of music than were any of his classmates. And what he knew, he knew with assurance that came from studying entire on hestra scores, not simply instrument parts. But it was not long before Zubin discovered he had at least one weakness: harmony.

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Recalling Sc hiske today, Zubin says, "That man was unbelievable. You could give him any theme and he could play it in the style of Bach. He could make a fugue on it immediately, or a canon. He could play it in the Brahmsian manner, with threes against twos, or like Chopin. I had never heard anything like it."

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Zubin felt the spell as he searched through the Altstadt, the old town, a winding tangle of cobbled Gassen, more alleys than streets. On Backerstrasse, hidden within the heavy aroma of baking breads, he could detect the scents of spices the Viennese imported for their famous tortes and souffles. Cardamom, nutmeg, coriander, and cloves — they reminded him a little of home. If only one had the peppers, he reflected, one might compose a passable curry.

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Zubin followed streets like Sommerheidenweg and Haubenbiglstrasse, streets whose names he couldn't pronounce, into suburbs that dissolved into meadows, vineyards, and woods, and he began to understand the Stimmung of Vienna, the atmosphere that had inspired such dissimilar musical personalities as Brahms and Bruckner to create their masterworks.

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From all indications, Zubin was performing well. His professors seemed to take to the Indian student with a mixture of curiosity and affec tion, just .is the Viennese had accepted coffee from the Turks in the seventeenth century. Around the Academy he became know as der Inder, thus receiving the all-important "title" without which no one could truly be at home in the city. But the true sense of belonging came only when one of his professors presented him with his first ticket to a concert of the Philharmonic .

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I he featured woi k on the program was the Brahms First Symphony, to be conducted f>\ Karl Bdhm. Zubin anticipated the beginning of the work as one awaits the arrival of an old friend. He'd studied the score with records ai home and had even played a four-hand reduction on the

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It was as though his life had at last taken form, just as the First Symphony unexpectedly solidifies in the theme of the fourth movement. Zubin was gripped by the strings in their first statement of the simple theme, reminiscent of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He was swept up by the full orchestra and carried along in the arms of the legendary Austrian conductor.

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Zubin needed every ounce of control to keep from bursting into applause before the final beat of the concluding chord. At last he jumped up from his chair, cheering Karl Bohm, cheering the musicians who somehow breathed life into this magic thing called music, bravoing Brahms, and applauding Vienna for bringing them all together.

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Perhaps Zubin's greatest discovery that day was the importance of the bass line in music. Like most people, he had always listened first to the melody, the part that had its own movement in time; the bass line he had thought of as the underpinning, the almost static support on which the moving melody rested. Perhaps he had simply never paid such close attention to the basses as he did that night, his stage seat having made him practically a member of their section. Whatever the reasons for his weakness, Zubin determined to convert it to a strength.

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The double bass, on the other hand, is an extrovert, bombastic instrument that loves company, at its best in a crowd, at home in a tutti. Barring the odd vacancy in a string ensemble, any classical musician who commits himself to a bass commits himself also to an orchestra. It was the entire orchestra that Zubinwanted.

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Zubin was sustaining himself in Vienna on the princely sum of seventy-five dollars a month, from the trust of eight thousand dollars shared equally with his \ounger brother Zarin, who was now in London as an apprentice zu mutuant. If he was careful, Zubin could stretch out his share of the trust tor four years.

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Zubin heard the Viennese students' witty remarks about the herr Barons of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the conservative organization that virtually ruled Vienna's musical life. Idiots, someone proclaimed, to have blackballed Schonberg! Not to mention Mahler, said someone else. An American at Zubin's table expressed surprise that Mahler could be snubbed and Bruckner lionized . . . weren't they just two of a kind? That brought a good laugh from the Viennese. Everyone knew Mahler was a musical thief!

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Zubin made few close friends among the Viennese students, most of whom lived with their families and took their meals at home. On the other hand, nearly all the foreign students lived in one-room apartments with shared bathrooms and no kitchen privileges. They were treated to coffee and bread in the morning, but all other meals had to be taken out, usually at Barry's Restaurant, the "fast-food" place near the Academy that catered to students. Students who spoke the same language banded together to share their poverty and their meals, becoming one another's substitute families. Zubin's crowd all spoke English.

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The group included Englishmen, Americans, Dady and Zubin — the only Asians at the Academy — Canadians, and an Egyptian Jew.

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When summer brought the end of the school year, all his friends went home or to summer master classes in France and Italy. Zubinstayed behind to prepare himself for the Fall entrance examination for the conducting school. Travel, on his budget, was impossible

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Even the tram fare from the Thirteenth District Wienerwald apartment was becoming a strain, so Zubin moved into a less expensive room in the Third District, nearer the Music Academy. The building was owned by a large and friendly woman named Frau Mumb, who raised chows in the cellar. Learning to memorize scores to the yelping of hungry puppies was not easy, but Zubin put his mind to it and disccvered he could block out any sound by "hearing" the music in his mind.

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"But those chow chows never learned to recognize me in the eight months I lived there," Zubin remembers, laughing. "Every night I would come home and one would start barking, then all ten would bark at once. And they had blue tongues!"

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During the summer break, Zubin joined the Singverein, the official chorus of the Musikverein, in order to "involve myself in music as soon as I could, not being good enough yet to play the bass in an orchestra." The highlight of the summer came when he sang in the bass section in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under Herbert von Karajan. In those years Karajan was director of the Vienna Symphony, the city's second orchestra, but he was making his first recordings of the complete Beethoven Symphonies with London's Philharmonia Orchestra, and he brought the whole orchestra to Vienna in order to use the Singverein as his chorus for the Ninth. Thus Zubin made his first recording, not as a conductor or even as an instrumentalist, but as a singer.

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After singing in the chorus all day and standing at concerts in the evening, Zubin would long to discuss the music he'd heard with his friends at the coffeehouse. Instead he returned to his room and stayed awake long into the night, sitting cross-legged on the bed and filling his head with scores, trying to understand what messages lay hidden between the notes and bar lines. He became very close friends with Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Webern during those three months, because he simply could not bear to be alone.

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Zubin had a good laugh as he lead that. He wrote back, "You know,

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"I have great news and I must tell you all right now," Zubin shouted above the din. "I just found out I passed my entrance examination. They're letting me into the conducting school!"

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Only nineteen, perhaps. But in one year Zubinhad so inundated himself with Viennese music that he astonished the soprano from the backwoods of Canada.

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willing to be shown around by someone who knew the ropes. So he sold us on Vienna. In the process, I suppose he sold us on Zubin."

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"Zubin was very much the leader of our group," Carmen says. "There were nineteen or twenty of us, I being the only singer, and everyone seemed to fall in line behind Zubin.

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"He was always the one who knew what was going on, which concerts were not to be missed. At the end of the evening, as we left the theater or sat in the Liesingerkeller, Zubin would say, 'Now, here's what we're going to do tomorrow.' Then the next day he would go and pick up the tickets and we'd all meet at the concert hall."

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More important musical events created the inconvenience of having to wait until one hour before performance time to buy standing room tickets. So as soon as classes were finished, the students would rush to the theater and stand outside, often in the snow. For several hours they would wait in line, just for the privilege of standing several hours more in the rear of an auditorium, sardined among as many as a hundred fifty fellow standees, all sweltering in heavy coats and sweaters. Small wonder that Carmen found herself feeling woozy one night during the fourth hour of Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Vienna Opera. When she fainted there was luckily no place to fall but against Zubin, who quickly got her out into the vestibule and onto a chair.

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1 he da) after the concert or opera, Zubin was always eager to get to the coffeehouse to see what the important critics had said in the news-

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Foremost among these was Josef Marx, himself one of the last great composers of the lied. When Marx was present to review a concert, the students could always spot him by the white mane flowing above most other heads in the audience. A gruff, stiff-spined old man over six feet tall, Marx seemed to Zubin "the embodiment of all musical knowledge." His special field of expertise was the music with which Zubin was growing more and more sympathetic, the late romantic.

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For the better part of a year now, Zubin in Vienna and Zarin in London had been urging their father to leave the unhealthy musical climate of Bombay and emigrate someplace where his work would be more appreciated. Prodded by his sons, Mehli found an agent to book him a recital tour in the north of Italy. Meanwhile, Zubin used his rapidly expanding influence to get a date for Mehli at the Brahmssaal in the Musikverein.

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"I remember Zubin taking me to my first concert at the Musikverein. It was Hans Knappertsbusch conducting the Bruckner Eighth Symphony. Zubin had a standing room ticket, but he bribed one of the ushers — he knew all of them, I think — to let me have a seat. He couldn't stay because he had a class that evening. What a performance that was!"

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Since top price for an opening night ticket for Fidelio was $200, the nearest standing room Zubin could get for his family and friends was across the Ringstrasse, near the Bristol Hotel, where they watched the limousines drive up to deposit the wealthy ticket holders.

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Zubin was fast man (1 by the hugeness oi opera, the world that seemed so larger-than-life. I he open house itself was a home for gods, with its grand staircase thai rose, soaring, in crimson splendor from a blue-andivoi\ vestibule .ill burnished with gold leaf; and above, the nine Muses looked down in marble from their loggia on Mount Olympus.

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Wagnei was a night ol discover) foi Zubin. Most opera lovers, particular!) those in the United States, find then wa\ to Wagner onl) after

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gradual exposure to Verdi and Puccini; for Zubin in Vienna, it was a headlong plunge into the Ring.

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After listening to Wagner's music, Zubin began to read everything he could get his hands on about the composer. He discovered that the man had been as interesting and controversial as his operas. It was only natural that this supreme romantic would appeal to a young man caught up in discovering his own remarkable potential.

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From that first Walkiire, Zubin promised himself that he would someday devote himself to the study and interpretation of Wagner. But not now. Unlike so many young people, who find themselves equal to any task that presents itself, Zubin realized there was a lot he had to learn before he could conduct opera, let alone one of Wagner's operas.

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From there, Mehli intended to look for work in England. He had given up hope of creating a taste in Bombay for the music he loved; the Bombay Symphony Orchestra was again disbanded. Tehmina would stay for a while with Zubin in Vienna, joining Mehli when and if he found employment as a musician. If the effort proved unsuccessful, the two of them would return to Bombay and Mehli would go back to his job as a tax collector.

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With his family gone, Zubin could concentrate on his classes, which were now in full swing at the Academy. He was especially delighted with his bass professor, Otto Riihm, and with Swarowsky, his conducting teacher.

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Zubin remembers Otto Riihm fondly as "the one who made me conscious of what beautiful sound was. It is tin sort of thing one cannot learn in books, but only from someone like him, who has had that sound in his ears for mam . mam years.

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Inc redibly, Zubin Listed a full ten measures before he received his first reprimand from the master. I he other students looked at ea< h other in amazement. One <>f them, Ukrainian-born Eugene Husaruk, dividing his time between violin and conducting, recalls/the da) with a still-evident

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"He came up behind me while I was conducting, threw his arms around me, and stuck his fingers in my coat sleeves and pulled downward, leaving only my \\ lists free. 'Now you conduct,' he told me." Zubin saw instantly what Swarowsky was after. If one could master complete freedom of the wrists, so man) flailing arm gestures would be unnecessary.

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Though adopted by his wealthy Jewish stepfather, a prominent Viennese banker, Swarowsky kept his mother's name, and in later life he took to wearing a signet ring of the Hapsburg dynasty, with a bar sinister to indicate illegitimacy. According to the story he told Zubin, Swarowsky was the product of his mother's liaison with one of the Hapsburg Archdukes.

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"Swarowsky was unlike most of the Viennese I met in that he was generous," recalls Zubin. "He would give me the shirt off his back. But in Swarowsky's case the shirt was his knowledge, his incredible musical knowledge. I learned from him how to look at a score and analyze what he called the 'handwriting' of a composer, the thing that made one master's music different from every other's."

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Considering Swarowsky's absolutism on the matter of the score, Zubin decided that the only way one could confront an orchestra was with every bit of that scores information lodged firmly in one's memory. From that day on he determined that he would try never to conduct a piece of music until he had first memorized it. Since he did not have a "photographic" memory, as Dimitri Mitropoulos and some other conductors were said to have, he could only accomplish this by going over and over the music until he completely understood it, until he knew how and w h\ one note, one c hold, one measure, one phrase led inevitably to the next, how eac h sprang necessarily from what came before. To his friends, it seemed that one part of Zubin's mind was constantly reviewing .1 s< ore.

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Some ol the other student conductors would see Zubin and ask, 'How long did you stud) today?"' Carmen recalls, "as though you could recline everything to hours and minutes.

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"I thought, That's funny, I never hear Zubin sa\ th.it. I began to

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realize thai he must he studying .ill the time, even when he was talking to me. from morning till night. It was never, 1 studied five hours yesterday .' Stud) was vei \ mm h .i pari ol his everyday life, and he never mentioned it to anyone. Even lodas I think he studies all day long. Not that he has no othci Interests, hut to a good music i. ui work is life and life is work." foda) Zubin laughs when he recalls how total was his Viennese im-

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If Zubin had any advantage over his fellow students, other than his remarkable powers of concentration, it was his olive skin — light for an Indian, but distinctive in Austria. That, along with his Bombay accent, made him an oddity in the Viennese music world. People listened to what he said and did with keener interest than they showed the typical Music Academy student. As Carmen says, "The Viennese were very interested in anything fainth Oriental, and Zubinwas made much of."

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"He began to meet people." recalls Kugene Husaruk. "He would meet Mr. A. and Mr. A. knew Mr. B.f who would talk about Zubin to Mr. C, who was very important. That's the wav it began to snowball. And he made a positive impression on everybody he met, something so many artists think is unimportant. As a person he made a very positive impression on other people. He was gregarious, too. and charming, and in addition he always did his work very well.

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If his Oriental heritage made life in Vienna easier for Zubin, it was having just the opposite effect on his parents. In Scotland, Mehli and Tehmina were having trouble finding a decent place to live. "There is," Mehli wrote to Zubin, "a very strong anti-Indian feeling here." Moreover, the standard starting salary was low, even for a back-chair first violinist, about the equivalent of fifty dollars a week.

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After a few months with the Scottish National Orchestra Mehli got an audition with Sir John Barbirolli through one of Zarin's accounting clients, who was on the board of the Halle Orchestra of Manchester. Barbirolli took him on, and before long Mehli was promoted to assistant concertmaster at a salary of twenty pounds a week — about eighty American dollars. It was still not much money, but Zubinnoticed an immediate change in his parents' letters.

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homesick — not for Bombay, but for his family in England. To fight the longing to be with them, Zubin buried himself in his work and his friends' company, refusing to be alone.

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Gregariousness, leadership, and a disarming directness are the qualities his friends in Vienna remember about Zubin. These, combined with his charm and good looks, were the key elements in the Mehta approach to winning friends and influencing young ladies.

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"There are some people," Husaruk observes, "who become so sophisticated they get all tied up in knots. Not Zubin. It was not a sophisticated approach," he says, laughing, "and it still isn't. The way he deals with musicians professionally, that's the way he deals with people privately. There's nothing complicated about it. And if you ask what made him so appealing to women, this is the key. There's nothing else to it."

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There are those who will tell you that Vienna is the most romantic city in the world, that no matter how far north it may seem on a map, it's a southern city by temperament. They say the springtime scent of the linden trees along the Ringstrasse may drive a girl deppert, that a young man may lose his heart as he rides the Riesenrad, the ancient and enormous ferris wheel from which one sees the city as in a dream. For Carmen Lasky and Zubin, it didn't happen like that at all. It just happened.

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After a pause, she continues in her soft, western Canadian accent with its faint Highland lilt. "As I said, he was the leader. In the summer he led us all to Siena. Zubin just said, 'Let's go to Siena,' so we went."

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Summer in Siena, the picturesque town in the Tuscan hills of Italy, meant studying at the famed Accademia Chigiana. There were classes by such instrumental masters as Andres Segovia and instruction in conducting by Carlo Zecchi, with whom Zubin was eager to study.

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Taking Carmen, Gene Husaruk, and a few others along, Zubin went by train to Tuscany and quickly made himself a prominent figure. Husaruk, who shared a room with Zubin near the palatial Accademia, recalls that "Zubinspent a lot of time in the room going over new scores, but as soon as he was finished he immediately went out to see who was there that he could meet, and there were a lot of important artists in Siena that summer."

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At an al fresco cafe, Zubin introduced himself to a young guitarist named John Williams. The two struck up a friendship, and soon Williams got Zubin admitted to the very select master class of Segovia. Though it was extremely unlikely Zubin would ever encounter a need for the fine points of guitar playing, his appetite for musical knowledge

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Zubin became like a big brother to Danny and took to carrying him around Siena on his broad shoulders. He also became fast friends with the boy who was clearh the top conducting prospect among the Italian students. This young man. three years Zubin's senior, was named Claudio Abbado.

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From Danny and Claudio, Zubin learned about Israel and about the great opera houses <>| Italy. In turn, he introduced them to his friends and filled their ears with stones of life in Bombay and music in Vienna. Claudk) veined particular!) Interested in the Vienna Music Academy, for he felt he had aheach plumbed the depths of the Milan Conservators .

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I here was no professional jealousy, none of the backbiting that one frequentl) finds in professional students. Instead, the young conductors — Abbado. Barenboim, and Mehta — shared a camaraderie horn of mutual love for their work. This is not to say thai Zubin was

Page 35
Plans had been made for a gala concert in the main piazza, but Zubin was not on the program. The day before the concert, the student who was scheduled to conduct the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony did not show up for class. Word was sent that he was too ill to conduct.

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"Certainly, Maestro," Zubin replied.

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Refreshing his memory was not the problem. Zubin had never even looked at the Fifth Symphony before. But as he says, "You must be ready to take a chance when it is presented to you. And when you get those chances, you had better do well or you may not get any others."

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And at the concert the next evening, "Zubinwas a tremendous success. He knew every little note in the score."

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Besides learning new music, Zubin played tennis and Ping-Pong, thus filling a void created by the Viennese ignorance of the cricket he had loved in India. He also picked up a new language, Italian, with the ease born of switching from dialect to dialect in the streets and on the playgrounds of Bombay. The months in Siena passed infinitely more quickly than had his previous summer alone, and almost before he knew it he was back in Vienna.

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A British Army officer hit upon the idea of improving the spirits of the refugees by means of a concert, to which end he approached the directors of the Music Academy. An orchestra of volunteers was put together, with Zubin as conductor. The students were asked to assemble that same evening, to be taken by bus to the refugee camp, about fifty miles away in the province of Burgenland.

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Zubin was delighted that at last he would lead an orchestra by himself, not as one of a group of fledgling conductors. His first public concert. To his dismay, he opened his closet and found that both his pairs of shoes had holes in them. And it was snowing outside. He thought of wearing his boots, but they simply would not do for a young man stepping off on his career. Then he noticed that, of his four dress shoes, one right shoe and one left shoe had soles that were not quite worn through. They were not a pair, but at least they were both black. Better, he decided, than rubber boots.

Page 36
There was no Itage, so the students set up their music stands on the floor at one vnd of the hall. Zubin had no need of a podium, since he had ( hosen pieces he knew from memory: the Overture from Die Fledermaus; a Mozart violin concerto, with Terr) Gabora as soloist; the first movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony; and finally the Liszt Hungai i.m Rhapsod) no. 2.

Page 36
The applause for each piece was warm and enthusiastic, but at the conclusion of the Hungarian Rhapsody Zubin turned to see the people out of then seats, some (heeling, others hugging one another and crying. \ bearded priest made his way through the crowd to Zubin and

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threw his arms around him, kissing him on both cheeks and speaking words the young conductor could not understand. The old man faced the audience and said something that made them burst into cheers all over again; then, as the crowd fell silent, he made the sign of the cross over the orchestra, giving them his blessing. Suddenly Zubin felt outside of himself, looking on the scene with a strange mixture of involvement and detachment.

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Now even more than before, Zubin threw himself into the mainstream of Vienna's musical life. His growing proficiency on the double bass made him sought after as a substitute bass player in the secondary orchestras of Vienna. The money he earned provided occasional relief from the austere budget he was forced to live on, and the experience of watching other conductors at work was perhaps even more valuable.

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There was additional experience to be gained as a member of the Singverein. Zubin, who had been delighted when Claudio Abbado appeared to enroll in Swarowsky's conducting class, talked his friend into joining the chorus as well. They soon made a pact to attend only rehearsals of important conductors, not the routine practice sessions held by chorusmaster Reinholdt Schmidt. They delighted in singing under Josef Krips in Haydn's Creation, Erich Kleiber in Verdi's Requiem, and Bruno Walter in the Mozart Requiem. Fritz Reiner, Herbert von Karajan — they all conducted the Singverein that season. Then, rather abruptly, the halcyon days were over.

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Zubin was also being threatened with eviction from his apartment. Frau Mumb, whose rules about visitors were strict, caught Zubinbringing Carmen into the building one afternoon and launched into a tirade against the loose morals of foreigners and the younger generation that would have put a Victorian Englishman to shame. Since Zubin was a good deal fonder of Carmen than he was of the Mumbs, he decided it was time to

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Zubin and Carmen never even discussed living together, as several foreign "couples" among the music students were doing, but as the winter wore on toward 1957 they found themselves growing closer. With Carmen, more than with any other of his friends, Zubin shared his musical thoughts, shared the ideas about music that were taking root and shooting up in his mind. He also shared with her an increasing fondness for Vienna.

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On Christmas Eve the shops were dark, the streets deserted. Even the Staatsoper closed down — its only other dark night from the start of September till the end of June being Good Friday. Carmen, who was Catholic, took Zubinto midnight Mass at St. Stephen's and they joined in the singing of carols. Standing amid the forest of pillars, gazing at the Romanesque tapestry in stone, hearing German carols in the soft, lilting accent of Vienna, Zubin might have been on another planet from the one where he had grown up, where worship meant a few wellremembered prayers and a stick of sandalwood for the temple fire.

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On New Year's Eve the ritual was just as strict, and just as foreign to Zubin. At the Opera there was Die Fledermaus, in which the only change from year to year was the topical jokes of Frosch the Jailer, certain to bring down the house and embarrass the city fathers.

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Meanwhile, across the Ringstrasse, the Philharmonic played more Strauss — waltzes, polkas, and overtures — in its annual Neujahrskonzert, predu table as the evening's program at the Opera. From their standing loom positions, Zubin and Carmen could hear some of the comments from the old women who sat toward the back of the house. As concertmaster Willi Boskovsk) strode to the podium, one of them sighed, "Just like del Strauss himself.'1 "Dear Willi!'* exclaimed another, "this is always his moment."

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Boskovsk) had conducted the Neujahrskonzert ever since the death of Clemens Krauss. Wearing a turn-of-the-century morning coat with patterned waistcoat and striped pants, he conducted with his bow, as Mehli had done m Bombay, occasionally lifting the violin to his chin to play some lilting solo melody. Zubin watched Boskovsky, swaying in threequaitei tunc-, his eyes closed, and knew thai this must be the way to conduct fohann Strauss. Whether or not it was great music was

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core, the "Blue Danube." Zubin watched the audience cheering, crying jumping from their seats, and he felt certain that the Philharmonic would never invite anyone but a born-and-bred Viennese to conduct its New Year's Eve concert. That, at least, would be one goal he did not have to add to the goals he was rapidly accumulating for his still unborn career.

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As for Carmen's goals, they were no clearer in 1957 than they had been when she left Saskatoon a year and a half earlier. Nearly twentyfour now, she was content to let her voice guide her career as she let Zubin guide her life.

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Zubin, whose "projected ambition" was very strong, but still largely unfocused, kept on studying and absorbing as well. His repertoire was growing by leaps and bounds, alrcacU including main works by the great German and Austrian composers, from Bach to Berg, along with a number of pieces from the French and Russian schools.

Page 39
From Swarowsky Zubin had learned the theory of conducting, but, watching the great conductors at close quarters, he began to cross the bridge from theory to practice. Training an orchestra, he quickly learned, was one of the essentials of a conductor's trade. This he observed in Josef Krips's rehearsals.

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Zubin got to know the classical and romantic repertoire the way the Viennese played it, with their sensitivity to tone especially throughout the rich, mellow string sections. He listened and he listened to that sound till it became the only sound he wanted to hear.

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Indeed, the Vienna Philharmonic set its own standards of perfection. If the music was beautiful, the audience was happy. And the Philharmonic only played beautiful music. At any rate, could perfection ever be possible in anything so diverse and multiple as an orchestra? Zubin doubted that the ideal could be attained — until he heard an orchestra from Cleveland, Ohio.

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Zubin was discovering what any young artist must discover: that the \ei \ ( oik ej)t of "taste" implied limitations. If one's life was to be devoted to the ( real ion and interpretation of beauty, then one would have to see things in terms of being more beautiful Of less beautiful. Sometimes it seemed to him that, in Vienna at least, the relative merits of a piece of music might just as soon be detei mined by its relative German-ness, with Brahms somewhere neai the top of the scale and. saw Debussy some-

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Since the years in Vienna were the formative years for Zubin's musical taste, it would be strange had he not been influenced by the preponderance of German works among the city's annual output of music. There are probably some music lovers who would consider this growing bias for the German repertory an unfortunate shortcoming. Zubinwas aware of the bias, but he never saw it as anything but an advantage for himself as a young conductor.

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As the week of the concert drew near, Carmen reminded Zubin that he did not have a full-dress suit. In a panic, he went around to tailors and haberdashers, only to discover that he could not afford the price of a set of tails and trousers. Then he happened to see a group of waiters reporting to work one morning at the fashionable restaurant, Urbani Keller. They were resplendent in their white ties and tails, as though they were on their way to a wedding.

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Zubin ran up to the waiters and explained his situation, asking whether they knew of a place where he might buy tails at a bargain price. The waiters wrote down the name of a Volksladen, which outfitted him with a coat and trousers that fit perfectly, all for only about twenty-five dollars. Only when he arrived for the concert and compared himself to the other young conductors did he realize the reason for his good bargain. Someone had forgotten to stitch a pocket into his coat.

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and fellow students. Zubin and Claudio were only disappointed the next morning to find that no newspaper had sent a critic to review their debut performances.

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Three days later, however, one of their friends spotted their names in a column by Gerhard Bronner, a noted political satirist and cabaret performer. Unable to get tickets for the opera, Bronner had "stuck my head into the Musikverein to see what was going on." He continued at length about the young conductors and the high quality of musical training available in Vienna. Then, toward the end, Bronner mentioned that two of the young conductors, Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta, had given especially praiseworthy performances. The music circles of Vienna would do well to take notice of this young foreign talent, he wrote, for before very long the world would be hearing from them.

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It seemed as though everything was going well for Zubin and Claudio, almost too well. They returned to Siena that summer, expecting to take the town by storm.

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"I was slowly beginning to feel invincible," Zubin recalls with a laugh. "I just knew I was going to knock everybody dead in Siena. Then I found out that the conducting professor was not Carlo Zecchi again, but Alceo Galliera. He got my feet back on the ground, and fast."

Page 42
( .innm was not .ii the Accademia Chigiana to cheer Zubin's faltering spirits. She had c hosen this time to visit her parents in Saskatoon, parting c ompany from Zubin for the first time sine e they'd met. Fortunately, his brother Zai m arrived to illuminate the gloom.

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Zaun, doing quite well as an apprentice accountant, had earned a holiday and was spending it hitchhiking through southern Europe. He brought Zubin word thai their grandfathei , Nowrowji Mehta, had made the d( < ision to leave Bombay and join Mehli and Tehmina in Manchester.

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Zubin was deeply attached to his grandfather, who at the age of ninety-two was still riding the crowded double-decker buses to and from WOI k eai h day , still pursuing his hohh\ as a journalist and columnist for

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He told Zarin he was glad his grandfather would be able to meet Carmen. She had arranged to make her return trip through England to spend a few days with Mehli and Tehmina in Manchester. Zubin felt it was time they got to know each other, since she would likely be joining the family before long.

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Zarin did not pursue the matter of Zubin's affair of the heart. The two brothers were very close, but they had never discussed such personal matters. They talked rather of the things they could share — music, sports, and having a good time. And, oh yes, Zarin remembered something he had in his knapsack for Zubin.

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Zubin mailed in the application, thinking no more about Liverpool. With the end of the summer season, he bade farewell to the Accademia Chigiana, to Maestro Galliera, and to his friend Claudio. Back in Vienna, he joined up as a bass player with the orchestra of the Jeunesses Musicales, which was leaving for Paris.

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The Jeunesses Musicales, destined to play a large part in Zubin's first years as a struggling conductor, was an organization begun in Belgium and dedicated to fostering and encouraging a love of serious music in young people. By the mid-fifties, the Jeunesses had taken hold in practically every nation of Europe, and it was firmly established in the Viennese musical hierarchy. Zubin had been introduced to the organization's directors by Hans Swarowsky, who "just brought me over there one day and said, 'Here, take this guy. He's a conductor.'"

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The Jeunesses Musicales was planning a program for conductors, but their immediate interest in Zubin was as a bass player. He agreed to join the orchestra for its trip to Paris, where they played at the Sorbonne. Then he left the group and traveled to Manchester, where he met Carmen, saw his parents and his grandfather — and feasted on Indian food for the first time in nearly three years.

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Back in Vienna, Zubin was delighted to receive word that he'd been accepted in the Liverpool conducting competition. Each contestant was required to know all the compositions on a long list provided by the

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The 1910 composition makes a great many demands upon a large orchestra, complete with a bold array of percussion instruments and a pianoforte. Zubin had no idea how the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic might play it, but he felt that a young conductor might score a few points with the judges if he could demonstrate his control over so rich and complex a work.

Page 44
In the course of his preparation of Petrushka, Zubin read whatever he could get his hands on about the piece, its composer, the historical backgound — anything that might help him to a clearer understanding of the music and its proper interpretation. This was the way he studied any piece of music.

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The more he learned about the tragicomic character of Petrushka, the marionette with human feelings, the more he became fascinated with it as a subject for music. Petrushka was only one of his names, the Russian version; in French he was called Pierrot. It was only a matter of time before Zubin began investigating another musical treatment of the subject, this one by one of Hans Swarowsky's former mentors, Arnold Schonberg.

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Zubin found himself discussing Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire with Erwin Ratz, the president of the Mahlergesellschaft, the Mahler Society, in Vienna. Together they evolved a plan for Zubinto conduct a concert of the work, to be sponsored by the Mahler Society. Zubin threw himself into the task, his first job being to recruit the necessary musicians. He required a female voice and five instrumentalists playing eight instruments: one for flute and piccolo, another for clarinet and bass clarinet, another for violin and viola, a cellist, and a pianist.

Page 44
Zubin would work with the violinist for several hours, going over his pan measure b) measure. Then he would go over the same section with tin cellist, then both together, then he would add another instrument. \\v practiced each pari so thoroughly with each group that when they put it .ill together it worked perfectly.

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"She kept saying, 'I'll never do it, I'll never do it.' But Zubin told her, 'When you're nervous or scared, you must never admit that. Never even to yourself, let alone to anyone else.' "

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The Mahlergesellschaft hired the Brahmssaal, the small auditorium in the Musikverein where Mehli had given his recital in 1955. They voted also to pay each of the musicians a small fee for the performance, but Zubin did not expect to be paid.

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Zubin thought for a moment, and then he recalled Ratz speaking of a facsimile of Mahler's original score for Kinder totenlieder. Ratz had it under the bed in his tiny apartment, where he kept all the materials and records of the struggling Mahler Society.

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Suddenly Zubin and his ad hoc chamber ensemble were celebrities. The concert was a sellout and a critical success. Even the Austrian government took an interest. Zubin's group was asked to make a musical goodwill tour to Italy, in exchange for which the Italian government would send a similar chamber ensemble from Milan to Austria. Conducting the Milanese orchestra would be none other than Claudio Abbado. So Zubin embarked on his first tour, to Milan and Rome, with a twentieth-century program of Schonberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. Claudio's ensemble tempered Hindemith with the Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 3.

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Never one to shun companionship, Zubinbrought Carmen along and encouraged several of the instrumentalists to invite their girlfriends as well. Since the Austrian government was in part sponsoring the tour, these travel arrangements were bound to raise a few eyebrows.

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It was fortunate for Zubin that his reputation rested chiefly on his conducting rather than on his flouting of public morals. The concerts in Milan and Rome were applauded as a credit to Austria and to the Academy, as well as to Herr Hilbert's Cultural Institute. This was especially fortunate in that Hilbert was destined soon to become director of the Vienna Music Festival and, later, of the Staatsoper.

Page 46
"That upset me," says Zubin. "Of course, when you observe another human being so closely and you respect him, some of his conducting style is bound to rub off. Just like when you're a kid and you worship your father, so you make your signature like his. I suppose he was right in that criticism. But the man never said anything about the tempi or my handling of the great transition from the third movement to the finale of the Beethoven Fifth/'

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It had been Swarow sky's intention, once he was established, to hire Zubin as a bass player and assistant conductor. Meanwhile, he left Zubin in c harge of a group he had founded called the Haydn Orchestra.

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I his organization was to stive two purposes. First, it would keep Su an >\\ sky's ftx >t in Vienna's musical door. Second, it would serve as his entree into the re< ording business, since he was in the process of promoting the recording o\ a complete set of all 104 Haydn symphonies. Zubin was to rehearse the orchestra and to conduct its first public concert in Man h.

Page 46
1 hei c are 1 ondu< tors who ( an thrive on a diet of Haydn, but Zubin was not among them. He soon had the on hestra rehearsing pieces from the romantu and post-romantic literature, the music with which he felt most ,»t home.

Page 46
As Man h di cw neai . Swarovt sk\ w rote 1 equesting the program Zubin

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Swarowsky fired off an angry reply. Zubin could almost hear Swarowsky's voice bellowing with rage as he read, "Not what this orchestra is meant for. Get back to Haydn or else."

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Zubin reluctantly changed the program, keeping only the aria from the first foolhardy attempt. He tempered the Haydn-only decree by opening with a Mozart overture and violin concerto. The concluding work was Haydn's London Symphony.

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The performance at the Konzerthaus went quite well, with excellent notices, redeeming the pupil in the eyes of his master. In those days, unfortunately, Swarowsky could not do as well for Zubin in Glasgow as Zubin had done for him in Vienna.

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"When I proposed your name as assistant conductor," Zubin recalls Swarowsky writing him, "the board only wanted to know if your skin was dark. I told them I did not find you particularly so, but I don't think they believe me. They said, 'The father was very dark.' And that was the end of that."

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Racial and religious discrimination was becoming a matter of some concern to Zubin. He had seen it affect others, but now it was hitting home. Close on the heels of the snub from Scotland, he was approached by his landlady on the subject of his friend Amnon Zalmonovitz.

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"He's from Israel," answered Zubin innocently.

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Zubin was astonished to see her rise from her parlor chair, no longer the accommodating, gentle person he had known.

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Zubin backed away from her, still too stunned to speak. The next day he found another apartment, even though he would be moving again in only a few weeks, moving in with Carmen at last.

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Their summertime separation, their few days together with his family in Manchester, the unsettling encounters with landladies — all this reinforced a longing that was growing steadily in Zubin. He yearned for a woman to come home to, for the life of a family man. He was nearly

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"It more or less happened, I suppose," says Carmen now. "Zubin decided we'd get married sometime in the spring and I said all right."

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Getting the bride to say yes turned out to be the only easy part of the wedding arrangements. Had Zubin trusted his mother's faith in astrology, he might have seen the ensuing complications as portents of the problems that would lie ahead. As it was, he attacked and unraveled Viennese red tape with the determination he applied to a Schonberg score.

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To begin with, Austrian law required a civil wedding and Carmen's conviction required a church wedding, so there would have to be two ceremonies. This gave Zubin the opportunity to name two best men, violist Eddie Kudlak and Amnon Zalmonovitz, the Israeli singer.

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Setting a date was complicated by the resistance of the Dominican fathers of the Dominicanerkirche, the parish to which Carmen belonged. In the first place, they were not at all certain that "Parsee" was a religion, and, in the second place, canon law in 1958 would permit the couple to be married at the altar only if Zubin converted. Since he had no desire to become a Catholic, Carmen would have to settle for a brief ceremony in the sacristy — provided Zubin would promise to raise any children as Catholics. Zubin agreed, but reserved the right to give them Parsee names.

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"After we got the permission from the church, we went to an office to arrange for the ( ivil marriage. Oh, that would be very difficult, the clerk said. It would take him a good three weeks just to arrange the papers. It was ob\ ions that this man was going to make things very difficult. Zubin went back and forth with him. The man said, 'You don't understand,' and he took all his papers and showed them to us, one by one.

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"Finally Zubin said. Now listen. Hen Direktor, we've been here an hour and a half and you've done nothing but show me these papers that are going t<> take you three weeks. Now let me tell von something. I think that in the time we've been sitting here I could have filled out all these

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"Foi some reason the clerk thought that was very funny. He laughed a\\(\ laughed. I suppose no one had evei spoken so bluntly before to such a distinguished officer of the government. He decided he would do it. Zubin could always convince people to do things they didn'i want to do."

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Eventually, the day of the wedding arrived. First there was the civil ceremony, with the six-foot, five-inch Amnon Zalmonovitz towering a foot over his Indian friend as Zubin and Carmen said their jawohls. In the confusion Zubin had forgotten the ring and had to borrow a friend's.

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"We had sandwiches and cake. That was it. Zubin insisted on having chocolate cake — forget about tradition. He likes chocolate, so we must have chocolate cake. And on the top were these ridiculous little bride and groom figures.

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"Zubin had been running around for weeks trying to buy a groom with a black face. That's how he saw himself, you see. But he never could find one. Then out (onus the chocolate cake with its little white bride and a groom with his face colored in black shoe polish. It looked like the Moor of Vienna."

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The matter of marriage seemed like a lark to Zubin. If he had any notion of the responsibilities it would bring, he managed to keep it to himself. With the hundred-dollar check Carmen's parents sent, he purchased that most basic of newlywed needs, a phonograph.

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Obligingly, Zubin hauled out a suitcase huge enough to hold nearly all his belongings. Into that Carmen placed a neatly folded nightgown, Zubin's pajamas, toothbrushes, and a change of underwear for the morning. The bellboy's astonishment at the feathery weight of this leaden-looking luggage was exceeded only by his disappointment at the tip he received for lugging it to their room.

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After that briefest of honeymoons, Zubinlooked forward to May, when he would take his beautiful blond bride to England and new fields of conquest. Soon after what he hoped would be a victory in Liverpool, Zubin would be traveling to the United States, for both he and Claudio had been accepted as conducting students in the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, in Massachusetts.

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The Parsees believed that neither air, water, earth, nor fire should be contaminated by mortal remains, so they carried the bodies of their dead to the tower, marked on every map of Bombay, just up the shore from where Zubin had swum as a child.

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There were always birds there, gulls and kites, like a screaming cloud that hovered above the wooden platforms, where fragments of ancient fabric stuck and blew in the wind. Zubin knew that his grandfather would have wished to be left there to the beaks and talons of the birds, until there was no flesh to contaminate the earth, until his bones could be swept off the platform and finally, crushed by the weight of bone falling upon bone, become no more than dust, his soul free to cross the Kinvad Bridge into eternit\

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It was of little comfort to Zubin that his grandfather was not buried in the earth. Mehli and Tehmina had decided to follow Hindu custom since, there being nodakhmas in England, there were at least crematoria.

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Zubin found Liverpool prett) much ,is he'd imagined it. .1 drab, I.k toi \ -filled pl.K r. Vet m the springtime it had .« i ertain British charm

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The Englishman was standing in the rear of the orchestra as Zubin strode out to conduct his semifinal test, the third movement of Schubert's Fifth Symphony. This time, confidence soaring, he came out without a score. Things might have gone easier had he brought it along: just placing it unopened on the podium might have refreshed his memory as to the composer's name a; least.

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John Pritchard knew something was amiss, though he had no idea what. "Zubin started that movement at a very lethargic pace. The musical pulse was lacking and I thought, Well, he's in a mood or in a state or overly nervous."

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But when Zubin faced the orchestra and raised his arms, he was thinking of another classical symphony, Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G-minor, which was also on the long list of compositions the Liverpool contestants were supposed to have prepared.

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Unfortunately, whereas Schubert's tempo is allegro molto, Mozart's minuet is marked a significantly slower allegretto. Zubin heard Schubert's

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As soon as he reached the second beat of the first measure, Zubin realized his mistake. But once launched on the "lethargic pace" he had no choice but to continue that way until one of the judges might suggest he begin again. He saw the pained expression on the face of John Pritchard, knew that William Steinberg and the other judges must be having a good laugh out in the hall at his expense. But no one said a word. They let him go on until finally he reached the end of the movement. He walked offstage, agonizing over what he would tell his father, who had put up the hard-earned money for him to come all this way and conduct the wrong piece of music.

Page 52
On the verge of tears, Zubin moved away, saying brokenly, "Why on earth didn't you stop me?"

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Perhaps there is something to be said for taking the minuet of Schubert's Fifth at a snail's pace. After all, coaches and commentators use slow-motion videotape to analyze a football player's technique and execution, so why not the same approach forjudges of conducting competitions? At any rate, the judges were not moved to ridicule. In fact, when the names of the three finalists were read out, Zubin Mehta's was among them.

Page 52
There was a packed house for the final, public concert. Mehli could not be there — he was off on the Halle's first tour to eastern Europe — but I ehmina and Carmen had seats in the rear of the hall. There was a third seat saved for Zarin, but, this being the day of his intermediate accounting exam in London, there was little hope of his catching the last possible nam to Liverpool. Then, just as Zubin made his entrance, his brother eased into the seat, out of breath from running.

Page 52
Zarin squeezed his sister-in-law's hand for encouragement, but she onl) smiled nervousl) as Zubin bowed and stepped to the podium, again without a s( oie. \\ h\ . Carmen wondered, had the) given him something as worn and weatherbeaten as Beethoven's Fifth to conduct? What could he do with it that anyone with a record player and a baton couldn't manage almost as well? It was .i> though the judges had already made up

Page 52
In the ensuing two dec ades, Zubin has had a lot of time to go over that

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HansSwarowsky's conducting class at the Vienna Academy, 1956. Directly behind Zubin, at his lefl shoulder, is Qaudio Abbado; in front is Maestro Swarowsky

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An elated Daniel Barenboim embraces Zubinafter the Six-Day War Victory Concert in Jerusalem, 1967.

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\lici his Metropolitan Opera debut, Zubin is congratulated b) Mr. and Mrs. Vrtui Rubinstem .ind Madame Fandit, the Indian ambassadoi i<> the I nited States, as Franco Corelli

Page 53
Whether or not all those things occurred to Zubin when he heard his name called out is doubtful. As for Carmen, "My only thought was, Thank God." Tehmina rushed out to send a cable to her husband.

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"Zubin wins competition!" he read, his high-pitched voice sounding almost girlish in his excitement.

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from Tehmina, who put Zubin on the line. It was as good a moment as there would ever be, Zubin decided, to break the other news. After all, now he had a job and a steady income to count on.

Page 54
Tehmina's jaw in Manchester and Mehli's jaw in Prague dropped as one. Though they had grown to love Carmen as their own daughter, and had even convinced themselves that the astrologer must have been wrong about this marriage not lasting, they had prayed that Carmen and Zubin would wait to start a family.

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To conduct, one required an entire orchestra, and what Western city would be inclined to trust its orchestra to a young unknown from Bombay? The Liverpool assistantship was a good beginning, but what about when the year was over? What sort of security could Zubinoffer a wife, let alone a wife and child?

Page 54
Zubin did little to set his parents' minds at ease when, after getting Carmen registered in the National Health Service in Manchester, he borrowed the money she'd saved and bought an airplane ticket for the United States. Expectant father or no, Zubin had to open a door when opportunity knocked. And he thought he heard opportunity knocking at Tanglewood.

Page 54
Mehli Mehtds introduction to the I'nited States in 1945 had been a sort of culture shock, as a man whose entire life had been spent in India was suddenly swept up in the unsympathetic currents of New York City. For Zubin, thirteen years later, the firsl meeting was almost too good to be true. He had not imagined th.it an American music festival and summer academy could be held in surroundings as idyllic as those at Tanglewood.

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Zubin and Claudio Abbado found themselves in a setting that nature seemed to have intended for the making of music. From rolling lawns they looked out over tranquil Lake Mahkeenac, like liquid crystal gathered in the bottom of a mountain bowl. At one end of the 210-acre estate was the Music Shed, where the Boston Symphony performed, at the other end the Theater, where they would rehearse and conduct the student orchestra.

Page 55
The student musicians, nearly four hundred strong, were gathered through auditions held by the Boston Symphony in cities all across the country; others, like Zubin, came from abroad on the recommendation of recognized authorities in the international music world.

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Zubin was immediately impressed by these so-called students; the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra was as good as or better than many of the professional orchestras he had heard in Europe. Coupled with the expertise the young musicians had gained in the best conservatories and music schools was a vitality, an enthusiam for music that was undimmed by the disenchantments of the professional musician's life. "It was," he says, "an exhilarating experience for me."

Page 55
Much later, Zubin discovered that Charles Munch had indeed been paying very close attention to the young man from India who stood with his feet apart, but at Tanglewood Zubin's compliments came only from less influential sources.

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the amazing crop of young conductors. Not the visitors, of course, who came with their picnic suppers to commune with nature and to hear the Boston Symphony under the stars. But the students, at the beach and in the dormitories, discussed the prodigious talent evident in Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado, and David Zinman (who would go on to conduct the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and the Rochester Philharmonic). The orchestra members were particularly impressed with Zubin's handling of Richard Strauss's Don Juan and Schonberg's Chamber Symphony.

Page 56
"I have my own definition of a conductor's job," says Foss. "First, he must be a detective, finding the trouble spots at rehearsals; then he must be a doctor, diagnosing the trouble and finally curing it. That makes a good conductor. It usually takes many years to learn, but Zubinhad that from the start, which seemed incredible to me.

Page 56
Zubin spent six weeks in the Berkshires, totally immersed in music. He worked with students and professionals in interpretation, technique, and theory. He worked in studios in the gabled Main House, in the East and West Barns, in unfinished sheds scattered about the grounds, in the rehearsal hall, which consisted of a stage and no space for an audience.

Page 56
One of the great lessons of Tanglewood for Zubin was the value of ensemble playing in an orchestra. The string students were together virtually every moment of the da) . as were the winds, the brass, and the percussionists. Communication, awareness of the other members, "team spirit" — these things c ame about of themselves and produced an ensemble sound that could not help but be appreciated by the audience. On the bulletin board backstage at the Theater, someone had posted a sign that read, "Remember, the ( )ic hestra That Plays Together Stays Together." I he sign was still there in 1 *J76.

Page 57
At the end of the second week in August, the festival was over and prizes were awarded. In the conducting class, the first-place Koussevitzky Prize went to Claudio Abbado, while Zubin won the runner-up Gertrude Robinson Smith Prize.

Page 57
After the awards presentation, Zubin found himself sitting in the cafeteria with Lukas Foss, who complimented him highly on his work with the student orchestra. Zubin thanked the older man, but there was a sadness in his dark eyes. He had hoped that, somehow, something would come of his Tanglewood experience, that Tanglewood would lead to something greater, as the Liverpool competition had. Now that he appreciated the potential of American orchestras — as demonstrated by the Berkshire students — Zubin hated to leave the United States without establishing some more permanent connection.

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Finally he looked at the composer and said, "Lukas, what am I to do? Everybody says I am good and nobody does anything." Zubin was complaining to the right man.

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"I suppose," says the composer, "that it doesn't really take talent to discover talent — all it takes is a little generosity and knowledge. Anyway, when Zubin spoke to me like that I said to myself, 'So nobody docs anything . . . let's do something.'"

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On his way to the airport in New York, Zubinstopped at the address Lukas Foss had given him and was ushered into Siegfried Hearst's private office. The manager looked over the materials Zubin had with him, then asked about his previous experience and his musical background.

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The flight to London was long and choppy but, for Zubin, no more than a brief, smooth soaring above the clouds and into a stratosphere of great expectations. A manager in New York. An orchestra in Liverpool. Something of a name already in Vienna. There seemed to be no limits to what he could accomplish, and it would be on a grand, international scale.

Page 59
He met Carmen at his parents' flat in Manchester and they went on to Liverpool, about an hour away by train, Zubin talking the whole way of

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Perhaps it was the weather that made him see Liverpool in a different light the second time around. The encroaching gray of autumn gave the place a bare, monochromatic look it hadn't worn in May. Approaching the city, there were no flowers to be seen, no cheery buds on the hawthorn and lilac, no golden branches of laburnum. Blocks of dour flats flashed by, looking to Zubin like rows of condemned prisoners.

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Zubin saw in Liverpool an amalgamation of Bombay and Vienna. There was a certain vitality about the place, as well as an international feeling, as there had been in Bombay. One could walk the busy streets of the shipping district and hear smatterings of conversations in languages ranging from Chinese to Portuguese.

Page 60
How such a place had come to have its own orchestra, and one with so pretentious a name as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Zubincould not understand. Perhaps his burgeoning prejudices were nothing more than his ow n inset unties rising to the surface, a thing he could ill afford at so crucial a Stage in his career. So, imprisoning any doubts he might have in the deepest dungeon of His soul, Zubin girded himself in the self-assurance thai was his only armor and reported to John Pritchard.

Page 60
In the earl) Stages of their meeting, Zubin's positivism appeared to be paying off. He was to spend a good deal of time rehearsing the or( hestra, said the maestro. He was to conduct not one but twenty concerts over the season, some in Liverpool and some "on tour." If all went well, Zubin would be invited back for another season .is guest conductor, perhaps even .is an associate-.

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Zubin tensed in his chair. He had seen this happen a few times in Vienna, the conductor leaving the preparation of his concerts to his assistant. Invariably this would involve a work the orchestra had played so many times that everybody — the conductor, the musicians, probably even the audience — was tired of hearing it. How could an inexperienced assistant conductor breathe new life into a work under those circumstances?

Page 61
They were, in fact, three scores Zubin had never seen. Only one of them, Richard Strauss's tone poem Ein Helderdeben, had he even heard. The other two, Edward Elgar's First Symphony and Arnold Schonberg's Variations for Orchestra, he had only heard of.

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"Not to worry," assured the music director, showing Zubin to the door. The orchestra had played the Elgar a few years back, and recently they'd made something of a specialty of the modern stuff in their Musica Viva concerts, so neither the Strauss nor the Schonberg ought to give them much trouble. Zubin walked out of the meeting not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

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The Elgar, he saw soon enough, was late romanticism, with perhaps a good deal to recommend it had one the opportunity to interpret its nuances properly. The Heldenleben was a gigantic, epic triumph of postromanticism, of course. The sort of thing that was bread and butter for the Viennese. How the Royal Liverpudlians would play it, Zubin could not be certain.

Page 61
The Schonberg was another matter altogether. Zubin saw little chance,

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From the outset the orchestra members treated him as their inferior, giving him none of the respect a conductor requires from his players. Today, Zubin looks back on the experience with regret.

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Rehearsing the Variations for Orchestra was just the beginning of what has proved to be a less than satisfying relationship between Zubin and the musical "system" of England.

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Though Zubin was to have later experiences that would contradict his ou n bias against "the English bias," at the time circumstances seemed to be conspiring against him in Liverpool. He saw himself as a twenty-twoyear-old apprentice trying to drum into a hostile orchestra a piece as potentially bewildering as the Schonberg Variations, the first stricdy

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Under these circumstances, Zubin took his reluctant orchestra to such "important music centers" as Bedford, Rochdale, and Sheffield, traveling by bus through dots on the map with curious names: Newton le Willows, Snake Inn, Ashton under Lyne, and Ramsbottom. In fact, he spent more time traveling with the orchestra than rehearsing them.

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The one-rehearsal problem was only for the handful of concerts Zubin actually conducted in Liverpool. In the coal mining and manufacturing towns, where presumably the audience mattered less, Zubin was allowed to pick things both he and the orchestra knew, so th.it each "provincial" concert might not require its own full rehearsal. This tactic led to another problem for Zubin.

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"But that girl was so beautiful," Zubin says, laughing, "I just got enraptured with her and started flirting with her backstage."

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Suddenly Zubin became aware of the absence of music. He looked up and saw Pritchard glaring in his direction. Pushing the girl away, he hissed, "Scream!" As so often happens when opera is heard and not seen, the audience missed the best part of the action.

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Today John Pritchard maintains that he and Zubin had a very close, personal relationship in Liverpool, but Zubin feels he did not receive the guidance he required from his own music director, and searched elsewhere.

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His father, of course, was an even shorter train ride away, just under an hour. Zubin began spending less and less time in Liverpool and more and more time in Manchester, where he could be near Sir John Barbirolli as well.

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A characteristic ally friendly man who believed strongly in the importance of close family ties, Sir John admired the obvious affection between Zubin and his father, who had become a trusted and important member of the violin section of the Halle Orchestra.

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Yet, as Zubin sat in the drafty hall, absorbing Barbirolli's expertise, he became aware of a strange aura of disrespect that rose from the orchestra, no matter how lovely their playing might sound.

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Zubin knew that his father felt unappreciated in the Halle organization. Mehli corresponded regularly with his old teacher, Ivan Galamian, in New York, and in his letters there was always the question, "When are you going to find me a position in the United States?" Around the house they talked often of North America, and Mehli insisted that one day he would be playing his violin there, perhaps even in Philadelphia, but it was for Zubin, not Mehli, that North American opportunity knocked.

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Zubin had all but given up on getting any work through his manager in New York when a cablegram arrived from Siegfried Hearst's office informing him that he was to conduct a radio concert of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in March of 1959. That was hard enough to believe, but upon reading further Zubin discovered that the fee for this concert was to be five hundred dollars, no expenses paid. That wouldn't begin to cover his expenses. How was he supposed to get to Toronto?

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At his father's suggestion, Zubin went to London to see Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the High Commissioner for India and a sister of Nehru's. Mrs. Pandit received him warmly, having heard an Indian had won the international conducting competition in Liverpool. When Zubin explained his plight, the lady did not even pause to consider, nor to indulge in any of the red tape so natural to embassies.

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"I couldn't believe it," says Zubin. "I just told her what I wanted, and she said, 'So, of course.' They paid for my entire trip. I'll never forget that."

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There was still the matter of taking time off in March from his duties in Liverpool. What with travel and rehearsals, he had better ask for two weeks. The orchestra's manager came back with word that Mr. Pritchard did not mind if Zubin took off a week in March, the next-to-last month of his assistantship.

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Since there was not much time to prepare a program and send it to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for approval, Zubinhad to act quickly. There would be a pianist to perform the Beethoven C-minor Concerto. Something to open with, an overture perhaps, but nothing ordinary or in any way lightweight — there couldn't be anything of the student about him. The Brahms Tragic Overture was agreed upon for the opening. And for the featured work, something he knew, something the orchestra knew, yet not something the Canadian radio audience would know too well. Running down the list of works in the CBC Symphony's catalogue, he was delighted to find Petrushka. Not something one expects

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In the meantime, there was still the matter of finishing out his time with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Among his remaining concerts was Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique. It was during a rehearsal of this work that Zubin received a call from Manchester informing him that Carmen had given birth.

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The next morning Zubin returned to Liverpool, thinking of anything but tin Tchaikovsk) Sixth. By the evening's performance, his thoughts

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The Pathetique requires a good deal of pulling together if the whole is to be greater than the sum of its parts. The bombast, the self-pity, the vulgarities and sentimentalities will prick away at the overall strength and beauty of the work if a conductor lets it get away from him, which is precisely what happened to Zubin that night. It turned into possibly the worst concert of his career.

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The Laskys ended their visit and returned to Saskatoon, well in time to switch on their radio and listen to their son-in-law conduct the CBC Orchestra from Toronto. In Montreal the broadcast was heard by Zubin's old friends Eugene Husaruk and Eddie Kudlak, now both members of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Zubin had no time for reunions with family or friends, since it was a brief stay, crammed with rehearsals. But he did have time to extend his high opinion of United States orchestras to include those of Canada, although his first contact was not one to inspire confidence in a young conductor.

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Clearly, the sharing of musical experience that had brought them together was no longer a staple of their life. Even if Zubin had wanted to burden Carmen with his career decisions, she had problems enough of her own, caring for the bab\ .

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Considering the financial pressures, Zubinmight have agreed to put up with another season in Liverpool for the sake of an income. However, Destinv was hurrying him out of England with no more ado than his arrival had caused.

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Nearly twenty years later, the two conductors, Mehta and Pritchard, would look back on that Liverpool season of 1958-59 from quite different vantage points. In the course of those two decades, the pupil has outdistanced the master in terms of public recognition, and to Pritchard, if not to Zubin. th.it success is due in some small part to the experience he gained as an assistant.

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"I'm sure he did learn a good deal about the repertory/' says Pritchard. He was quick at it and so on. But," he continues, "I must be frank. The talent of Zubin Mehta didn't really need that year with the Royal Livei pool Philharmonic ."

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Confronted with that statement, Zubin shakes his head and says, "If you must know, I was not good enough for some of those things he threw at me. How would he know anyway? I don't think he attended one of my concerts."

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"I often attended his concerts," counters the Englishman. "Why, I remember particularly a Beethoven Seventh he did very early on. That symphony is very difficult for young conductors, but Zubin did a marvelous job of it."

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"I conducted my first Beethoven Seventh in 1961," Zubin says, "two years after I left Liverpool."

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When the Liverpool season ended, Pritchard called his assistant into the office and said that, although he would have preferred it otherwise, he could not invite Zubin back the following year. The musicians, he felt, did not enjoy working under him.

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In the spring of 1959, Zubin and Carmen found themselves overwhelmed by melancholy in Vienna, the city that had given them so much happiness together. There was nothing different about the city; it was their own Stimmung that kept them from enjoying the budding limes and lindens, that made it hard to delight in reunions with old friends.

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In the first months back, Zubin could do little but make the rounds of his former friends and professors in an effort to get his name circulating again. He could not actually bring himself to ask for work, but only hoped that by seeing him again someone would be prompted to hire

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His most realistic hope seemed to be the Jeunesses Musicales, whose directors were still quite certain that derlnder was a protege. They invited him to "guest-conduct" one of their concerts. The fee was modest, almost to the point of embarrassment, but Zubin was in no position to refuse.

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What he could not do, however, was go back to his odd jobs as a bass player. His student and apprentice days were gone, and Zubin had to sever as many ties to that past as he could. He knew he could not play last-chair bass in an orchestra one week and the next week be invited to conduct that orchestra.

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When summer arrived Zubin traveled to Salzburg for the music festival. The New York Philharmonic was making a number of guest appearances there under its young director, Leonard Bernstein, and he wanted to see what he might be able to pick up from watching this man who was making so many headlines in the music world.

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At Salzburg he ran into Seymour Lipkin, one of the many American musicians who had befriended him at Tanglewood. Lipkin had come along to join the New York Philharmonic in Bernstein's^^ of Anxiety Symphony, with its demanding piano part. When Zubin told the pianist of his interest in Bernstein, Lipkin said, "How would you like to meet him?" The offer delighted Zubin, though he would not realize until sometime later that the chance meeting with Lipkin was another of those curious "coincidences" thai made it seem as though Fate, Ahura Mazda, or some other superhuman entity was playing an active role in the formation of Zubin Mehta's career.

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From the Fust meeting, there seemed to be a rapport between the two conductors. '1 only expected to meet him," Zubin recalls, "just to say hello. But he was vei \ ni( e and started to ask me about what I had done. Fll never forge! that meeting because he had every right to say, 'Here's another young conductor bothering me.' But he didn't.

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introduced him to another conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had preceded Bernstein on the New York podium. As Barbirolli had done in Manchester, the Greek maestro developed an instant liking for Zubin and took him under his wing.

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There was nothing official about their relationship, but Mitropoulos was ever ready to help with whatever musical advice Zubin asked him for. As for Zubin's feelings toward Mitropoulos: "I came to adore that man, as a conductor, but most of all as a human being."

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But when he told Mitropoulos of having spoken to Bernstein regarding an assistantship in New York, the old man's eyes narrowed and he became very serious. "Listen to me," he said. "You may be starving now, but don't you ever take a job as anybody's assistant again. If you do, you'll regret it later." Zubin respected the advice but doubted he'd be able to follow it. Starving alone is one thing, but starving with one's wife and children is another matter.

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As for his American agent, Zubin was uncertain whether he would ever hear from the busy Mr. Hearst. Then, early one morning, he was awakened by a telephone call from the United States that proved Hearst had not forgotten.

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On the contrary, Zubin was very much on Siegfried Hearst's mind in those days. In fact, attests the manager's former assistant, Joan Bonime Glotzer, "Mr. Hearst used to talk about Zubin Mehta to anybody who would listen."

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One of those who listened was none other than Leopold Stokowski, the maestro who had provided Mehli with one of his most thrilling experiences in music, the man whose recordings Zubin had listened to in Bombay, hour after hour, as a surrogate for his father's music. In the late fifties, Siegfried Hearst was acting as Stokowski's agent in New York.

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Although neither of the men had ever heard or seen Zubin conduct — indeed, Stokowski had never even met him — they shared a feeling that this unknown youngster from Bombay was destined for greatness. They agreed that the time was ripe for his debut in the United States.

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Zubin never found out about that phone call, never learned that he owed his United States debut to the generosity of Leopold Stokowski. And when his telephone rang in those hours before dawn, he had no idea who Fredric Mann might be. As soon as he heard the words "Philadelphia Orchestra," though, Zubin was wide awake. It made no difference to him that the fee would be only five hundred dollars; there was simply no way he would turn down an opportunity to conduct one of the world's great orchestras for his first concert in the United States.

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For Zubin, as for many artists, this was the "middle period," the seemingly inevitable letdown. After the years of youthful enthusiasm, of self-discovery, of recognition of his own peculiar genius, of eager development, he had come to the point at which further development was meaningless without some symbols of success.

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Those symbols — public acclaim, critical recognition, and a viable income — seemed very slow in coming. In the meantime there was nothing to do but stretch the borrowed money as far as it would go and borrow more when that ran out. Since he didn't drink, Zubin could not even drown his Zweifel in cheap young wine at the Heurigen. He could only wait. Wait a few more weeks to hear from the embassy. Wait for tomorrow's mail to bring good news.

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And suddenly there was good news. A letter from Siegfried Hearst's office announced that after his concert in Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell Zubin would be required to stay in the United States through July, to conduct the New York Philharmonic.

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Hearst's letter stated that the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts, the sanctified summer series in New York City, were in need of a conductor to fill in for Leopold Stokowski, whose health would permit him to conduct only one of the four stadium concerts he'd scheduled. Between the lines, Zubin read that Hearst had booked the dates knowing full well Stokowski would conduct no more than one. The dates were in July, just following the Dell concerts in Philadelphia.

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Zubin could hardly believe it: the Philadelphia and New York orchestras in one summer! It was an opportunity he would never have dreamed of. Naturally, the fee would again be low, on account of the nature of the concerts, but no matter how badly he needed the money, the fee could not be a major consideration.

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Zubin dashed off a letter to Hearst, thanking him and asking him for program suggestions. He thought of mentioning that he had no money to get to the United States, since that might prompt Hearst to lend him the fare, but he decided not to bring it up. The less anyone in the profession knew of his financial difficulties the better. Let him be thought of, especially on the far side of the Atlantic, as a rising star untarnished by experience.

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Artists are notorious for failing to plan, to establish clear and attainable goals for themselves. Up until now, Zubin had been no exception. His life had gone where his career had taken him and the career path had been determined by chance encounters and blind steps. Now he began to perceive a direction and that direction was Westward.

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In early February, Zubin had a solitary concert in Belgium, once again courtesy of the Jeunesses Musicales. When he walked off stage to applause after conducting Stravinsky's Pulcinella, he was handed a telegram. Carmen had picked that night to go into labor. They had a son.

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Word went through the orchestra quickly, and throughout the next work, Hindemith's Der Schwanendreher, every time he gave a cue to a musician Zubin was greeted with a silently mouthed "Congratulations."

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Zubin regretted that his wife could no longer share the cheap and abundant music making of Vienna, but he was not about to deny his own pleasure. Carmen found herself growing resentful.

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If communication had been poor in Liverpool, it was nonexistent in Vienna. Zubin knew something was wrong, but he never quite fit the piei es together. Carmen had no thought at all of the self-doubt that was creeping over Zubin as a result of his failure to make any progress.

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"Whatever difficulties Zubin was having, I was not aware of them. Probably I was not even aw air of my own psychological difficulties because m\ life was so extremely physical."

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At last, when Merwan was about ten weeks old, Zubin put forward a suggestion he'd been holding back for some time.

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"My reaction was one hundred percent physical. I was so tired that the thought of having my mother and father to look after me and my children was very agreeable. And for Zubin, the thought of being physically removed from the responsibility must have been very attractive."

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Zubin watched Carmen and the children depart for Canada — on a ticket sent by her father — with a great deal of regret. Yet he'd convinced himself that, under the circumstances, this was the best way to meet his paternal responsibilities. He would rejoin them in just a few months, and meanwhile he would soak up whatever Vienna had to offer.

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As he never failed to do, Zubin got himself admitted to the Musikverein for Walter's rehearsal of the Mahler Fourth Symphony. Sitting behind his old bass professor Otto Ruhm, Zubin was entranced by the way the dirigent made the orchestra play this still-neglected music.

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When the first rehearsal session ended and the musicians tiled off stage for their break, Zubinstayed behind. He watched the old man move to a corner of the stage, where, wiping his brow, he slumped down on a bench. The two conductors were alone in the Musikvemn.

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After that rehearsal and the first concert, Zubinwas introduced to Bruno Walter. As was the case so often in Zubin's early career, a rapport was established between the older conductor and the younger man, and as Zubin recalls, "As with Mitropoulos, a rather touching relationship started between us."

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Halina Rodzinski recounts in her book Our Two Lives a story of Walter's attempt to destroy a rehearsal of her husband's Paris debut when Artur Rodzinski stayed four minutes more than his allotted time in the hall. Walter was certainly not famous for helping young conductors along. Yet he was ready to advise Zubin at any moment, immersing him in Mahler. The baptism was to have profound results on the course of Zubin's musical life.

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Not only was Mahler supposed to have stolen his musical ideas from other more "respectable" composers, but even greater ridicule was heaped upon him for "stealing from himself — taking themes from his early compositions and working them into new forms. The Viennese seemed to forget that virtually every great composer has done the same. As a student, Zubin had made a game of detecting Mahler's "crimes"; now he went beyond the obvious in an effort to understand the composer in all his complexity.

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Zubin remembered well a story told by his bass professor, Otto Ruhm, handed down from his professor, who had played under Mahler. According to the story, whenever Mahler's assistant was seen carrying scores of Tchaikovsky or Wagner or other operas up to his master's room, someone would gibe, "Aha! The director must be composing again!"

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It was easy for Zubin to forget the agony of waiting and seal himself in the cosmic envelope of Mahler. For the First time he understood the man's genius for orchestration and precise coloring. He paid rapt attention as Bnmo Walter pointed out to the orchestra Mahler's intricate Indications of tempo and dynamics.

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The second letter was from Leonard Bernstein, inviting Zubin to come to New York and work as his assistant in the 1960-61 season. It began to look as though the waiting was finally over.

Page 77
"My parents were ecstatic that we were all going to America," Zubin recalls. "My father was tired of the hardships of the Halle orchestra, sick of the climate, tired of living on twenty pounds a week. My mother had grown up in a wealthy family with five servants in her house. I saw her in Manchester having to carry the heavy coal bucket herself from the cellar. And she just couldn't take the cold. The English didn't believe in central heating — only little stoves with bricks in them. The only time my mother was warm was when she was sitting next to the stove. They were very glad to see the end of Manchester, even though my father and Barbirolli had a great love for one another."

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Things were beginning to turn around. After the bleakest of winters, spring of 1960 found Zubinready to conquer America. He had been there in 1958 as a student, but in 1960 he would be recognized as a professional conductor.

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Upon his arrival in Philadelphia, Zubin was somewhat chagrined to find that he had been scheduled for only one rehearsal. But, as he soon learned, "with the Philadelphia Orchestra one rehearsal was time to spare." The musicians took to him almost instantly.

Page 78
At first, when he walked onto the stage and set his scores down unopened, there were a few smiles; American orchestras were already fed up with boyish Toscanini imitators who felt constrained to ape his scoreless conducting — that was usually their only resemblance to the Maestro. But when the voting Indian began conducting the Overture to Verdi's La Forxa del Destino, slashing the air with the first three brass chords, they knew Zubin Mehta was something special.

Page 78
Rudolf Firkusn) wassoloisi in the Beethoven, and the musicians noted the spontaneous rappon thai seemed to spring up between the young ( oihIik tOl and the wteran pianist. Zubin had heard him play in Vienna, but the) had never met.

Page 79
Under Stokowski, the orchestra's records for the Victor Talking Machine Company dated as far back as 1917, when Zubin's father was only nine. Eugene Ormandy's tenure in Philadelphia began in 1936, the year of Zubin's birth. The two conductors had built the orchestra into one of the world's foremost music institutions. As a consequence, debuting in Philadelphia carried a potential for disaster, and, as Zubin admits, "I was scared stiff."

Page 79
That evening, under the stars in the lovely Robin Hood Dell, Zubin Mehta made his professional conducting debut in the United States. As the critic for Musical America was to write later, it was "a sensational success" for the "youthful and unheralded conductor."

Page 79
The audience cheered, calling Zubin back for bow after bow, and — as more than one reviewer noticed — the orchestra cheered, too. Mehli and Tehmina spent the next day clipping newspaper reviews, all of them raves. Most impressive, perhaps, was the evaluation of the city's dean of music critics, Max de Schauensee.

Page 79
Even Zubin, his own worst critic, admits that "the concert in Philadelphia went quite well." But his stay in the City of Brotherly Love was brief; it was on to the Big Apple, which, as many performers have mixed their metaphors in pointing out, is a tougher nut to crack

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This was the lions' den into which Zubinwalked on July 25, 1960, to rehearse such pieces as the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Till EulenspiegeVs Merry Pranks, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, and various operatk arias — all for the first time. More experienced men have crumbled under less pressure, yel with Zubinthe greater the risk, the more forceful and winning his personalis became. In the end, the New York lions were eating out of His hand, purring as benignly as had the musicians from Quaker Cit) the week before.

Page 80
Yet, by virtually all published m i ounts, the concerts just didn't seem to jell. "I never did understand that,'1 ponders Zubin, "the reviews were uniformly bad. I must say, I certainly didn't know how to accompany those operatk excerptSi and the) went very badly. Yet I seem to recall that Bart ok \ Com erto for Orchestra and Till Eulenspiegel went very well." I here were to have been three concerts, on the twenty-sixth, twentyteventh, and twenty-eighth of July, with mezzo-soprano Stevens, pianist John Browning, and cellist Aldo Parisol the soloists for each of the three evenings, When rain ( aiu eled the se< ond coin ert, most of thai program

Page 81
The concerts were unquestionably not the disaster Zubin remembers, yet his New York debut was certainly less than the resounding success he'd had in Philadelphia, as far as the critics were concerned. The remarks of those New York critics are worth examining.

Page 81
The reviews were certainly unfavorable enough, yet in ea< h of them one can see the seeds of what many critics (including al least one of the aforementioned) were later to proclaim as the essence of Zubin Mehta \ greatness: his ability to cull from a piece of music something new and revealing. He always had ideas about music.

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The critical attitude that emerges most prominently is one of discomfort; they simply did not yet know what to make of Zubin Mehta. Apparently, they even doubted their own evaluations of him, else how could the same critics have written in the same reviews:

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Solid rehearsal technique; respect and absolute command of the orchestra; the ability to extract his conception of the music from a potentially hostile group of players; excitement . . . these are the qualities the early critics saw, the qualities other critics would begin to see in every Zubin Mehta concert. And before long the roar of the crowd would deafen any grumbles of uncertainty about his musical ideas.

Page 82
After the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, Zubinhad a talk about his career with Siegfried Hearst, whose only advice was "Don't worry." He asked about Zubin's plans for the immediate future.

Page 82
Zubin checked the bus schedules and discovered that traveling by way of Montreal was probably the simplest way to get to Saskatoon anyway. Besides, his two friends Eddie Kudlak and Eugene Husaruk were playing in the Montreal Symphony now. There was a stopover of several hours between buses, so he'd probably have time to look them up as well. Had it not been for them, he probably would not have agreed to call on the symphony manager. He had never so blatantly solicited work before, and found the very idea of asking for work repulsive. But the bus did go through Montreal. . . .

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up-and-coming soloists and conductors, he filed their names away for possible future use. One such file was labeled "Mehta, Zubin: Conductor."

Page 83
Had Zubin postponed his trip to Canada by one more day, a lot of things might never have happened. Had there been no delay between buses, had his friends from Vienna found jobs in some other orchestra.. . but, as usual, the stars were right for Zubin.

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"I was about to hang up again — of course, I assumed it was just one of the local hopefuls — when she told me, 'He says Maestro Munch told him to look you up.' I said, 'Munch? Wait a minute, what's this fellow's name?' And she said, 'Zubin Mehta.' Naturally, she pronounced it all wrong, but I recognized the name immediately; I had just finished reading about him.

Page 83
' 'You mean that Zubin Mehta is outside my office right now and he wants to see me?' She said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Well, I suppose you had better send him in.'"

Page 83
Beique welcomed Zubin warmly, asking what brought him to Montreal, how the concerts in New York had gone, about the season in Liverpool.

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Zubin treated the meeting rather matter-of-factly, recalling later that "Mr. Beique had heard of my concerts in Philadelphia and New York and he was very friendly. But he said he had nothing to offer me because his season was only six weeks away and of course it was already filled. We talked for about an hour and I left. I had to get to Saskatoon to see my wife and children."

Page 84
She had let herself believe the pleasant fiction that everything would be fine once she recuperated from the pressures of early motherhood. Zubin, of course, would manage to keep them all fed and clothed when they got back to Vienna. But Zubin had reacquainted himself with freedom from responsibility and was not sure he was ready to pick up where they'd left off.

Page 84
After two weeks in Saskatoon, Zubin decided they should all go to Philadelphia in September so Mehli and Tehmina could see the children. Playing the old and easy game of follow-the-leader, Carmen left the decision to her husband.

Page 84
Once Zubin made up his mind to something, his enthusiasm for the idea infected everyone around him. A priest who was a friend of the Lasky family, as well as an art scholar, declared that he would drive them all to Philadelphia. He had always wanted to visit the Rodin Museum there, and this would be as good a time as any to make the trip.

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Into an aging black Plymouth they piled, a priest, a Parsee conductor, a soprano turned housewife, two children, and their attendant baggage. Zubin, who hadn't yet the vaguest notion of how to drive, sat in the front seat with Zarina, reading maps. Carmen shared the rear seat with Merwan and his crib.

Page 85
the children in the back seat and washed out diapers in roadside streams. Zubin pointed out the scenic wonders in endless fascination.

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Zubin's concerts in Linz were not until mid-October, and his only work after that was another series of provincial concerts in Graz, in southern Austria. His plan was to spend about one month with Mehli and Tehmina before heading for Europe. Since the Philadelphia Orchestra's season was about to start, Zubinlooked forward to eating his mother's cooking and to attending some of Eugene Ormandy's concerts.

Page 85
Until that point, the assumption had been that Carmen and the children would be returning to Vienna with him, but Zubin was beginning to wonder if this was such a good idea. The hypothesis that two could live as cheaply as one had been disproven, especially when two became four. He was loath to separate again from the children, to whom he had grown firmly attached, but what would be the purpose of dragging the entire family back to Europe? At least in Canada they could be warm and comfortable and have enough to eat. Carmen's parents seemed willing enough to help for the time being, and he would send them money whenever he could.

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But at that point Carmen was not about to give up. Though even Mehli and Tehmina urged her to return to Saskatoon, she feared she might never see Zubin again. Neither she nor Zubinunderstood that their parting was inevitable, that his career was taking him away from her.

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Zubin and he had never mentioned it to Carmen.

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Since her visit to the jotisi in 1954, Tehmina Mehta had remained unshakable in her conviction that bliss in this life would be attained by her son. The difficulties she and her husband endured were made sufferable by the knowledge that Zubin would one day be rewarded with "the best of things."

Page 86
"Always, always there has been some supernatural power behind me as far as Zubinis concerned. Whatever I have tried to do for his career I have succeeded in; there have been no stumbling blocks."

Page 86
Having just come through the most difficult two years of his life, Zubin could have challenged her on that last point. But perhaps it had simply taken that long for the pieces of his cosmic jigsaw puzzle to fall into place. All of the things that had brought him to this point — the success in Tanglewood that prompted Charles Munch and Siegfried Hearst to recommend him to Pierre Beique; the dazzling success in Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell that fixed Beique's attention to him; the presence of his two friends in Montreal, which had settled him on stopping over in that city; perhaps even the depressing poverty that had sent Carmen back to Canada and given Zubin reason to go there in the first place — all these things were factors in the telephone call from London. The final elements had to clo with Beique himself and his poor relations with the musk direc tor of his orchestra.

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Who, then, to open the season? The first concert was scheduled for the Montreal Forum, the home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, with more than eleven thousand seats already sold. He needed somebody with a big name, but there was nobody like that to be had, least of all for the niggardly fee he could pay. If not a "name," then a newcomer with a dramatic flare and good audience appeal, somebody like . . . Zubin Mehta. He wasted no time making the call to Philadelphia, where Zubin had mentioned he'd be spending some time.

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Had Beique waited until he returned to Canada, Zubin would have been gone. The message might have been a week getting to him, and Beique would very likely have found someone else. Zubin told him it would be difficult, that he would have to do some rearranging in Linz — he refused to cancel — but with the flexibility of those provincial orchestras, he thought it might be possible to free the two weeks.

Page 87
Before he left the United States, Zubin had one final piece of business to attend to in New York. He had to speak to Leonard Bernstein about his still-open offer as assistant conductor.

Page 87
Zubin remembered well the advice of Mitropoulos against hiring on as anyone's assistant; for the first time he felt he might have the luxury of considering that advice. The concert fees in Linz and Montreal would give him an appreciable, if not lordly, income for the next several

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Bernstein received Zubin at Carnegie Hall, then suggested they go for a walk in nearby Central Park. It was a lovely Sunday afternoon, and the park was filled with bike riders and dog walkers and tourists in hansom cabs. The first blush of autumn color was on the elms and sycamores.

Page 88
Perhaps, but Zubin found himself wondering how long it would be before he found himself chafing at the bit of assistantship, how long before the glamour of New York turned into the nightmare of Liverpool. Besides, he wanted to do what he had seen his father do in Bombay, he wanted to build something. What could an assistant hope to accomplish in the way of building? There was also the matter of guestconducting stints, offers for which were beginning to trickle in from Europe.

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Looking back on that moment from the vantage point of today, Leonard Bernstein says, "It was really a terribly important decision for him." Not wanting to force Zubin into something he might regret later, Bernstein gave him until after the Montreal concerts to make up his mind.

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That headline appeared in the December 1960 issue of Musical America above an article that was a paean to three astonishing concerts in Montreal, concerts that marked the arrival of Zubin Mehta on the North American musical scene.

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"Zubin arrived for rehearsal," recalls the French Canadian, "and I was very curious to see how that would start. Well, in the first fifteen minutes of the rehearsal, there was no doubt that he had conquered the orchestra professionally, with authority and with serious musicianship."

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That first rehearsal began with Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, one of the crowd-rousing giants of symphonic literature and a severe test of any conductor's skill. It provides plenty of opportunity for a conductor to let the reins slip away from him and have the orchestra go tearing off like a runaway team of horses. Not surprisingly, it was the first time Zubin had conducted the Fantastique, except for a rehearsal in Liverpool.

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After those first fifteen minutes, Beique felt so certain of his choice in Zubin that he left the Forum and attended to some business back at the Symphony office. Returning in time for the rehearsal intermission, he found himself swamped by excited musicians.

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"Conductor Zubin Mehta created a real sensation," reported Musical America, when he made his local debut October 25 with the Montreal Symphony. News of the illness of Igor Markevitch, regular conductor of the orchestra, obliged the management to find replacements and it was fortunate to find Mr. Mehta and Mr. Golschmann available."

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The reviewer was half right. Zubin did create a sensation. The Forum that night rocked with cheers as loud as any that ever greeted a victory foi the Montreal Canadiens hoc key team. "People had the same intuitive reaction thai I did," says Beique. "He had a tremendous ovation; the people went wild."

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Beique was livid. He decided that this would be the last season for Markevitch, determining on the spot to offer the job to Zubin Mehta. "When a comet passes through your life," he says, "you do not have to be any sort of a genius to realize it.

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Zubin, astonished at the compliments he received after that first concert, forced himself to wait until after the next performance to take it all seriously.

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Montreal's first-nighters have been known to sit on their hands and to give polite but cold receptions to unimpressive strangers, but there was none of that for Zubin. They cheered him from the moment he walked onto the stage. They applauded the Barber of Seville Overture and La Valse as though they'd never heard them before. They loved their firstchair violin and viola players in Mozart's Sinfonia concertante, as though they had been doing the 1812 Overture. The Bartok concerto was a revelation. And when it was over they were left, as the Musical America critic observed, with "an overwhelming impression" of Zubin Mehta.

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So impressed was Pierre Beique, that the morning after the second concert he contacted every member of his executive board and asked for their concurrence. Having received it, he waited until after the final concert and then made the offer. Zubin did not have to consult anyone before accepting.

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It was long after midnight when they finished celebrating the final concert and Beique's offer. Back in their hotel room, Zubin had a call to make, to Siegfried Hearst in California.

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During the first week of rehearsals in Montreal, Hearst had phoned to say that Georg Solti was interested in Zubin as assistant conductor in Los Angeles. Somewhat reluctantly, he had let Hearst talk him into flying out for an audition between the final Montreal concert and his departure for Linz and Yugoslavia. Now, of course, there was no need to make the trip. Or so he thought.

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Suddenly, trapped in Interstices, he saw green groves of orange and lemon trees that shimmered under rainbows formed by the perpetual watei sprays that kept them alive. Finally the houses began to appear — someone lived here after .ill. Zubin thought — one at a time, then in

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bunches on hillsides. With virtually every house came a blinding reflection of blue, which it took Zubin a moment to recognize as swimming pools. Factories, clusters of commerce, communities came into view; they all seemed to struggle in that mindless web of roads and highways.

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Zubin was unprepared for the seemingly endless reach of the place, block after block of buildings, looming above streams of traffic that wriggled through the morning rush. As his field of vision turned toward the east, he could see the orange-brown haze disappearing back over the mountains. He'd been impressed by the bird's-eye view of New York, but compared to the constrained, insular mass of that eastern city, Los Angeles seemed a boundless place where one might expand to the limits of his own imagination.

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Siegfried Hearst helped Zubin settle into his hotel room and at the same time settled his misgivings about auditioning under false pretenses.

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Zubin relented and asked how he was supposed to audition. It would be during a rehearsal the following morning, and Hearst had suggested the Brahms First Symphony and Mozart's Prague Symphony to audition. At least, Zubin thought, he was on safe ground with the music.

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But the audition went no further than the first movement of the Prague. When that was over, Solti called Zubin over to where he was sitting, beside Siegfried Hearst.

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"Well," said Hearst to Solti as Zubin sat down, "what do you think? Was I right or wrong?"

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Solti nodded his head gravely and turned to Zubin. "Yes," he said, "I would like you to be my assistant."

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Zubin started to speak but, for once, could not find the right words. At last he stammered, "Thank you, sir, but . . ." and his voice trailed off. He

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The manager jumped into the breech, choosing his words carefully but explaining precisely what had happened. The only alteration to the facts was Hearst's declaration that Zubin had received the offer from Montreal only yesterday, after he had arrived in California — at his own expense, Hearst was quick to add — so there had been little point in his going away before Solti had had a chance to hear him. Again, Zubin was struck by Siegfried Hearst's gift for manipulation.

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In New York, between flights, Zubin reached Leonard Bernstein and told him the news about Montreal. Bernstein congratulated him on his good fortune and said he knew Zubin would be a great success in Canada, although he was sorry they would not be able to work together.

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So, in November of 1960, Zubin flew to Europe to see if his streak of luck would continue. In two days he had turned down two assistantships under two esteemed conductors; but come the following season, he would have an orchestra of his own to conduct — and to build.

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Measured in terms of public acceptance, the Yugoslavian tour was a resounding success. Zubin expanded his repertoire as usual, though he was less than satisfied with the playing he got from some of the local orchestras. Indeed, his patience and charm were often put to the test as he rattled along Yugoslavian rails from the poppy fields of Macedonia, through the pig farms of Serbia, to the sophisticated charm of Zagreb. He found it difficult to believe that only a few weeks before he had been plummeting along the avant-garde freeways of Los Angeles.

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So Siegfried Hearst had been right after all: the California audition trip had paid off. When Fritz Reiner canceled at the last minute, the Los Angeles management had Zubin Mehta on its mind and knew he'd be available. Quickly he dashed off a reply, "Will be delighted," and handed it to the desk clerk. October in Montreal, December in Yugoslavia, January in California ... he suddenly felt for the first time a sense of urgency about his career that was never to leave him.

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Within a week he received the dates of the four concerts he was to conduct, along with the programs Reiner had scheduled. Schumann's Second Symphony, Beethoven's Seventh, Le Rossignol by Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss'sDcm Quixote were the featured works; Zubin had never conducted any of them.

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On January 15, 1961, Zubin returned to Los Angeles, the city he'd supposed he would never see again. He was twenty-four years old, dripping with confidence. In two years he had leapt from the crowded ranks of students and apprentices to the status of international artist.

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"He came on stage carrying a baton and a score of Don Quixote," she remembered. "Fritz Reiner had programmed that, and I remember everyone was a little bit surprised that Zubin had kept it in. He set the

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Zubin, too, recalls the moment: "What a rare, marvelous experience it was to hear the music of Don Quixote coming out of that orchestra for the first time. It was obvious that the musicians and I were going to get along."

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After the first concert, Zubin greeted enthusiastic well-wishers and autograph seekers in the dressing room, still wearing his one-and-only full dress suit, purchased for twenty-five dollars in Vienna. Since the suit still had no pockets, he had to borrow a pen every time someone presented him a program to sign — a ritual to which he had not yet grown accustomed.

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"April 29, 1936," Zubin answered. "Why do you ask?"

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Perhaps not, but the reputation came soon enough for Zubin. By his second series of concerts, on January 26 and 27, it seemed apparent that he was on his way to becoming (quoting Fleischmann again) one of the "six to ten musical heroes here who can do no wrong."

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Those concerts of Petrushha, Webern's Six Pieces (heard for the first time in Los Angeles), and Beethoven's Symphony no. 7 were magical nights for the orchestra, for the audiences, and for the Philharmonic's board of directors. Even Zubin felt hard pressed to recall them with his typical matter-of-factness.

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Before the last concert was over, though, there was more adventure in store. Igor Markevitch — whose ill health and career prerogatives seemed fated to propel Zubin's career — would not be able to conduct the next week's concerts. Could Zubin possibly stay? Why not? answered Zubin. Markevitch had programmed the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra — -just as he had in Montreal — along with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1 , with Byron Janis as soloist. He'd heard the Tchaikovsky dozens of times, but had never conducted it.

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By now the Los Angeles press — egged on by Mrs. Chandler — was treating Zubin as an Event. There were newspaper articles, radio and television interviews, all portraying him as a dashing young Hindu (of course, everyone from India must be a Hindu) who had flown from the East, perhaps on a magic carpet, to rescue the city from cultural despair.

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Rumors began to circulate, as rumors do in the thick Los Angeles air. Zubin was a playboy, a glamour boy, a roue, a ladies' man, a "swinger." He was "seen" doing the night spots with various female celebrities. In fact, whenever he was not with the orchestra rehearsing that week, he

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No matter what the facts might be, however, Zubin Mehta was an overnight public hero in the city that was built on its own publicity. When Zubin walked on stage the evening of February 2, the spark he had struck three weeks earlier with that first downbeat was running like sheet lightning through the theater.

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With uncanny appropriateness, Zubin opened the program with the Overture to Verdi's La Forma del Destino, almost as though he were paying tribute to those "unseen powers," as his mother would describe them, which had somehow brought him to this moment. Again came the first three notes, splitting the air of the old theater like staccato thunderclaps, and the second three, just as startling, leading to the Destiny motif.

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Like two cobras, Zubin's arms struck, down and out, making the horns cry out with an urgency that no one in the audience could have thought the hackneyed old concerto still contained. Then the pianist's hands crashed down on the keyboard like Thor's hammers, and Zubincalled up the soft rain of the strings — the elemental duality, the Yang supported by the Yin. The arguments stated, the piano and orchestra then entered into a dialogue that flowed and ebbed and climaxed in a surge of spirit and sound at the end of the long first movement.

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There seemed hardly a breath from the audience in the pause between movements. Zubin could feel their eyes glued on him as he leaned forward, summoning the strings to tiptoe in, almost imperceptibly, out of the silence. The flute entered, like the faraway piping of a shepherd at night, then the piano, and Zubinurged them all into a tinkling nocturnal dance.

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Zubin felt like a man trying to stand against a tidal wave. He was weak, he wanted to collapse and let himself be swept away by the roaring, cheering crowd. He gathered his strength and followed Janis offstage; both men were sweating and trembling. The) walked on again to see the ok lustra members applauding, stomping their feet, the audience on its

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feet, yelling and bravoing. They walked off again, but it was the same when they came back on. Suddenly, Zubin was moved to do something he'd never done before. He leaned over and shouted into Janis's ear, then walked over to the concertmaster. He was going to repeat the last movement.

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The next day Mrs. Chandler did think of something. She contacted most of the other board members by telephone and secured their approval. There was little time to waste, since Zubin was scheduled to leave the following morning for Vienna. She sent a car to his hotel that afternoon.

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Zubin arrived at the Chandler home to find, on the table, a typewritten contract between the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta.

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Hardly had Zubin landed in Vienna than he received an urgent telephone call from Egon Hilbert, the former cultural diplomat whose moral scruples Zubin had offended in Rome. Now Hilbert was director of the Vienna Festival and offended only by bad performances and conductors who failed to show up. He made Zubin an offer that seemed too good to be true.

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Zubin was able to accept. He'd never dreamed he'd be conducting the Vienna Philharmonic at age twenty-five.

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Puzzled, Zubin made some quick inquiries concerning the identity of the "Palphilorc" before he accepted any engagement with it. He learned that the letters stood for Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, which had changed its name, but evidently not its cable address, to Israel Philharmonic in 1948.

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Eugene Ormandy had been scheduled to conduct in Israel just prior to his concerts in Vienna and had canceled the entire tour. Delighted at the prospect of visiting the Middle East, Zubin cabled his acceptance.

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Suddenly, another request, this one from Lies Askonas, a British agent who'd heard Zubin the night of the final Liverpool competition. She could get him an engagement with the Royal Philharmonic if he could come immediately.

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Zarin Mehta, now a full-fledged London accountant and rising rapidly in his firm, took an afternoon off from work to attend his brother's rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic. He'd been moved many times by this orchestra's playing, but never had he felt anything like the mixture of uneasiness and pride that swept over him as Zubin walked onto the stage.

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But Zubin went about his work methodically, using his knowledge of the music and of each instrument to win the musicians' respect. It took longer than it had in Toronto or Philadelphia or New York or Montreal or Los Angeles, but by the end of the rehearsal the members of the Royal Philharmonic were won over. The evening's performance took on an added dimension when the orchestra learned that its beloved former music director, Sir Thomas Beecham, had passed away during it.

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boim, Daniel's parents, who took them out on the town for their first night in Israel. To Zubin, it was like coming home.

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Besides the sights, sound, and smells, there was a feeling of brotherhood he'd experienced in no other place. Jostling in a human river of people from all corners of the earth, nearly all of them Jews, Zubin was as much in the minority as he'd been in Vienna or at Tanglewood. Yet, with the so-called Oriental Jews outnumbering their European-born countrymen, his complexion went unnoticed. Seated at the sidewalk tables, nursing their coffees or reading the poster-filled kiosks, were Jews from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and Egypt, whose skin tones included every shade of brown.

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The program for the Israel concerts was one of the most demanding Zubin had ever chosen, consisting of the Dvorak Symphony no. 7 in D-minor, Kodaly's Dances of Galanta, and the Symphony in Three Movements by Stravinsky. There were three rehearsals, followed by concerts in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem.

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"That first rehearsal in Vienna was the worst rehearsal of my career." Zubin groans, shaking his head as though to get rid of the painful memory. For the first time he was facing many of his old professors, not as a student but as their Dirigent. Worse perhaps was the experience of directing some of the younger players, with whom he had shared rather puerile experiences hardly more than a year before. And he had to go and program the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements. To the Israelis it had offered relatively few problems; to the Los Angeles Philharmonic it would have been duck soup; but to the Bruckner-bound

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After the first rehearsal Zubin dragged himself back to the Imperial Hotel for a night's sleep he knew would be filled with awful dreams. In the lobby he almost bumped into Josef Krips, on his way to conduct a performance at the Staatsoper.

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"Professor," Zubin moaned, "I've just done one of the most awful rehearsals in my entire life. I'll never be called here again."

Page 102
The older conductor did his best to calm his worries and set his mind at ease, but Zubinfeared the worst. Disgrace at the Vienna Festival could mean banishment from the regular Vienna Philharmonic season as well. Matters were not much helped by a thoughtful speech the orchestra president took it upon himself to deliver to his musicians.

Page 102
"Gentlemen [there were no ladies in the Philharmoniker], we have to start thinking of the younger generation of conductors." Zubinwanted to hide somewhere. The president, Prof. Otto Strasse, seemed to like him, but what kind of thing was this to say to an orchestra?

Page 102
With a broad smile, he turned and waved the "young one" to the podium. Like a dutiful guinea pig, Zubin thanked Strasse for his kind words and rapped his baton. Maybe moments like this were what made conductors cancel.

Page 102
But the worst was over. Perhaps recalling his own admonition to the contralto in Pierrot Lunaire, Zubin called up his reserve confidence and let the orchestra think he knew precisely what he was doing. After a number of small corrections they began playing the Stravinsky as though it were as Viennese as apple strudel.

Page 102
Rounding out the program was the more appealing Don Quixote by Richard Strauss. That gave the festival audience something to cheer about, which they did. The concerts went extremely well, and the press hailed the return of "Vienna's own Indian" in glory. As one critic wrote, "A great career is sure to lie ahead of Zubin Mehta."

Page 102
A year before, Zubin might have taken that as fatuous flattery, but now it had the ring of truth. The Vienna Philharmonic management was talking about asking him back for the regular season, and there were suggestions thai he might be a good candidate for the Salzburg Festival.

Page 102
The following season. Zubin would extend his record of accom-

Page 103
plishments even further, becoming the youngest conductor ever to lead the Berlin Philharmonic. That distinction so agitated Zubin that he cut himself shaving and walked bleeding onto the stage of the old Hochschule.

Page 103
The first half of that memorable evening's program in Berlin included the Schumann Cello Concerto, played by Enrico Mainardi. The concerto proceeded smoothly, Zubin growing progressively surer of himself, when suddenly, as he turned to give Mainardi a cue, he saw a look of anguish come across the old man's face. Zubin could see he wanted to speak, but could not. At last the concerto was over, and Zubinstepped off the platform to grip the cellist's hand.

Page 103
Zubin looked down to see that, indeed, his fly was open. Quite a debut, he thought. Back in the dressing room, between halves, members of the orchestra filed in one by one to tell him in discreet, hushed tones, "Herr Kapellmeister, die Hosen ..."

Page 103
Fortunately, his brilliant conducting of the Mahler Symphony no. 1 in the second half took the minds of musicians and audience off the Ungluck of the first half. At last Zubin could put into practice the invaluable education in Mahler he had received from Bruno Walter in Vienna.

Page 103
Many of those international guest appearances during 1960 and 1961 came about as a result of cancellations by other conductors. Several years later Zubin would tell a magazine reporter, "I made half my career by jumping in at the last moment. Sometimes I think my success was due almost entirely to the misfortunes of my colleagues."

Page 103
But as Zubin hopped from continent to continent, he never imagined that another conductor's cancellation would lay much more than a concert in his lap. In Los Angeles, ZubinMehta was about to inherit an entire orchestra.

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It was then, in February 1961, that Mrs. Chandler hit on what she thought was the ideal solution. Zubin, as "associate conductor," could provide a continuity for the season, taking over the orchestra for a full nine weeks.

Page 107
The board accepted the proposition enthusiastically, Zubin accepted enthusiastically. Unfortunately, the incoming music director was at the music festival in Lucerne and could not be reached by telephone to gauge his enthusiasm.

Page 107
At this point in what Zubin regretfully looks back on as "a dirty business," the stories conflict. To this day, the musicians in Los Angeles who were there at the time refuse to talk about it. As then-concertmaster

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The starting point of what became a much-publicized controversy was the board's negotiating and signing a contract with Zubinwithout consulting the man they had just appointed music director, the man whose "associate" Zubin was supposed to become.

Page 108
Charges and countercharges were fired across the Atlantic, escalating from the theater pages of newspapers to major articles in national magazines. In Vienna, Zubin stumbled onto the story in the European edition of Time Magazine.

Page 108
Ii seemed then to Zubin thai whatever career he might have had in Los Angeles was stillborn. Hearing nothing further from the management, he went back in July to conduct his promised concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. He assumed the pencil-signed contract had been forgotten. The orchestra would be looking for a new resident conductor, «ind certainly the board would not repeat its mistake by telling him, whoever it might be, that he already had an associate before he started.

Page 108
Zubin could afford to be somewhat fatalistic about the Los Angeles job. After all, he still had the Montreal Symphony, and suddenly he was gaining a great deal of recognition in Europe. His mother kept telling him to trust to fate, and perhaps she was right. There were plenty of

Page 109
"I stressed that this was not New York, Boston, or Chicago but Los Angeles. And our orchestra was about to enter a new phase. We needed not only the best person musically, but the right man at the right time right here. Because of age, health, or other commitments, our list of esteemed men was narrowed down to two. At that point I had to choose and make my recommendation. It was Zubin Mehta."

Page 109
But now that Los Angeles wanted Zubin, did Zubin want Los Angeles? He wondered whether indeed the board had acted capriciously, as Solti maintained. Perhaps Mrs. Chandler and the others would think nothing of going over his head in the future.

Page 109
Had Zubin acted on impulse, as he so often did, the course of musi< al history in the last decade and a half might have run much differently. Certainly it would have in Los Angeles and quite possibly in several other of the world's music capitals as well. But instead of turning down the offer, he expressed his doubts to Siegfried Hearst, who worked out a contract with general manager George Kuyper that spelled out Zubin's independence from the board in artistic matters.

Page 109
That stumbling block removed, Zubin Mehta was named music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Page 109
Zubin would have to wait a whole season before officially taking charge in Los Angeles, but the management encouraged him to put any changes into motion as soon as he liked. Since he had conducted the orchestra already more times than he had any other professional group, he had a fair grasp of its strengths and weaknesses.

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How to build. Zubin clearly had no intention of treating the Philharmonic as a given quantity in his musical equation. He did not plan to settle down with his three-year contract, content to be known as the music director of a semiprestigious organization. He wanted to build the Los Angeles Philharmonic into something better, something it had never been before.

Page 111
This would have been an ideal moment for Zubin to seek advice from a more experienced conductor, something he later learned to do. Instead he acted, as he so often did, on impulse, and he came very close to destroying the warm conductor-musician relationship that had served him so well with this and other orchestras in the past. He was assisted in his error by well-meaning friends who did not foresee the consequences.

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It must be remembered that this was in the early sixties, when the American Federation of Musicians still had rather lax firing laws. Now, as Zubin points out, "the musicians' union is very strong, and it is only because of such mistakes."

Page 111
Zubin had a healthy respect, indeed compassion, for the orchestra members as individuals. Yet he knew there was no dearth of precedents for sacrificing inadequate individuals for the sake of the ensemble.

Page 111
To soften the blow beforehand, Zubin decided to appoint a new personnel manager for the orchestra because, he felt, the present man was not doing the best job of representing the orchestra's interests. He took Joseph Fishman out of the second oboe chair, where he had been since 1948, and made him personnel manager. But Fishman quickly saw there was nothing he could do to keep the ax from falling.

Page 111
"There was really no choice," Zubin reflects, with perceptible sadness in his tone. "You can't tell them, 'Please resign, but if you refuse you can stay on.' Sometimes an entire section will be featured in one solo passage, and if that is not played well the standard of the entire orchestra is reduced."

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For instance, he was struck by the orchestra's penchant for playing twentieth-century music. As a guest conductor, he was impressed by their ability to make music out of the difficult Six Pieces by Webern. After the Webern there had been a number of condescending and uncomplimentary remarks from board members and patrons alike, who let Zubin know they would be pleased if he would steer clear of such stuff in the future. But in his first address as music director, Zubin made his intentions on this score quite clear. "I will," he told the board, "introduce as much modern music to vou as I possibly can."

Page 112
In Montreal, however, there was a shortcoming that overshadowed all Others, the shortcoming that had afflicted the orchestra since its conception in 1934, and which Zubin had little hope of 'ever solving. There was

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Yet, as Zubin found out from his first performance at the Montreal Forum, it could be done. He knew he would have the support of the public and of the musicians; if anything could be considered lacking in Montreal, it was financial support.

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I<> f int her raise the orchestra's morale, Zubininstituted a pension fund, stretching the Symphony's shoestring budget almost to the breaking point.

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So it was that, in the spring of 1962, Zubinfound himself flying across the Atlantic and Iceland with an orchestra that had never been off the island of Montreal.

Page 115
"It was a tremendous emotion and made for an enormous change in our attitude toward ourselves," Pierre Beique recalls. "Sitting in Tchaikovsky Hall, draped with the red flag and the maple leaf, it was a great thing for this little band of hometown musicians. It was also a great thing for Zubin."

Page 115
By the time they reached Leningrad, Zubin had mastered the Russian language well enough to give a short speech during each concert. The speech was nothing unpredictable — declarations of mutual understanding and peace through music — yet the Russian intelligentsia must have marveled at a native of India appointing himself the cultural bridge between Canada and the Soviet Union.

Page 115
There is a story, often printed in American newspapers and magazines, that during one of these speeches Zubin uttered the brief hortatory sentence, "BOCCTAHHE," pronounced "vas-sta-nye." In English the word is "revolt."

Page 115
"Not so," declares Zubin with finality. Then comes that tell-tale wrinkling around the eyes. "I never said that to an audience. It was to a group of autograph seekers backstage."

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Entering Vienna with his own orchestra, Zubinfelt like Pompey returning to Rome. By the sheer force of his personality, he transformed the Canadians into something more than they had been. The performance that evening towered over anything the orchestra had done before, and for Zubin it was the summit of his achievements to that point.

Page 116
Out in the theater, in that glittering jewel box Zubin had first seen from a seat behind the basses, were friends, professors, and colleagues from student years, along with many of the old-guard Philharmoniker subscribers in their gowns and full dress.

Page 116
As Zubin brought the encore, Weber's Overture to Oberon, to its rousing conclusion, one stately gentleman paused before applauding with his white gloves. He leaned over to his wife, nodding in the direction of the young conductor, and barked something that sounded very much like "Foot-vonkler. Foot-vonkler." To those who know the Viennese dialects and the Viennese taste in music, it was the ultimate compliment: "Furtwangler. Furtwangler."

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Still, she went along on the Russian tour, supposing, as always, that being together would somehow heal the wounds. But when she saw that the pleasure Zubin found in others was so much greater than any pleasure they could feel together, she knew it was over. Worst of all was his obvious attration to another Canadian soprano, a witty, vivacious young singer named Teresa Stratas.

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That Stratas was even along on the tour, that she came to meet Zubin at all, was another of those curious coincidences which dominate the landscape of Zubin's career.

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What ensued was, according to Beique, "only a little flirtation. After all, Zubin was an intelligent man, was not about to cause a scandale. Besides, his wife was right there, along with a prominent member of the Canadian Parliament, who was also dating Teresa."

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"There was never a war," Zubin remembers, "never any dirtiness. My lawyers warned me about injured women changing their personalities overnight, but that never happened with Carmen.

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"When I think of Zubin now," Carmen reflects, "I think of him as a musician, not as my former husband. I think I always thought of him that way. Probably it sounds very strange, but since I was a young child the strongest element of my life has been music, and Zubin was a part of that. Sometimes the children and I become angry with him for things, little things. But then we see him conduct and we forget Zubin the father, Zubin the husband, and think of him as Zubin the conductor. He is a great musician, you know."

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When Zubin took over the orchestras of Montreal and Los Angeles, he inherited two theaters that were impractical, unattractive, and ill suited for the purposes of symphonic music. Yet once again fate was on his side, for in both cities the wheels of progress were already in motion. The season 1964-65 would see Zubinestablished in the newest and most lavish arts centers in the United States and Canada.

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The plans grew like mushrooms under the snow, until at last Montreal was promised a dazzling downtown complex of three theaters, seating three thousand, fifteen hundred, and eight hundred fifty respectively. They would all be joined by interlocking foyers, and each would have an entrance to the new subway system, to promote easy coming and going. La Grande Salle, the largest theater (and since renamed for Wilfrid Pelletier), would be a multipurpose arena, suitable for opera, ballet, and of course symphony. Its principal tenant would be the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The plans were well under way when Zubin signed on as music director, and, by the time he returned from the Russian tour, construction on Place des Arts had begun.

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There being no reasonable answers to those questions, the French partisans won. As they generally do in Quebec. The honor of opening La Grande Salle fell to L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and its Indian chef d'orchestre, Zubin Mehta, with the opening selection "guest conducted" by the beloved former director, Wilfrid Pelletier. The Place

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Except in cities like Vienna and New York, where a great variety of music is constantly performed, conductors rarely get a chance to hear other conductors conduct. Munch had not heard Zubin since Tanglewood in the summer of 1958, when his only comment to the young Indian had concerned the spacing of his feet on the podium. In the ensuing six years, however, Munch had had a great deal to say about him.

Page 120
He had discussed Zubin on several occasions with Siegfried Hearst and early on suggested him to Pierre Beique. What most people in the music world did not know was that Munch also recommended Zubin to the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Page 120
Because of his love for the Boston Symphony, Munch gave considerable thought to the matter of a successor when he announced his retirement in the winter of 1960-61. Out of all the available conductors, who would be the one most capable of leading the orchestra to perhaps even greater heights? The name he settled on, the name he proposed to the board, was that of a still unheralded beginner, ZubinMehta.

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Almost simultaneously, Zubin was being considered for the top posts in Montreal and Los Angeles. Perhaps he was not ready to take on so prestigious an orchestra as the BSO. Certainly the "Brahmins," as the Bostonian elite are known, did not think they were ready for a twentyfour-year-old Parsee.

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hopping from country to country as a last-minute replacement for his indisposed colleagues. Munch knew then he'd been right about Zubin, but he didn't know how right until the night of the opening concert at Place des Arts as he sat in Pierre Beique's box, watching and listening to Zubin conduct the Mahler First Symphony.

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It was a glowing, fiery performance, made warmer by the acoustics of the new hall, all red and silver gray with a honeycomb ceiling. But Munch knew it was not just the improved acoustics giving a new sound to this orchestra he'd conducted so many times in the past. It was Zubin, Munch realized, driving and cajoling the musicians through the shifting colors and moods and tempi like a man possessed, yet a man who saw clearly the way before him.

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It began to seem that boards and committees in Los Angeles were formed for the purpose of acquiescing to Dorothy Chandler's will. By the end of that summer, she had also wrested a unanimous vote of approval for her choice to lead the Symphony into its new home, ZubinMehta. By November 21 all the plans were approved. Construction began March 12, 1962.

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Several of the city's music heroes were simply declared immortal and commemorated in works of art. There were busts of Otto Klemperer and Alfred Wallenstein (by Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav) and Gregor Piatigorsky (by Jane Ullman); and, in the Founders Room, portraits of Buff Chandler (by William Draper) and ZubinMehta (by Marion Pike).

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Since the 3,250-seat Pavilion was also intended as a multipurpose hall — for symphony and chamber music, recitals, and opera — the administrators elected not to let any critics into the hall for rehearsals before opening night, a decision that Zubin endorsed wholeheartedly. At least the opening night audience would arrive expecting the best, not the worst.

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Both Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were still fairly unknown quantities on disc, but the grand opening of the Pavilion was expected to provide enough fanfare to ensure adequate publicity for the recording. Moreover, RCA would be delighted if the lion's share of critical attention went to Dynagroove rather than to Mehta.

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The morning of December 5, the orchestra played its first rehearsal in the hall. Zubin had decided to start the opening night concert, after the "Star Spangled Banner/' with a fanfare by Richard Strauss. He had intended the opening number to be Elytres, commissioned from Lukas I oss, but the composer had given him a rather quiet, pensive piece that did not seem to fit the occasion, so he substituted the Strauss.

Page 125
After the first reading of the fanfare, Zubinturned to the principal RCA engineer for his comments on the "acoustic cavern," as the experts called the hall. Up in the boxes on the Founders' Level, architect Welton Becket did not wait for an expert opinion. Becket had been criticized for spending a quarter of a million dollars on acoustic consultants' fees, but as the music sounded in his ears he knew he was vindicated. He swung around in his seat to Mrs. Chandler and the few others who were there to reap the first harvest. "Well," said Becket, with as much relief in his voice as triumph, "we really did it, didn't we?"

Page 125
Finally Schonberg was assured that the New York press was not being discriminated against and he settled for a tour, sans music, conducted by the PR man and Becket, who sent a message in to Zubin that he should call a recess.

Page 125
On his way to the stage door, Zubin passed a group of pale young men wearing red silk sherwanis and Nehru caps; there was no mistaking them for Indians.

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Zubin groaned. Nobody had consulted him about the costumes. He felt a little bit like the host at a catered cocktail party, but he decided not to complain, since he had already incurred the ire of some of the Symphony dowagers by telling them at a pre-opening party that their condescending attitude toward his musicians was not appreciated. "Just because they wear bow ties," he said, "you don't have to treat them as though they were all waiters." On occasion, his patience with the moneyed gentry of Los Angeles could wear a bit thin.

Page 126
As Zubin welcomed the evening's soloist, Jascha Heifetz, architect Welton Becket saw a movement along one of the side aisles in the orchestra seats. Harold Schonberg was on the move.

Page 126
Becket felt his stomach tighten. No matter how much he and Zubin and most of the audience liked the acoustics, public opinion — possibly even future financial support — could be vastly affected by what the critics wrote. It was not like reviewing a performer or even a play, in which changes could be made or locales could be changed. This was the most important element of an immovable, largely immutable $35-milliondollar investment, which he just happened to consider the crowning glory of his architectural career. That so much of his work now hung from the ears of a few taste makers, to be shunned like cheap jewelry if it didn't strike their fancies, was a bit unsettling.

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The following week, Zubin began rehearsing the two pieces RCA intended to record, Respighi's Feste Romane and Strauss's Don Juan. Both were big, full-bodied works that would exploit the rich sound of the hall and the orchestra. Unfortunately, the recording would also lock into place an impression that many critics around the world were beginning to form of Zubin: that his repertoire consisted solely of big, full-bodied compositions in a narrow, romantic range that began with Mahler and ended somewhere around Strauss and Respighi.

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It was, at any rate, the sort of music RCA expected from Zubin. As the recording date neared, Zubin was quite clear about what he expected from RCA. "I do not want cold, mechanical perfection," he told the engineers. "Rather, I want a warm, expansive tone, without the explosive attack one hears from some of the famous orchestras."

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Most of the problems were ironed out by alterations in the physical placement of the musicians. The movable floor that was designed to become an orchestra pit for operas and musicals was raised to the height of the stage, and the strings were brought forward on this. The percussion and trombone sections were exiled to the rear of the stage and elevated on special platforms so they could see Zubinconduct. An intermediate-height platform held the woodwinds and basses. In addition, a number of baffles were placed to direct and partially deaden certain instruments. All of this was supposed to increase the effectiveness, in respect to the strings, of the gold-leaf acoustical panel that extended out into the hall from the top of the proscenium. These adjustments having been completed, the recording sessions proceeded smoothly, and, after the first mix, the test tapes were pronounced satisfactory by chief engineer, producer, and conductor.

Page 128
Several months later, when RCA at last released the first recording of Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, its handsome fold-out jacket promised the buyer "a fuller musical-aesthetic involvement than has ever been possible via records before" and that Mehta's interpretation of Strauss and Respighi would be "projected into your sound consciousness as on no other recording."

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Yet for all the puffery and hoopla, the record was not a particularly big seller. With notable shortsightedness, RCA failed to sign the Philharmonic to a recording contract, though Zubin himself was to record some operas for RCA in later years. It was also the last time Zubin and the Philharmonic recorded in the Music Center Pavilion. It was, however, far from being their last recording.

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The publicity attendant on the Pavilion's opening — including a fourteen-page color spread in Time Magazine, with Dorothy Chandler's portrait on the cover — did serve to project Zubin into the consciousness of the American musical establishment. Stories on the "twenty-eightyear-old, Bombay-born conductor*1 began to spring up in national publi( ations from \ to Vogue.

Page 128
A full-column stor) in the New York Times proclaimed: "Mehta Paves \\a\ for Musk (.enter.'' Included among its feuilletonic observations — women diners dropping their forks at the conductor's approach, Zubin drenching his food in Tabasco sauce "in sweepingly dramatic gestures*1 — were several salient points.

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season attendance record, and doubled its number of season ticket holders. In its first year in the Pavilion, the orchestra played to 125,000 persons, 10,000 of them season subscribers, grossing about $225,000. The Times divided credit for these astounding accomplishments evenly, between the new Music Center and Zubin Mehta.

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If Zubin had yet to arrive at "household word" status, his name was at least to be found on the tongues of administrators and directors in the nation's most prestigious music institutions. Indeed, it seemed that the only accomplishment missing from the Mehta career was success in the opera pit. It would not be missing for long.

Page 130
Since his first brush with opera in Vienna, Zubinhad wanted to conduct music drama as well as the symphonic literature. The symphonies he enjoyed most were always the most dramatic, and the addition of singing actors and stage directions would be only a short step from such dramatically structured works as the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Moreover, the bulk of the standard operatic literature fell within Zubin's familiar spectrum of romantic and post-romantic music.

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The first opera he'd attended was Beethoven's Fidelio in 1955. Eight years later, Zubinconducted his first performance of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, something he considered a necessary preliminary to the task of managing a full-scale opera. It was the Czech Philharmonic thai asked him to i onducf it.

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possible, he arrived at rehearsal thirty minutes behind schedule. He rarely arrived anywhere early, but he did like to be on time, so there was a bit of nervous flutter in his stomach as the driver turned onto a fantastic bridge, filled with spires and statuary, that crossed Smetana's Moldau. The car started up a hill, at the top of which Zubin saw a medieval acropolis, the Hradcany Palace, with a green cathedral lurking at its center like some gothic vulture. At that moment Zubin wished he had somehow managed to conduct his first Ninth Symphony in Montreal or Los Angeles.

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Zubin smiled, but his voice sounded hollow as he spoke to the orchestra manager walking beside him. "Shouldn't they be playing Mendelssohn's 'Wedding March' or something?

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Reaching the altar railing and the podium, Zubin suddenly realized the chorus and soloists should not be there. They were not needed until the final movement of the symphony, which would certainly take him several hours of rehearsal to reach.

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His confidence was nowhere to be found, so Zubin saw he would need all the charm he could muster to get through the day. "I'm afraid there's been a mistake," he said, smiling broadly for the benefit of the choir. "You see, I always rehearse a piece from beginning to end. I'm sure you can see how logical and necessary that is."

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From a pew behind him, Zubin heard the chorusmaster growl something in Czech, a language he, gratefully, did not understand. Looks of astonishment and disbelief crossed the faces of the choristers as, with much gutteral grumbling and a good many severe glances toward the podium, they got up to leave.

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"If only I had known how to handle myself better," Zubin says now, sighing. "Of course, I should have just gone along and started with the finale. But it was my first time ever conducting it, and I wanted to build myself up to that incredible conclusion, from the beginning to the end. It turned into an unhappy experience in my life. I lost my confidence and

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Looking out from the "backstage" sacristy, Zubin saw the front pews of the great cathedral filled with officials of the city and the resident diplomatic corps. Ambassadors from India, Canada, the United States, and Austria were there, he knew. Would there be any nation on earth he could safely call home if he made a mess of things here? Behind the seated diplomats were perhaps eight thousand people, all of them standing.

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Maintaining his aplomb that night was one of the most difficult assignments Zubin ever had, but if ever music had been written to inspire confidence, it was the Ninth Symphony. By the time he led the assembled forces into their final "Freude, schoner Gotterfunken," and spurred the orchestra into the prestissimo coda, he was feeling some of that "divine spark" of joy himself, remembering the musical ecstasy of his first night in the Vienna Musikverein. It would have been nice to hear a thunderous, spontaneous ovation after the crisp finale, but there was at least a glow inside him from knowing he had pulled it off.

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He waited for the murmuring audience to file out, receiving polite congratulations from the festival directors and the leaders of the orchestra and chorus, then went out a side door to a waiting car. As the car rounded the cobblestone street to the front of the cathedral, Zubin was greeted by an incredible sight. The eight thousand members of the audience, diplomatic corps and all, were lined along both sides of the street that curved down the hill to the Moldau. When his car came into sight, they began to applaud and cheer.

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In the 1970s Zubin would return to Prague, to salvage "my love affair with the Czech Philharmonic" in such massive works asLe Sacre du Prin-

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In May of 1963, Zubin returned from Prague to North America, convinced that he had weathered one of the worst storms of his career. After that Beethoven Ninth, he felt prepared for anything that might happen in the unstable atmosphere of opera. Immediately, he put forward his plans for a season-ending Tosca in Montreal and entered into negotiations with the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence to do an // Trovatore there.

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Zubin threw himself into the task, working with Montreal set and costume designers to come up with what they hoped would look like a lavish production. He put together a good cast of American and Canadian singers, headed by American soprano Ella Lee as Tosca and as Cavaradossi Richard Verreau, the Montreal tenor who had canceled the Russian tour. And he considered himself fortunate that George London agreed to sing the role of Scarpia.

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The opening performance went off without a hitch — something that can be said of relatively few operatic first nights — and the Montreal papers were filled the next morning with Tosca stories from front page to society gossip columns. A Symphony board member who was an oldworld acquaintance of Rudolf Bing's telephoned New York and so belabored the Metropolitan Opera's general manager with glowing descriptions that he finally agreed to fly up to Montreal to see what all the fuss was about. After the second performance, he appeared backstage to compliment Zubin and the singers, then returned to the Metropolitan, secure in the knowledge that opera was alive and well in the provinces.

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Things went so well with Tosca that Zubintalked the Montreal board into two operas for the 1964-65 season, La Traviata and Carmen, along with anAida the following fall. Among the many sopranos he auditioned

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for the demanding role of Violetta was a still less-than-famous coloratura from the New York City Opera, whose top notes Zubin found dazzling in the first act "Sempre libera" but who seemed less suited for the highly dramatic second and third acts. So, though he was impressed with her personality and agility, Zubin declined to give the role to Beverly Sills — another of those hasty decisions he regrets to this day. Instead, he settled on a dramatic soprano he'd met in Florence, Virginia Zeani. She would sing Traviata and return the following season as A'ida.

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Zubin had what he considered a proper suggestion, opening the Symphony season with Salome by Richard Strauss. Though there was some grumbling at his choice of Operas, the plan was adopted. Salome would be the first staged and costumed opera ever produced in a Los Angeles Philharmonic subsi ription season.

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Since New York City Opera traveled with its own conductors, notably Julius Rudel, and since he knew Los Angeles could only support a certain amount of opera per year, Zubin saw right away that he would not be able to make his operatic reputation in Los Angeles. But by the summer of 1965 that reputation was building, and by the start of 1966 he would be recognized in Europe and America as an emerging giant among opera conductors.

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Rudolf Bing had apparently been sufficiently impressed by the Montreal Tosca to invite Zubin to conduct a total of ten Aulas at the Met in December and January, following close on the heels of his Montreal Aidas. The second hint, or more than a hint, was the reception his Abduction from the Seraglio received at the Salzburg Festival that same summer.

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In Austria, Zubin was rapidly becoming a celebrity, his reputation in that small but musically dominant nation growing with each guest appearance, not to mention his triumphant tour with the Montreal Symphony. His Salzburg debut had been in 1962, enough of a success for him to be asked back the following year. After the second festival appearance, the Salzburg directors accorded der Inder the signal honor of asking him to open their festival with a new production of Mozart's comic opera Die Entfiihrung aus don Serail, starring Frit/ Wunderlich, Reri Grist, and Anneliese Rothenberger.

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The Abduction went as well as anything Zubinhad ever done. The fact that it was in the delicate style of Mozart, a st\le his early and late detractors have maintained is foreign to him, did not seem to matter. No amount of conducting grand-romantic Bruckner or ubermenschlkh Strauss had clouded his recollection of or dimmed his love for the classics. So moved was the visiting critic from the Chicago Tribune — who perhaps had not heard of Zubin's already established career in the wilds of Montreal and Los Angeles — that she called him "the most promising \oung Mozart man the festival had found in seasons."

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There were four concerts in Philadelphia on four consecutive nights, from October 28 to November 1 , followed by the opening of the orchestra's Carnegie Hall engagement in New York City. For his program, Zubin chose the Coriolanus Overture of Beethoven, Schonberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, and the Bruckner Symphony no. 9. Not an easy program for conductor, orchestra, or audience.

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The Bruckner Ninth had been Zubin's first recording for London/ Decca, with the Vienna Philharmonic, and from nearly all reports that interpretation was considered highly successful. But in the two intervening years he had given the long and tortuously complex symphony a good deal of thought, coming to several new conclusions as to its proper interpretation, especially after a meeting with George Szell, who heard Zubin conduct it in rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic. He saw nothing unusual in these second thoughts about the symphony, considering that Bruckner himself spent seven years revising the first three movements and never did get around to completing a fourth. Still, many of the musical intelligentsia attended those concerts expecting to compare the Vienna recording with the Philadelphia live performance, the same conductor with the same interpretation.

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Rudolf Bing might have read those reviews and smiled; his gamble on Zubin, «m operatic unknown, was about to pay off. Almost on the heels of this muc h-writteu-about Bruckner would come the Indian's debut at thr Metropolitan opera. Very likely the theater would be sold out and the i eviewers there In force, with full columns set aside in the next day's papei v

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face, and Zubin encountered them at his first rehearsal. It was a rude awakening to the glamorous world of Opera with a capital O.

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Though working with the orchestra was very pleasant, Zubin discovered for himself all the problems about which he had read: insufficient rehearsal time, the practice of letting the second cast perform without an orchestra rehearsal, and uneven casts.

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Backstage, just inside the Fortieth Street entrance, where they were allowed to wait out of the cold, were three people Zubin had invited to share the excitement of his Met debut, Pierre Beique, Carmen, and Zarin. They could not take their seats until Zubin arrived with their tickets.

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No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the door opened and in walked a smiling Zubin, pretending to be calm. Sliding off his overcoat and gloves, he tossed them on a table, shook hands with the scowling, silent Bing, and handed a ticket envelope to Zarin.

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"Good luck," Carmen shouted. As his coattails disappeared through the doorway that led to the orchestra pit, Carmen shouted the traditional good-luck wish, "/rc bocca al lupo," and indeed it may have seemed that Zubin was walking "into the mouth of a wolf."

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But when he emerged again, after an unexpectedly prolonged first-act ovation, the scowl had disappeared from the general manager's face. Bing realized, as did the critics and the paying public, that Zubin Mehta was the find of the season. And nothing happened in the ensuing three acts to change anyone's mind.

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"One name emerged," wrote Alan Rich in the Herald Tribune, "writ large and clear, as one of the great events of the year." The name, of course, was that of Zubin Mehta.

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The critic s were unanimous in their praise of Zubin's command over all the elements of the huge opera. Yet for all the control he exercised, they saw a remarkable flexibility at work, in letting the singers expand when a luscious phrase deserved expanding or pause when pausing gave dramatic emphasis. This last point was something that Zubin had taught himself from the standing room sections of the Staatsoper in Vienna — that the "moments" in opera must belong to the singers.

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But the New York critics had heard their share of high notes over the years. I he\ were looking for a conductor whose commanding presence might turn an average Metropolitan performance, with its moments of brilliance separated l>\ often interminable lapses into dullness, into the unified work of .tit that a (omposer like Verdi surely must have intended. In Zubin they found their man, and for weeks to come they

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Reviewing a Saturday afternoon broadcast performance, the Times 's Howard Klein found it "one of rare completeness." And, even though the cast had been changed to an all-star group for the radio audience — Leontyne Price, Richard Tucker, Irene Dalis, and Robert Merrill — the reviewer proclaimed that "the major role belonged to the conductor, Zubin Mehta.

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Hubert Saal, the critic from Newsweek Magazine, also devoted his entire column to Zubin, who "was like a man intoxicated. The passions of love, hate, jealousy and self-sacrifice flickered across his face like images upon a screen. His body rolled with the operatic punches. His hands stabbed, pierced, slashed . . . with the aplomb and showmanship of a Roman policeman." No matter that no one could possibly have seen those things unless he was sitting in the orchestra pit. The writer was trying to make the point that he and everyone else in the Met had been moved, and moved not by high notes or histrionics, but by a conductor who was all but invisible to most of the audience.

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Analyzing the Mehta style, the New Yorker critic calls attention to the fact that Zubin, unlike virtually every other conductor to come along in the last twenty years, had not been influenced by Toscanini to the point of imitating him. Such mimics, he writes,

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There is more, a good deal more, and one can read the entire article several times without finding the slightest qualifying phrase, word, or even suggestion that Zubin is anything less than a great opera conductor. All this toi a man who until two years before had never conducted an

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On the other hand, Zubin says, "Beethoven's Fifth sounds good with a lousy conductor, but opera just doesn't hold its own under mediocre leadership. There's so much to control, so many things happen at the spur of the moment. That's why I conduct without a score. I don't have to look down every two seconds to see where I am." As for Aida, "it's the Eroica of operas. You feel that everything functions; you can find no fat."

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It was unquestionably a high point in the career of a twenty-nineyear-old conductor. "Frankly," Zubin said, "I'm glad I made it to the Met before I was thirty." But he had no intention of quitting while he was ahead. "What do I want in opera? Everything! I've still fifty years to do opera."

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Nineteen sixty-seven was a convulsive year for America's symphony orchestras. In New York, Leonard Bernstein announced his imminent abdication of the prestigious Philharmonic throne. Jean Martinon left his post with the Chicago Symphony. Erich Leinsdorf, who had been awarded the Boston position Charles Munch wanted for Zubin, decided not to renew his contract when it expired two seasons later. Even Eugene Ormandy was rumored to be fidgeting in Philadelphia.

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No! so in Los Angeles. Pride in and of the Philharmonic was soaring, confidence in Zubinat its peak. His love affair with the Israelis might have stung a bit .it first, but the Los Angeles board still saw that as a passing flirtation. As i xecutive board member Olive Behrendt told an interviewer, Los Angeles was still Zubin's first love and most likely vehi( le to stardom. "To Zubin, the < hallenge is right here," she said. "He can do anything he wants, he has all kinds of recording possibilities." Indeed,

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Decca/London officials had been highly pleased with Zubin's leading of the Vienna Philharmonic in the Bruckner Ninth. He followed that up in 1966 with an album of opera preludes by Wagner and the Liszt Les Preludes, again in Vienna; then, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy, a recording of the Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2. Since all three records were artistic successes, and beginning to look like commercial successes as well, Decca/London officials let Zubin talk them into a contract with his own orchestra in Los Angeles.

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This had been one of Zubin's highest priorities since he took over in Los Angeles, feeling strongly that recordings — quality recordings of important music on a good label — would boost the Philharmonic's international reputation. He had signed his contract with Decca on the condition that he be allowed to record with his own orchestra, as soon as he determined the orchestra was ready. Decca officials went along, providing the musicians would be paid European scale, not American. This gave Zubinthe added headache of finding benefactors in Los Angeles who would make up the difference. It took some doing, but at last a contract was signed between Decca and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

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The four-year exclusive contract was momentous for a number of reasons. First, it signaled the arrival of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the international scene, with a recording industry giant willing to make a long-term investment in its future. As for marketability, clearly Decca was counting on the emerging prominence of Zubin Mehta to boost record sales. Historically, this was the first exclusive contract ever signed between an American orchestra and a major European recording hosue.

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Before they could begin recording, however, Zubin had a date with television cameras. The Bell Telephone Hour, lured by the maelstrom of publicity that seemed to swirl about him, was planning a TV special devoted to the conductor "whose sable locks, honey-colored aquiline features and voracious energy give him the appeal of a matinee idol and make him a kind of culture hero." Or so said Time Magazine.

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The television crew invaded the Music Center to film Zubin rehearsing, eating lunch, going over programming details with administrative personnel, working with the sections, talking to the camera, and finally playing a concert. They crowded their lights and sound gear into Mehli and Tehmina's Los Angeles home for a glimpse into Zubin's personal life. They interviewed players, board members, and office workers for their opinions of their favorite Parsee. When they had everything they wanted, they packed their equipment into cases and went away.

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Time was a tremendous pressure, since the orchestra had only two weeks between the end of its subscription season and the start of a spring lour in the East. The musicians would be unavailable for the necessary week of setting up the hall prior to the recording sessions. To solve this last problem, Zubin enlisted the aid of a youth orchestra to give the engineers some music to place their mikes by. (This was the American Youth Symphony, w hie h recently had come under the direction of Mehli Mehta, who had moved to California the year before.)

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I o furthei ( omplu ate matters, Zubin had to break away in the middle of the ic( ording period for a one-night stand at the Metropolitan Opera in New Yoik. That would cut three days out of the recording schedule. 1 hen there was Zubin's insistence that the U.C.L.A. music students be allowed to attend recording sessions. 1 he engineers relented, providing the students would stav in the top baliom si .its and not make any noise. I he biggest noise. however, turned out to he that made by the cymbal player in Pictures at an Exhibition. No matter where the engineers situated

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way to achieve a proper balance. He couldn't simply bang them together more softly, since that made a sound altogether different from the one Zubin required. After much experimentation, the percussionist was stationed up among the students in the far reaches of the balcony. There he sat, listening to the music on a headset, awaiting Zubin's cue on a closed-circuit television monitor. He spent the better part of two weeks there.

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The Los Angeles Philharmonic would later play the concert halls of Europe and Asia under Zubin, and there they would benefit from their identification with Hollywood and the American West. Now they were crossing the Rockies for the first time, going where those labels spelled "provincial" and "small-time" to the cultural elite. The thing Zubin feared most was condescension from the eastern critics.

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Amid frenetic last-minute preparations for that first concert, Zubin had managed to leave his tails at the apartment of a current girl friend,

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A number of such misadventures occurred on the tour. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the librarian was the culprit. Zubin had scheduled the Prelude to Die Meistersinger as an encore, but in putting out the music the librarian had neglected to place a Meistersinger part on concertmaster David Frisina's stand.

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The error was not discovered until Zubin was about to begin the encore. He saw panic on the face of the new assistant concertmaster, who shared Frisina's music stand. Frisina whispered to the boy, "Just keep on playing C major," and nodded to Zubin that he would manage. Zubinwas astonished, after starting into the Prelude, to hear Frisina playing his part perfectly from memory.

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The personal highlight of the tour, for Zubin, came in Washington. There, in the capital of his adopted nation, he was presented the highest civilian award of the nation of his birth. The Indian ambassador to the United States, B. K. Nehru, came onto the stage at the concert's conclusion to give the conductor the Bhusan, the Order of the Lotus. It meant a great deal to Zubin, particularly since it came from the country in which his father had struggled half his life just to get people to listen to his music.

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Sargeant's description bean an uncanny resemblance to violinist Eugene Husaruk's recollection of Zubin standing before the student orchestra in his fust conducting (lass at the Vienna Music Academy. Asked to describe his friends conducting technique in 1978, violinist Pin* has /ukei man would use almost identu al words. Zubin's entire body

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was his instrument. With it — with the slightest gesture or glance, with the broadest arc of his arms — he could so illuminate a composer's manuscript as to make it almost impossible for anyone to mistake his intention. There were still those who took issue with those intentions, just as there had been at Lewisohn Stadium at 1960, just as there will always be, but no one could argue that Zubin did not get what he wanted from an orchestra.

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The logistics of an orchestra tour are hectic enough without the conductor flying off to other cities between performances. But this is exactly what Zubin was doing, conducting the touring Metropolitan Opera's production of Otello between stops on the Los Angeles Philharmonic tour.

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He'd managed to arrange Monday nights free from the orchestra, so that he could lead the Met in its opening night in Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, and Cleveland. On the orchestra's day off, Zubin traveled.

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The opera went as well as might be expected until Zubin began conducting the restless but lovely introductory music to the second act. Suddenly he felt himself being elbowed out of the way, leaning at a dangerous angle toward the woodwinds.

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Mercifully, the orchestra kept playing as Zubinrighted himself. The jostler was a hefty middle-aged woman clearly distressed at his having started up before she had taken her seat.

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Immediately after the opera, Zubin hired a private plane to take him to Montreal, where he would rejoin the Los Angeles orchestra for the gala opening of Expo 67. The Philharmonic joined forces with the Montreal Symphony in a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique ("It's

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the way Berlioz dreamed of it!" says Zubin), Ravel's La Valse, and Respighi's Pines of Rome.

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Incredibly, all of this — recording, tour, Met, Expo — took place in less than six weeks, from late April until the first of June. Zubin could be forgiven if he hurried off to the calm of a Caribbean island for a few weeks' rest. But he did not go there to rest. He was engaged to conduct a concert in May at the Pablo Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Also at the festival was the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. "Grischa," as he was known, had become a great friend and ally of Zubin in Los Angeles, where he made his home. He had been a supporter of the Philharmonic for many years and was always free with his advice to the young music director. The two men were disappointed that they had no concerts together at the Casals festival, but in their time off they could share the sun and the ocean at the beach of the Caribe Hilton.

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"You don't think there's going to be a war, do you?" Zubin asked.

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Inevitably, the conversation drifted back to music and the regrettability of the two "Angelenos" having no concert together. Zubincame up with an idea. He would ask to postpone the Bruckner Fourth he was supposed to conduct and substitute the Strauss Don Quixote for cello and orchestra.

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Don Pablo was sitting in the wings on the evening of the concert to see fiis two friends perform the German composer's idealization of the legendary Spanish hero. At one point, during the F-sharp major variations, which depict Quixote lost in reverie, Zubin turned to cue the basses and saw a movement of white in the wings, a handkerchief. The ( )ld Man was weeping.

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I he morning after the t on* ert, Zubin pic ked up a Miami Herald in the hotel lobby and read the disturbing news that Nasser had moved heavy tanks and artillery into the Sinai. It began to look as it Grischa was right about w.u .

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The principals in Christopher N upen's film, The Trout. Left to right: Jacqueline du Pre, ZubinMehta, PinchasZukerman {viola), Christopher Nupen, Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman {violin; back to camera ) , London , 1 969.

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Nancy Kova< k be< omes Mis. Zubin Mehta, according to the 1'ai sec rite, in I>os Angeles, L969.

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Nancy and Zubin enjoying a rare opportunity to listen to someone else make music.

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After five years of conducting there, Zubin had developed a deep affection for Israel. It was almost his second home now, as much as Austria or Canada or the United States, and it was clear that Israel needed all the help it could get. But an artist is not a statesman or a soldier; his only means of defending his country, or at least of supporting it, is with his art.

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Three American Jews — conductor Erich Leinsdorf, soprano Roberta Peters, and tenor Richard Tucker — had been billed as the attractions for concerts in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. When the outbreak of war seemed imminent, foreign embassies advised their citizens, through the news media, to leave Israel. The next morning Leinsdorfs bags were packed. When the orchestra's driver appeared at the guest house, where the artists were lodged, the conductor asked to be driven not to the Mann Auditorium but to the airport. The singers and musicians were left without a conductor, at a rehearsal that would never begin. Hearing of this incident, Zubin fired off a telegram, offering his help to the orchestra.

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Meanwhile the political tension was stretching the Middle East toward the breaking point. Arab leaders, certain this would be the finish of Israel, began speculating publicly as to how the spoils would be divided. The Palestinian Arab leader, Ahmad Asaad Shukairy, boasted in front of reporters and television cameras that all young Jewish males would be put to death and that he personally would take care of the women and children. Finally, Zubin made up his mind and called on another Casals Festival guest, Isaac Stern, knowing of Stern's close connections with the Israeli consulate in New York.

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As Stern contacted his Israeli friends in New York to speed through a visa, Zubin cabled his European agent, Ruth Boucher, to cancel his guest appearances in Budapest and Paris. It was the first time he had ever canceled a concert.

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Exactly one year earlier, in June of 1966, he had conducted the Israel Philharmonic in twenty-one concerts in twenty-four days, because a tour of the U.S.S.R. had been abruptly canceled by the Russians. They had shuttled from Tel Aviv to Haifa to Jerusalem with a busload of musicians, sharing with them the giddiness that comes from too much success and too little sleep. He bade them farewell only to be called for an emergency substitution. The Israel Philharmonic had been going on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong with two conductors — Antal Dorati and Carlo Maria Giulini — but Giulini had suddenly canceled. Without putting up much of a fight, Zubin let himself be talked into going along. And what glorious music they made on that tour!

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Arriving at Rome Airport can be an agonizing experience even under normal conditions. By the time Zubin fought his way through customs, obtained a visa, registered at a hotel, it was already noon. Immediately he telephoned the Israeli Embassy in Rome to seek help in getting into Israel. Despite Zubin's pleas for urgency, the best he could get was an invitation to dinner at the ambassador's house.

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But Zubin insisted. He remained until long after dinner, badgering the ambassador until he got at least a promise that he would try and "see whether something can be arranged."

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Since that seemed to be the best he could do, Zubin left. Anyway it was almost midnight Monday, and he had not slept decently since Saturday night in Puerto Rico.

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Tuesday morning Zubin was awakened by a call from the Israeli ambassador.

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"Don't worry," Zubin assured him. "I won't tell a soul."

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The ambassador's statement on comfort was a masterpiece of understatement. The plane's seats had been removed and the cabin filled with crates and boxes, all unmarked. Zubinfound himself seated on a box with three other passengers. One was a member of the Israeli Parliament, one was the Rome bureau chief of Newsweek, Curtis Bill Pepper,

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Sometime after the plane was in the air, the banker turned to Zubin and asked, in Yiddish, "Du vayst goornisht vos is in die SchactelnV ("Do you know what's in these boxes?") Zubinshrugged and shook his head.

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Zubin was enjoying the excitement too much at the moment to wonder whether all this risk was really worth taking in order to conduct an orchestra in concerts that might never be played.

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The four passengers were sped by military car into town, where Zubin was met by an excited fellow in his pajamas. Zvi Haftel, head of the orchestra committee, had been awakened by a call from the Foreign Ministry to say it was flying in a conductor. Haftel told him he was not the first to arrive.

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At the Orchestra House, the guest house for visiting artists, Zubin was reunited with [acqueline du Pre, Daniel Barenboim and his parents, and Sergiu Comissiona, the Rumanian-born conductor and former director of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra. They, along with Mrs. Comissiona, were all camping out in the On lustra House basement, a sort of tem})<)!. ii \ air-raid shelter However, nobody was really expecting an air

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"We had one whale of a time that night," Zubinrecalls fondly. "After everything I'd been through to get there, we stayed up all night laughing and kidding around.

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Exuding confidence, they planned a "victory concert." Zubin would conduct, Daniel would play the Emperor Concerto of Beethoven, and Jackie would play the Schumann Cello Concerto, with Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 as a rousing show closer. One of the principal Israeli objectives of the war was to reunify the divided city of Jerusalem, so they decided that would be the appropriate place for the concert. The only hitch, of course, was that no one could be absolutely sure when the victory concert wouid be held. But there was no doubt it would happen. Wednesday morning the orchestra members were called in to rehearse, and again it was like a family reunion. The musicians attacked the Beethoven Fifth with the fervor of Israeli soldiers on the front lines. For many of them this would be their only chance to participate in what would surely be a glorious moment for Israel.

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After rehearsal, Zubin talked his friend Memi Shalit, head of the Israel Tourist Office, into lending him a car to drive to Jerusalem ahead of the orchestra and make preparations for the concert. Shalit also handed him a map marked with a little-known, circuitous route through the mountains.

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Driving over the rough back roads, Zubin came upon a squad of Israeli infantrymen coming from the Syrian front. He stopped to pick them up. What news, they asked, did he have of the fighting in the South? He laughed at the irony of soldiers seeking military information from a musician.

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A musician} What was his name? They assumed from his complexion and curly black hair that he was a sabra, a native-born Israeli. When Zubintold them who he was, one of the soldiers exclaimed, "This is the fellow we've been hearing about on the radio." "On the radio?" Zubin was puzzled.

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"Sure. They keep telling how Zubin Mehta flew across enemy lines to make a dramatic appearance and how you'll be conducting a victory concert when this Streitfall is over. You're a hero."

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The exhausted soldiers soon dropped off to sleep, leaving Zubin to

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Sandwiched between two Israeli tanks, Zubinentered the city like a commanding general. The streets were filled with shouting, flag-waving people who seemed hardly able to believe that the Holy City was once again united, that it belonged once again to the Children of Israel. Zubin sat on his automobile horn like a New York taxi driver, so caught up was he in the orgy of joy. "Well," he shouted to the soldiers above the din, "I guess I'm going to get some work to do after all."

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The old man did not rise from his chair, only lifted his gnarled hand in greeting as Zubinentered the office. The tufts of hair billowed like white flames from the huge dome of his head. Zubin was astonished to find himself conversing with this amazing patriarch, actually being thanked for coming here by this figure out of history books, who had carved a Jewish state out of Arab desert.

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Zubin was the only guest Wednesday night in the blacked-out King David Hotel. Sometime after midnight he was startled awake by what Bounded like a gunshot close by. He knew there must be sporadic fighting still going on. with a few Jordanian Army stragglers left in the city. Paying little heed to the shot, he chopped off to sleep again.

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Memi Shalit arrived shortly after six a.m. to find Zubin washed and dressed. Together they walked through the New City, which seemed still drowsy from a night of war and celebration, and came to the wall that surrounded Old Jerusalem. Stepping over the rubble and spent ammunition cases, they reached the Mandelbaum Gate, symbol of the Holy City's division. Since 1948 no Jew had been permitted to live on the other side of that gate, but now there was no one to stop them from walking through, into Old Jerusalem.

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Memi led Zubin up the hill to an amphitheater built as part of the old Jerusalem University. Long neglected, it was overgrown with grass and weeds. Nearly twenty seven hundred feet above sea level, the amphitheater commanded a sweeping view of the surrounding hills and the Dead Sea in the distance.

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Zubin grinned, "It's no Hollywood Bowl, you know. It needs a little work."

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Zubin laughed. "But this is Jordan."

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On Saturday morning, however, Zubin and Memi arrived at Mount Scopus with their cleanup crew to find the area cordoned off by soldiers. An officer walked up to their car.

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"But we were up there two days ago," Zubinprotested.

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As the soldier walked away, Zubin said to his friend, "You know, we probably would have had one hell of a time getting people to come all the way up here just for a concert anyway."

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The old man looked at Zubin as though he were going to say something, then he simply turned his wife and led her away.

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The following morning, Sunday, Zubin went with Memi and some other Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Abba Eban, to see the Western Wall. He had been told the significance of this "wailing wall" (as Westerners know it), that it was believed to be the actual western wall surrounding King Solomon's temple, that it was one of the most sacred shrines of Judaism.

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But Zubin was not a Jew. What he saw was an ancient stone wall surrounded l>\ the carcasses of shacks, Arab slums that had grown up around the wall in the nineteen years of Jordanian control, flimsy as the chawls of Bombay. Soldiers were knocking down the hovels and carting away nibble-, trying to dear a path to the holy wall. In the other men's faces he read strange emotions: joy mixed with deep sadness that it should ever have c ome to this. In the eves of men who had been killing and facing death, he saw quiet tears.

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"Since I was the only one driving, in my borrowed car, I had to take everyone everywhere," Zubin recalls. "We went to pick up this old rabbi and then drove him and Jackie to the mikvah.

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Jackie du Pre Barenboim remembers passing under the chupah, the wedding canopy, and seeing the joy of her dear friend, whose shoulders had once carried the man she was marrying. "I looked at Zubin," she says, "and there was his face streaming with tears. I shall never forget that."

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The wedding party's talk was perhaps less momentous, but nevertheless important. The Israel Philharmonic was throwing together a goodwill tour to the United States and Canada, a fund-raising effort to help replenish the nation's depleted treasury. They wanted Zubin, Jackie, and Danny to kick off the tour in New York with a repeat performance of the victory concert. Meanwhile, calls were going out all over the world to other conductors and soloists who might volunteer their services.

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Zubin was called from the table to take an overseas telephone call.

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From Israel, Zubin, Danny, and Jackie flew to New York for the first stop of the benefit tour. They were just settling into the Essex House when Daniel received a call from a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter who had been sent to do an advance article on the Israel Philharmonic to publicize the orchestra's date in that city. Since Daniel was scheduled to be with the orchestra in Pittsburgh, the reporter was requesting an interview.

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"I thought we might use your suite for the interview," said Daniel to Zubin. "We're a bit crowded down here."

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Some time later, Zubin received the reporter, who began to speak without giving Zubin time to introduce himself. The young man was positively effulgent at being in the same room with so eminent a musician as Mr. Barenboim.

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Zubin listened to the man prattle, amused at being mistaken for Daniel and thinking what a fine joke it would be on the reporter when finally he discovered his mistake. He wondered how long the joke could be drawn out. He certainly knew Damns biography and current concert schedule well enough to answer the fellow's questions.

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The door opened and Jackie appeared. She was about to apologize for Daniels being late when Zubin preempted her.

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"Now," said Zubin, "that's enough about me. You must talk to Mr. Mehta here, mv ver\ good friend. I expeel to see his name very prominent m your .titic h

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Danny. He doesn't want to hear about ZubinMehta." "But you know I'd be nowhere without you, Zubin." So it went, the reporter dutifully taking down the pithy remarks of these two famous musicians, each so gracious in his deference to the other. He went back to Pittsburgh and wrote his article, the joke lasting right until the moment the man he knew as "Zubin Mehta" walked out on the stage in Pittsburgh as Daniel Barenboim.

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Zubin returned to Los Angeles for a series of Hollywood Bowl concerts that were trial runs for concerts the orchestra would be doing on an upcoming international tour. Beginning in mid-September, the tour would take the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, and France, concluding with concerts in Iran — the homeland of Zubin's ancestors — and India — the land of his birth.

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Between the Hollywood Bowl and the tour, Zubin had ten days to himself, so he decided to accept the invitation of some Los Angeles friends, Ted and Jarma Bensinger, to accompany them on a shooting safari to Kenya. Perhaps there is something of the hunter in Zubin's blood, for he recalls vividly his visits to the homes of relatives on his mother's side in Bombay, Poona, and Hubli, where he saw stuffed tigers and leopards promenading through the rooms and sambar heads mounted on the walls. At any rate, in Kenya he fired the first four shots of his life and brought down four running animals: a zebra, a Grant's gazelle, a small antelope, and an impala. Since these animals were to be used as bait for the big game, he returned with no trophies. He couldn't stay around for a shot at the lions, since he was scheduled to play a concert in Belgium.

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Zubin joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Antwerp for the start of the whirlwind tour, which was to include forty-two concerts in nine weeks. The programs consisted of Samuel Barber's Medea s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, Dvorak's Eighth Symphony, William Kraft's Concerto for Percussion, Mahler's First Symphony, Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. Andre Watts was to be soloist in piano concertos by Brahms, Liszt, and MacDowell. Those

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In Belgrade, a television crew set up lights and cameras in the theater for a nationwide broadcast of the concert — without bothering to consult with anyone from the orchestra. Zubinwas furious when he saw the glaring lights, and he refused to go out on stage. The concert was delayed twenty minutes before he gave in and allowed the televising. He and the orchestra were rewarded with applause so long and loud that they were required to play four encores.

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The reception in Bucharest was just as feverish. The Moscow Philharmonic, with Kiril Kondrashin conducting, was also in town, but, because the Russians were so disliked by the Rumanians, they were forced to "paper the house" in order not to be embarrassed. Free tickets were handed out to the California musicians, who heartily enjoyed the Muscovites' interpretation of Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. The following evening, Kondrashin and several Soviet dignitaries were in the theater to see a lavish display of affection for the American orchestra, with Rumanians rushing to the stage to hug and kiss Zubin and the musicians at the end of their concert.

Page 160
At the concert in Istanbul, the President of Turkey demonstrated his overworked condition and boredom with Western music by falling asleep in the first row. "It was during Pictures at an Exhibition," Zubin recalls. "If that piece can't keep you awake you must be a very sleepy person." The President woke up for the end of the concert, in time to present Zubin with a Golden Palm award.

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In Athens, where young King Constantine's monarchy had only recently been overthrown by a bloodless military coup, Zubin was treated to marvelous curries prepared by the Queen Mother, a devoted Indophile. At a reception after the concert, he was congratulated by one of the ruling generals, who bragged of his daughter's accomplished piano skills.

Page 160
That's wonderful," Zubin replied. "Do you also play?"

Page 160
From Cyprus, Zubin had to leave the tour himself, in order to attend a Paris meeting with actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault. The Frenchman wanted to go over his concepts for a new production of Carmen that he would h( staging and Zubin would be conducting at the Metropolitan ( >pera the following season.

Page 161
After two rather unproductive days in Paris, Zubin flew to Rome, where he was scheduled to meet a United States Information Agency film crew from California. The USIA was putting together a film on Zubin for international distribution, and it wanted footage of him with the orchestra in Teheran and Bombay, the final stops on the tour.

Page 161
Zubin had forgotten one important matter: the visa for the orchestra tour was a joint visa; his permission to travel to Iran was voided by his separation from the orchestra, and Pan-American Airlines officials would not let him on the flight from Rome to Teheran. Just as the plane was about to depart, and just as it appeared that Zubin would miss his opportunity to conduct in Persia, the Pan-Am officials gave in to the arguments of the film crew, whose visas were correct and whose equipment was already in Teheran.

Page 161
The Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts turned out to be the grand opening of the newly built opera house, and Zubin decided to mark the occasion by playing a Persian composition. It was a dance named after a percussion instrument, something like a tambourine minus the cymbals, which was featured throughout the short work. However, when Zubin announced the piece at the opening concert, his well-intentioned mispronunciation of the Persian made it sound like "Dance of the Diarrhea," which gave the audience a good laugh.

Page 161
Yet the music was well received, and from the sound of the applause Zubin anticipated another evening of multiple encores. After only one encore, however, the Shah and his Queen stood up and left their box.

Page 161
Iranian protocol demanding that when the Shah leaves everybody leaves, the rest of the audience rose and, still applauding, started to file out. Then they saw the Queen return to her seat, so they all took their seats again. Zubinplayed a second encore; the Queen got up to leave, the audience got up to leave, then the Shah came back in. Zubin played another encore and the confusion started all over again. After the fourth encore, Zubin saw the royal couple leave their box once more — so he left as well.

Page 161
At last came Bombay, the first time Zubin had seen the city since 1954. When their plane landed in Vienna he had told the musicians, "Welcome to my home." Now he told them, "Welcome to my real home."

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the airport by girls in saris who placed garlands of flowers around the musicians' necks. Air India had plastered the city with billboards and placards reading, "Welcome to Bombay, ZubinMehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic." People had waited outside the convention hall all night to purchase tickets.

Page 162
Somehow the airline had managed to lose Zubin's luggage, so he was forced to wear the casual shirt and slacks he had worn on the plane to a meeting with Indira Gandhi and other Indian notables, who welcomed him home with more enthusiasm than they ever could have felt for his music. "Suddenly — " and Zubin smiles — "everyone in Bombay became my closest relative."

Page 162
"It was a soul-stirring moment for me," Zubinsays. "As soon as I stepped off the plane, it was as though I had never left Bombay. I knew it would always remain my true home."

Page 162
Zubin returned to Los Angeles in the fall of 1967 to find his board members wearing long faces and worried expressions. Was it true, they asked, that New York had offered him the job as Leonard Bernstein's successor? That he had accepted the offer? What could they do to change his mind?

Page 162
But to the e\( ited reporter from the New York Times, Zubin was direct and firm, allow Ing for no misinterpretation: "My orchestra is better than the \( -w York Philharmonic. We play better than they do. Artistically, it would not be a step up for me. I don't want the job. I'm very happy hei i

Page 162
The article published December 12 went on to quote Zubin as saying thai only Philadelphia and Cleveland, out of all the orchestras in the United St.ites, could be considered superior to the Los Angeles Philhar-

Page 163
In true Times provincial-snobbery fashion, often imitated but rarely equaled, the writer one-upped Zubin by giving him "credit" for bringing his orchestra in Los Angeles, "in only seven years [actually, he had been music director for five years] from nowhere to at least a second level of prominence." No reader had to be told that the New York Philharmonic most certainly resided in the upper reaches of that valhallic region known as the First Level of Prominence.

Page 163
That should have been that. Score 1-0 or 0-1, depending on which coast you were reading from. Unfortunately, the more reporters kept calling, the angrier Zubin got at their insistence that there must be something to the rumor. As several of his close friends have ruefully noted, "Sometimes Zubin shoots his mouth off." This time it was loaded, and he shot it off in the wrong direction. The broad side of the barn he hit was the December 18 issue of Newsweek Magazine.

Page 163
In 1854 Thoreau wrote, "You do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness." Zubin had been provoked into this severe truth, and not only by the badgering of newspeople.

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Lukas Foss meant a great deal to Zubin, as a musician and as a human being. By his unselfish intercession with Siegfried Hearst, Foss had become one of the key elements in Zubin's early success. Now Zubin saw New York as a graveyard where his friend's conducting career lay buried; that may have been in his mind when he blurted out his remarks to Newsweek.

Page 164
As luck would have it, Zubin was in New York rehearsing the Met's new production of Carmen when the Newsweek article hit the stands. He longed to escape to California, but he was stuck with Carmen through the first two weeks of January. There was no getting away from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.

Page 164
This time, however, Philharmonic manager Carlos Moseley could ill afford to ignore the situation. He had Zubin Mehta scheduled as one of the orchestra's guest conductors for the 1968-69 season, and, if he did not take some action now . those concerts were likely to turn into musical bloodbaths.

Page 164
The situation was not improved by the ill-timed airing of the Bell Telephone flour's profile of Zubin. Nothing more than "an hour of adulation/' sniffed the New York Tunes television critic. Out west, of course, the show created quite a different impression.

Page 164
New York's musk columnists did their best to keep the pot boiling through the Christmas-New Year holidays. Zubin and the Philharmonic management remained incommunicado, but the Times'* Harold Schonberg got a membei of the orchestra to speak "not for attribution."

Page 165
Behind the scenes, a meeting was arranged between Zubin and the musicians so that the matter might be settled out of press. On the afternoon of January 9, Zubin (or "the uninhibited young conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic," as the Times characterized him) appeared at a meeting of Local 802's executive board.

Page 165
For ninety minutes they met behind closed doors, the union chiefs explaining that they only sought respect for their members, Zubininsisting that all he wanted was respect for his orchestra in Los Angeles, that he had been misquoted by Newsweek (whose editors stood behind every word of their story), and that his opinions of New York had been distorted out of all proportion. Nowhere is it recorded that anyone actually apologized to anyone else.

Page 165
Zubin left the meeting, giving reporters no more than a smile. The telling of the tale was left to Max Arons, president of Local 802.

Page 165
According to Arons, "Mr. Mehta said he was happy to come in and clear up the misunderstanding." The meeting had been "strict and stern, but friendly." At the end, the union was satisfied that Mr. Mehta did indeed respect its musicians and that his remarks were not intended to slur. Arons said he advised Zubin to "study what he says before he talks, like studying a score. It's like a bad note, you can't take it back once it's played."

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That same day the newspapers reported that Zubin's appearances with the Philharmonic were "postponed." As a matter of fact, it had been several weeks earlier, when the Newsweek issue hit the stands, that Carlos Moseley suggested to Zubin over the phone that, under the circumstances, it might be prudent to call off next season's appearances. Zubin had agreed immediately.

Page 166
Jean Martinon's post in Chicago went to Georg Solti, Leinsdorf s in Boston to William Steinberg. The rumors of Ormandy's leaving Philadelphia turned out to be false. Although he felt obliged to relinquish his Montreal directorship, ZubinMehta stayed in Los Angeles. After all, he had the promise of the then board chairman, Joseph Koepfli, that, "We're going to be as flexible as we can to suit you, because whatever this orchestra is and does, it's yours."

Page 167
The almost unbelievable pace of 1967 is made even less believable by the fact that it is not atypical of all the Zubin Mehta years since 1961. His life and his work have been inseparable, almost indistinguishable. Brief spaces between concerts — usually no more than a few days at a time — have been filled with study, meetings, and marathon strategy sessions over long-distance telephone lines.

Page 167
One critic in particular, the Los Angeles Times 's Martin Bernheimer, has played variations on the theme of "playboy conductor" for so long that reality has become inextricably entangled with myth in the media net. Whereas Zubinlaughingly declares that "that kind of 'Rubinstein' book will never be written about me," he does admit to having had a "pretty busy life" as far as women are concerned.

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In the years that followed his divorce from Carmen, Zubin backslid naturally into bachelorhood. There were always parties after concerts, against which he continually protested but at which he nevertheless felt obligated to put in appearances. Friends were forever pairing him with eligible young women who offered little or no resistance to the combination of Mehta charm and musical deification.

Page 168
"Look, we've all been through that," protests Zubin, referring to the built-in glamour of a performing artist's job. "The minute you walk on stage, whether you're tall, dark, and handsome or pale, fat, and ugly, you're creating an illusion in the minds of those people out there. It's the illusion they love, not the reality."

Page 169
So the "carefree" life continued. Carefree, that is, if one ignores the fact that he was burdened with the cares of building and operating orchestras in Montreal and Los Angeles, overseeing the growth of the Israel Philharmonic, tending to his own growth as a conductor of both symphonies and operas and managing his career. (After the death of Siegfried Hearst in 1963, Zubin never had a personal manager or even a secretary, except for Europe, where his affairs have been looked after by Ruth Bottcher, a friend since his earliest days in Vienna.)

Page 169
Even though Carmen and Zubin stopped living together, there was never, as Zubin has pointed out, any hatred or bitterness about the parting. Carmen continued sitting in the company box at Montreal Symphony concerts, usually with Zarin as her escort. It seemed like a natural arrangement.

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No one else had spotted this affinity then, not Carmen or Zarin, and certainly not Zubin. As he watched the relationship between Zarin and Carmen develop, Zubin was uncertain what his own reaction should be.

Page 170
For a time it seemed as though Zubin would never settle down. There were rumors of impending marriage to Teresa Stratas, but, as he put it, "We never found ourselves with the same day off in the same place at the same time. How could we get married? Besides, Teresa is a confirmed bachelor."

Page 170
On the other hand, Zubin found himself yearning after the security and stability of married life. The relationship with Stratas had cooled and finally died a natural death; his brief encounters with jet-set ladies dropped from headline stories to one-line notes in the gossip columns. In Los Angeles, his suite at the Sheraton West (now the Sheraton Town House) was becoming less and less distinguishable from those in all the other first-class hotels he slept in, from Berlin to Florence to New York. He even put a down payment on a studio apartment in a condominium ih.it was going up near the Music Center, hoping for at least a hint of permanence in his pied-a-terre. If not a wife to come home to, at least his own refrigerator and tea kettle. Then, in the fall of 1968, Zubin was invited to a dinner party given by Vincente Minnelli (father of Liza Minnelli) and his then wife, Denise.

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Hills, the sort of place that promotes whispered conversations among small groups of people, even when they are seated at a rather large table. Had the light been better, Zubin certainly would have directed his attention to the stunningly beautiful blond actress seated across from him. But, in the dark, he could only make out the people on either side of him.

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"You know," Zubin interjected, "we were there during his coronation, and I must tell you, Teheran was absolutely a fairyland. So many lights . . ."

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"You must be Zubin Mehta."

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Denise knew Nancy had a "thing" about ZubinMehta, a "thing," in fact, about all the Hollywood glamour-types with their fast cars and their faster talk that was always about themselves. She couldn't forget the Time Magazine article she read where Mehta was quoted about children being too much of a distraction for a musician as important as he was. How could a man feel that way about his own children?

Page 174
"The only trouble," Zubin was saying, "is that today nobody in Teheran (.m read those inscriptions."

Page 174
'" That's nonsense." Zubin declared, his voic e rising in pitch as it does in heated c on\et sation.

Page 175
"No," answered Zubin. Then he added, rather smugly, Nancy thought, "But I do speak English, Gujerati, Hindi, German, French, Italian, Yiddish, some Hebrew, and a few other languages."

Page 175
The pointless argument continued well into the entree. At last Zubin looked at his watch and cut Nancy off by pushing his chair away from the table.

Page 175
There were loud protestations, including one from Nancy, who wanted her point conceded. But Zubin rose and said, "I have a plane to catch."

Page 175
"But Zubin," said Vincente Minnelli, "you already told us you have no performance or rehearsal tomorrow."

Page 175
For three weeks Nancy fretted over the incongruities of this man who could be "distracted" by children yet fly four thousand miles just to see them on his day off, who could appear so sensible on one hand and so bullheaded on the other. Late one night she was awakened by a phone call from Europe. It was Zubin, wanting her to be his guest at his concert that Saturday in Los Angeles. Against her better judgment, Nancy accepted.

Page 175
Her memories of that first "date" begin after the concert ended. "We went to his suite in the Sheraton West so he could change clothes. On the way up he asked a bellboy to bring some drinks, so I said I would have orange juice. The bellboy asked Zubin what he wanted, and he said he would have orange juice, too. I thought, Boy, what a schlump. Can't even think of anything to order on his own."

Page 175
Perhaps it was inevitable that two people who so loved orange juice should fall in love. Neither Zubin nor Nancy can offer any sounder explanation. Their "courtship" consisted mostly of long-distance telephone conversations, with Zubin conducting in Berlin and Vienna and Israel and Nancy filming television shows in Los Angeles or on location.

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Nearly ten years later, Zubin also recalls that unique dinner date. "But that's not why I took her there," he says with a wink. "If you must know, I think Tiny Naylor's has awful chocolate pudding. She was hungry and that was just the closest place I could think of to my hotel room!"

Page 176
Zubin did ask Nancy on dates out of the country, but she refused, setting her sights on marriage or nothing. He'd been planning a trip to India for some time, to go on his second safari, and wanted to take Nancy along. Though she wanted desperately to see that part of the world, Nancy turned him down. She booked herself on a cruise to Antarctica instead.

Page 176
1 ven today, Nancy c arries her "protective attitude" to extremes, warning visitors to her home not to swat gnats because "they really aren't hurting anybody.*1 Meanwhile, up in his study, Zubin swats away, waging ,i private wai againsi the "damn bugs."

Page 177
The winter of 1968-69, the period of Zubin and Nancy's intercontinental courtship, was a difficult time for Tehmina and Mehli Mehta.

Page 177
Zubin, of course, continued calling the hospital room at frequent intervals from various parts of the world, considerably increasing his monthly contribution to the telephone systems of the world. The phone call Mehli remembers best came in early April, just before his scheduled release from Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Page 177
"My wife was with me in the room when the phone rang, and she answered. She said it was Zubin, calling from Florence, and he wanted to speak with me. Zubin said, 'Daddy, I want to tell you something very important.' I thought it was going to be something about his music, some performance he'd given or a new work he'd discovered, but he said, 'I would like to marry Nancy Kovack. Would you give me your permission?"

Page 177
Zubin was thirty-three years old and had no need of Mehli s permission to get married, but the closeness of the Mehta family and the strong bond that had always existed between father and son were not likely to be affected by Zubin's growing older. Mehli gave his permission and the wedding date was set for July 19, 1969, the next open weekend on Zubin's schedule. The wedding to Nancy turned out to be, if anything, even more complicated than the one to Carmen in 1958.

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First, there was the matter of introducing Nancy to her new stepchildren. Zubin was tied up in Florence, directing the spring festival there, so it was decided that Merwan and Zarina would fly there, as soon as their current school term was finished, and Nancy would meet them in Italy.

Page 178
"The first thing Zubin asked when he met me at the airport in Rome was 'Did you win?' And I said, 'No.' He said, 'Well, who did win?' I hadn't the slightest idea. I just knew the name they read wasn't Nancy Kovack, so I got out of there as fast as I could. To this day I still don't know who won that Emmv."

Page 178
In Rome, Nancy and the children took to each other from the start, and were close friends by the time they left together for Israel. For Nancv, it was a foretaste of what life as the wife of a famous conductor would be like. WOndering if perhaps she hadn't gotten in over her head, she struggled to keep a grip on the wedding plans as Zubin busied himself with the Israel Philharmonic. By telephone, Nancy worked out some of the details with a friend in Los Angeles, but she arrived home in late June to find that main of the ( ritical details remained to be settled.

Page 179
On July 19, 1969, as the world watched Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins maneuver their Apollo XI spaceship into place for the next day's landing on the moon, Nancy Kovack held her father's arm and walked down the aisle of the Westwood Community Methodist Church toward the man with whom she intended to spend the rest of her life, Zubin Mehta. Daniel Barenboim had flown in to be best man.

Page 179
"One thing about my wedding I will never forget," says Nancy, her malleable voice taking on a dark color. "When I walked down the aisle, all the faces turned toward me, all those faces of people Zubin had known and worked with for all those years. And they were not happy faces. Nobody smiled at me. I realized that, to them, Zubin was going away, that I was taking him away from them. For some of them, of course, that was true. But I kept on smiling. Nothing was going to spoil this day for me."

Page 179
From the church the wedding party raced down Sunset Boulevard to the magnificent Bel Air Hotel, where the couple changed into traditional Indian wedding garb. Zubin wore a traditional Parsee turban, a long jacket of white muslin, and white trousers; Nancy donned a sari that had been specially made for her in Bombay, of white satin with sequins and stitching of real silver, presented to her by her new in-laws. Two days before the wedding she had discovered that part of the ceremony included a matched pair of chairs in which the bride and groom were to sit and which they would keep as symbols of their inseparability for life. She came up with two French provincial armchairs upholstered in bright yellow.

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Zubin cut off Dr. Bode's explanation. "Look here," he growled, "this is supposed to be a wedding, not one of your lectures. Get on with it." So the ceremony continued, Zubin and Nancy sprinkling incense over a sandalwood fire and having their hands bound together over the flame.

Page 180
After what seemed like an interminable reception, they drove to Los Angeles International Airport. Originally they had planned a romantic, if brief, honeymoon in Tahiti, but, typically, Zubin had neglected to get a proper visa for Tahiti, so they wound up on a plane heading for Hawaii.

Page 180
On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong was taking his "giant step for mankind," Nancy and ZubinMehta stepped off the airplane in Hawaii, receiving the traditional leis as greeting. Though it was not quite the honeymoon they'd intended, Nancy remembers the two days as being "very nice. Of course, Zubin brought his scores along to study."

Page 181
The Los Angeles audience, after fifteen years, has grown accustomed to Zubin Mehta's insistence on programming contemporary music. Some of them like it, most only humor him, listening to Searle and Subotnick for the sake of Beethoven and Brahms, much as children put up with spinach and string beans for the sake of hamburgers and ice cream.

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Even in supposedly sophisticated New York, when Zubin conducted the Schonberg Five Pieces with the Philadelphia Orchestra, there was a certain amount of disapproval. Despite what critic Alan Rich called a "splendid reading," the musicians were playing against a background of "coughing and rustling in the audience, over a piece that is now sixty-five years old."

Page 182
Zubin has always faced a certain amount of resistance to twentiethcentury music; he blames it not so much on the audiences as on the previous generation of conductors. In 1965 he told a symphony preview audience at the Music Center:

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I here are critics, however, who maintain that "struggling" with contemporary music is a fault in a conductor. They accuse Zubin of putting up a show of modernity for the sake of appearances, of programming only those composers who are chk or trench, of (to quote the Los Angeles Times'* Martin Bernheimer) playing "avant-garde music for people who don't like avant-garde music/'

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Bernheimer: If it's a gutty piece, if it's a Carmina Burana sort of thing, watch out! But if it's a hard, thorny modern piece, if it's Elliott Carter, if it's Stockhausen [neither of whom, by the way, has Zubin ever performed in Los Angeles], if it's Penderecki, the implication is that this is bitter medicine, folks, but it's good for you, so listen.

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In recognition of which, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers presented Zubin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic with one of its annual awards for "adventuresome programming of contemporary music, in 1975 and again in 1976.

Page 184
A more consistent criticism of Zubin has been his limited repertoire. One finds frequent remarks in the press and in private conversations to the effect that he is an uneven interpreter of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, generally of any music composed before the nineteenth century.

Page 184
There is, to be sure, a reason for this criticism. Even one of his closest friends remarks that "Zubin has problems with the classical literature; it's not his metier, not one of the areas he feels most comfortable in. Still," adds the world-famous musician, "I'd rather hear him do it than a lot of other conductors. He makes things happen, he makes theater out of the music."

Page 184
Checking a recent subscription season in Los Angeles, one finds that out of approximately sixty programmed works, eight fall into the prenineteenth-century category. Among these are such major works as Mozart's Symphonies no. 38 and 41 and Haydn's Mass in Time of War, all conducted by Zubin Mehta. Guest conductors also brought several classi< «il works to the Los Angeles audience. There are no baroque works listed, yet a dearth of baroque music is hardly uncommon in any Ameri( an 5) mphon) season.

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( )( c asionall) the i riticism has been worded to suggest that what Zubin actuall) eschews is the small-orchestra sound of most Bach-throughMozart composers. This is truest of his appearances on tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, and, earlier, the Monti eal S\ mphon) . The explanation for this phenomenon is both simple and twofold. First, the out-of-town audiences expect the "big sound" from a Mehta orchestra, and a great (leal of money and planning has gone into bringing that to them. Second, the expense of traveling with one hundred-plus iuusk i.ms ( an haiclK be justified unless most of them ai ( kept bus) -

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( ( >ndu< ting his <>w n ok hestra at home, however, Zubin does not hesitate to decimate il lor the sake of playing smaller-ensemble music, whether baroque or contemporary. A recent audience at the Music Centei Pavilion was surprised and delighted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic — cut down to almost chamber orchestra proportions —

Page 185
If some of Zubin's latter-day critics would consult the files of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in pre-Mehta years, they would discover that both the orchestra and the audience were poorly disposed toward this sort of music. Season subscribers wanted Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, and that was what they got, almost exclusively. It was not until the 1963-64 season that Zubin slipped Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Weber into the programs, hoping his subscribers would be sufficiently dazzled by the opening of their new Music Center not to notice.

Page 185
Albert Goldberg, then the Los Angeles Times 's chief critic, spotted the move and praised Zubin highly for "breaking down the resistance of the audience" to the less bombastic literature. Goldberg pointed out that even the Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 4, while a familiar commodity to audiences in most cities, was almost a stranger to Los Angeles. The Philharmonic had played the Fourth Brandenburg only twice prior to its performance in April 1964, the last occasion having been in 1947.

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Zubin's repertoire does in fact extend from almost the earliest orchestral music to the very latest, with the works he loves best, and perhaps conducts best, lying in the great ocean of music that separates those not really dissimilar extremes. Within that sea of expansive, expressive, and impressive music, it is generally agreed that Zubin is tremendously impressive. His orchestras are together, their sound is one of lush beauty; his interpretations are suited to the composer's intent.

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To violinist Itzhak Perlman, the first impression of Zubin was one of astonishment. "It was just unbelievable. He was like a dynamo. I had never played Tchaikovsky like that before. It was my first experience with someone inspiring me as a conductor. I came off the stage and said, 'Listen, I just did something unbelievable!'"

Page 186
Zukerman observed what others have observed from both sides of the podium, that Zubinconducts not with a baton, nor with his hands, but with ever) part of his body.

Page 186
"Some conductors do it just with the hands, others just with the face, others only with the body, but Zubin can do all of it. You can tell from the moment he lifts his arms to begin; his back muscles and his arms are so tense that if I tried to move him with all my force I couldn't do it."

Page 186
From the audience, however, one often becomes entranced by the arms alone-, l>\ the numberless variety of their motions and positions. A Time Magazine observe* in 1964 found himself comparing the podium to a pin her's mound as he watc hed Zubin "winding his arm behind his head foi broad, sweeping gestures, like a pitcher unfurling a fastball, while his spider) left hand deftly drew out the secondary voices."

Page 187
Yet for all the easily observed, often poetically described armwork, there are those who say the most important parts of Zubin's body are his eyes. This became extraordinarily apparent to those who watched the telecast of Die Fledermaus from Covent Garden on New Year's Eve of 1978 and saw Isaac Stern's eyes glued to those of the conductor as they blended flawlessly in the unrehearsed last movement of the Mendelssohn PL-minor Violin Concerto. For Stern, the experience was unique — being in position, albeit forty feet away, to look into a conductor's eyes rather than standing next to the podium, stealing over-theshoulder glances. But to Zubin, bridging the distance with his eyes is nothing new.

Page 187
Zubin himself has admitted to "conducting the audience" on occasion. "It all depends on what you are playing, who is playing it, and to whom you are playing. I know, for instance, how to direct the attention of t hepublic to the soloist. Or I can appear heroic myself, with Ein HeldenUbenr

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To the Los Angeles Times in 1961, Zubin's conducting style was "seldom flamboyant; normally it is graceful and coaxing rather than agitated and histrionic." To Musical America three years later he was "not a 'showy' conductor, but a supremely theatrical one, in the best sense. Every movement has to do with the score." Still, on the matter of theatricality Zubinhas grown somewhat defensive.

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His point is that any dramatics must flow naturally from the music and from oneself as well. Eugene Husaruk, who watched Zubin in Vienna and played under him in Montreal, feels that this is essential to an understanding of the man and of his work.

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And, to give Zubin the final word on the matter, "Intellectual snobs forgel i hat showmanship is a great asset to the profession. We have to bring certain things over to the public magnetically, and that requires acting."

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Those w ho have observed Zubin conducting solo performers, whether in (oik eil or opera, have remarked on the rare electricity that seems to flow between him and instrumental soloist or singer. Ebb and flow of emotion, give and take within a tempo marking, fluctuations in soloensemble balance — these are things that are discussed in rehearsal, yet performed with enormous spontaneity.

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As It/hA Perlman puts it, "Zubin never disagrees with the soloist's conception, .is long .is it's reasonable. You know, if you want to take a rubato here 01 an accelerando there, that you are not bound by the limitations of the conductor. Zubin will always be with you. Always, we are i reating something at the moment.*'

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Bai itone Shci i ill Milnea obsei ves th.it. even though the Mehta execution ma\ he quite physical, the approach to music is metaphysical. "It's not just th.it Zubin understands what makes musicians tick. He knows wh.it in. ikes human beings tick."

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At his opening concert as music director he took the Los Angeles Philharmonic completely unaware with his interpretation of the Dvorak D-minor Symphony. The performance was radically different from its preparation. Zubinhad found both himself and the orchestra taking the music a bit for granted, and he wanted to give them all something to think about. The notes, the tempo markings, the dynamics were all the same ones they had played in rehearsal, the same ones Dvorak had written down, yet the music came out sounding different. And therein lies the secret of the conductor's art, simple, yet — to many — unfathomable.

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Zubin smiles. "Music, you see, is more than black notes on a white page. The important thing is what lies between the notes."

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There is one thing no one has been able to teach Zubin about conducting — the proper way to stand. Hans Swarowsky told him in 1955: "Mehta, die Fiissen!" Charles Munch yelled at him in 1958: "Put your feet together!" Twenty years later he still stands with his feet spread apart, but nobody argues about it any more.

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With two notable exceptions — the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 1958 and the New York Philharmonic in 1967 — Zubin has had nothing but good relations with the orchestras of the world. One reason he is respected by his players is that he respects them. Where once he had a reputation for getting irritated when musicians failed to live up to his expectations in performance, he has learned that a momentary show of displeasure can be a destructive force to the music.

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Thus a Mehta performance can seldom justly be criticized as perfunctory. If he is conducting a piece he loves, the love always shines through; if the piece is not quite top drawer, Zubingenerally finds some way to present it to his audience in the best possible light. An illustration of the latter instance occurred when he decided to program a work that is virtually unknown in America and only rarely heard in its native England, Elgar's In the South.

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How does Zubin account for this?

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Leading the Los Angeles Philharmonk in music from the films Star Wan and Close Encounters <>f the Third Kind, Zubin produced sonic j)\ rotec hnu s to equal «» dazzling display ol laser lights and fireworks that lit up the night sk\ in the Hollywood Bowl. At the conclusion of the concert, the sellout audience <>f near!) eighteen thousand erupted in

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uncontrolled, screaming frenzy. As the orchestra's executive director, Ernest Fleischmann, reports, "I didn't think they were going to let Zubin off the stage. They went wild, absolutely wild. The audience went out of their minds!"

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Doubtless some will lay this to the effect of laser lights and gimmickry. However, it must be noted that the same thing was tried in New York, with a different orchestra under a different conductor, laser show and all, and it was a dismal flop. When Decca/London saw the popularity of outer space films as an opportunity to pull the company out of a sales slump, Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were called on to make a crash recording of the Star Wars and Close Encounters suites that quickly climbed to the top of the charts.

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It was not a new work for the orchestra nor for Zubin. They had taken it on tour the year before and were scheduled to record it for Decca/ London a few weeks later. The performance had been programmed as a "refresher" before the recording sessions, but the concert turned into something much more than a play-through.

Page 191
"Often you feel a performance is good," Zubinsays, "but there are different levels of good, and at the top is the level at which you feel that you are no longer on a podium but standing on air, the sort of thing that people who take drugs talk about. But you don't need drugs, only the music. You don't work at it. All of a sudden it's there.

Page 191
When the symphony was over, Zubin dropped his head like a medium breaking a trance. The musicians breathed with him as though they had scarcely drawn breath for the length of the symphony. His face was dripping and his jacket soaked with perspiration as he at last turned to

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"Playing a concert with Zubin is . . ."Jacqueline du Pre pauses, searching for just the right words, "is like riding on a magic carpet."

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It seems to be that way for every soloist, renowned or not, who performs under the Mehta baton. No less an experienced musician than Artur Rubinstein, who has worked with the greatest conductors of the century, confides that "some of my most joyous and inspired performances have been in collaboration with Zubin Mehta."

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In the twenty-plus years since his student days in Vienna, Zubin has won a cheering section of some of the most familiar names in the music world: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alfred Brendel, Jacqueline du Pre, Placido Domingo, Shirley Verrett, Beverly Sills, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, and of course Daniel Barenboim. Those are a few who have worked with him often. Many of them are also his closest friends, and that can make for rare moments in music.

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with a virtuoso assemblage of Barenboim playing piano; Perlman, violin; Zukerman, viola; du Pre, cello — and Zubin Mehta playing a borrowed bass.

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Another of those rare moments, also preserved on film, came after a rehearsal in Israel. Artur Rubinstein was there to play a Brahms concerto with the Israel Philharmonic. At the end of the scheduled rehearsal time, Zubin asked the pianist if there was anything more he'd like to work on before the orchestra was dismissed. Giving the matter only a moment's thought, the white-haired Rubinstein looked up from the piano and said, "You know, all my life I have wanted to conduct a Brahms symphony."

Page 194
Taking the hint, Zubin asked the musicians if they would mind staying a few minutes late to grant Rubinstein's wish. Not one of the players made a move to rise. Handing the old man his baton, Zubin stepped back and took the role of interested observer. He was amused to see Rubinstein start the Brahms Third Symphony at an even slower tempo than the one he had used for the Schubert Fifth in the Liverpool competition. Apparently unaware that it was his own ponderous beat the musicians were following, Rubinstein urged them on. "Gentlemen, gentlemen, can't you play a little faster?" The "few minutes" turned into two hours as the Israeli musicians willingly plodded through the entire symphony. As far as I know," recalls Zubin, laughing, "it was the first and last time Mr. Rubinstein ever conducted. But I tell you, it was a treasured experience for all of us who were there."

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The only one willing to identify those mysterious "changes" that Zubin has undergone is Nancy herself, though she is quick not to take credit for them. Rather, she feels somewhat grateful that Zubin has chosen to reflect some of the qualities that she considers positive aspects of her own personality.

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"If there were anything I could wish for this marriage," she says, "it would be that I could be married to Zubin and that he could be as happy as he is now, without having to be what he is. The fame and the glamour and the money, that I could do without. That's not what I married."

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If she dreams of anything, it is of someday having more time alone with Zubin. When he is working, they have so little time to themselves that after a concert they will usually drive straight home. Pretending that midnight dinners are not out of the ordinary, Nancy cooks a full meal, they eat, perhaps a game of backgammon, and when they go to bed it is nearly two. "Its the only time we have," says Nancy, "where there's really a sense of family. That time is really very precious because so much of our life is in constant suspension.

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Even before the marriage, Nancy wasted no time talking Zubin out of his would-be apartment near the Music Center. She found a small house in Bel Air and they made their home there, in a "charming little cottage," as she refers to it, for four years. The year 1973 ended their cottage days for good, however. They bought a house built by the well-known California architect Cliff May and most recently owned by actor Steve McQueen. It sits atop a mountain in an area known as Brentwood, just west of Beverl) Hills.

Page 197
A sliding glass door opens and Zubin Mehta welcomes you into his studio, his sanctum sanctorum. It is somewhat cluttered, one imagines permanently so. A wood-paneled closet is half open, a trove of stereo

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equipment nestled under a large-screen color television set. The stereo represents work, the television relaxation. Zubin has been known to sit for hours on Sunday with a tuner in hand, switching from football to golf to basketball. Of course he always keeps a score in his lap so that one part of his mind brushes up on Bruckner while another part chuckles at reruns of The Honeymooners.

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"Nancy did it for me one week when I was away," Zubin explains. "It was a surprise."

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As he talks with his guests, Zubin occupies the sofa, drawing his legs up under his body in the "lotus" position, kicking off his thong sandals. Ronald arrives with a silver pot of Darjeeling tea and china cups, each with its own stick of cinnamon bark to give the tea a remarkable flavor. There may even be a sampling of chocolate mousse, made with real Viennese chocolate, which Zubin orders regularly from an old Jewish lady in the valley.

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"I've worked very hard for this house," Zubinreflects. "I've lived in hotels so much of my life . . . and I so hate hotels."

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But the mountain villa is not the only California house he has worked for, and Zubin is careful to point that out. There is also the house that Doroth) Chandler built. For sixteen seasons he has been music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, longer than any man before him. If Mrs. Chandler built the house, it is certainly Zubin Mehta who built the on hestra.

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I he million-dollar instrument collection, along with many other improvements Zubin has been able to make in the orchestra, is due in large pan to the generosity of the Michael J. Connell Foundation.

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In 1963 the foundation's trustees — John Connell and his two cousins — met with Zubinto ask what he felt the orchestra needed that money could buy.

Page 199
After barely a moment's hesitation, Zubinstarted to enumerate his priorities. "What I would like very much," he said, "is money to pay some important people in the orchestra more than they're getting now."

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Zubin had sat in the rear ranks of an orchestra; he had watched his father struggle on a violinist's salary; he knew, just as William Andrews Clark had known in 1919, that musicians couldn't make good music if they were constantly worried about paying rent and getting food on the table.

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"Thanks to the Connell Foundation," says Zubin, "we were able to begin a collection of fine string instruments which now includes four Stradivarius violins, two Gasparo da Salo cellos, a Pressenda violin, a Brescian viola, and many others. Many of the players have their own fine instruments as well."

Page 199
Signaling with his eyes and a movement of his head, Zubin alerted then-concertmaster David Frisina, who quickly handed Milstein the 1710 Tate Stradivarius he played. The soloist rejoined the orchestra after a hiatus of only three measures, coming in just in time for the cadenza.

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In Los Angeles alone, Zubin engaged more than seventy musicians in sixteen seasons, while actually dismissing only about ten. Others were retired on a pension plan Zubin helped introduce during the first years of his tenure.

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That system lias cased the pressure on the music director considerable Prior to its institution, the business of calling a man or woman into the of fu e. for .1 noti( e of dismissal or lowering of rank, brought Zubin to the verge of resigning. The most difficult case was that of concertmaster David Fnsma.

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Zubin ( onsidered Frisina not only a great concertmaster, but a valued Friend whose advii c he bad relied on considerably in his early years with the Philharmonic . Fi isina had been with the orchestra since 1937, only a year after Zubin w.is bom; he'd served as concertmaster since 1942.

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When he took over the ok lustra. Zubin had been more than content

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with Frisina leading the strings. By 1^71', however, Zubin decided it was

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The problem of Frisina was not unique. The orchestra was improving at a rate that left some of its musicians behind. Zubin had to act, yielding at last to the wishes of the board and to his own better judgment. Eight key players were either replaced or their position strengthened by the addition of co-first-chair players. David Frisina was moved from the first chair to the fourth. Acknowledging the benefit to the orchestra, the violinist accepted the change.

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"It was an awful time for Zubin," John Connell recalls. "He fought over every one of those musicians. He's a highly sensitive man and he hated every moment of it. At one point, when it was all over, he said, 'I've had it. I'm quitting.'"

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Zubin did not quit, however. The furor died down and the musicians made it clear that they wanted very much to be the world-class orchestra he was trying to build. He never could have achieved what he did in Los Angeles without help from them and from others.

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With a knowledgeable man like Fleischmann, who came to Los Angeles from CBS Records, Zubin for the first time had someone with whom he could discuss considerations of guest artists and repertoire. Among his many achievements, Fleischmann took over direction of the Hollywood Bowl season and used his long-established relationships with great artists to turn the Bowl concerts into profit-making events for the Symphony Association.

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The sole instance of the Los Angeles Board members wanting their own way with ZubinMehta is in the area of exclusivity. They wanted him all to themselves.

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Bui Zubin had fell an affinity for the Israel Philharmonic since that first c ryptk ( able fiom the "Palphuorc" In 1961 ■ At that time he and the on hestra wei e both twenty-five years old, and the self-governing Israeli musicians decided then and there that Zubin Mehta would be invited f>a( k to ( ondlM t them in eac h subsequent sear until their mutual fiftieth

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The friendship grew through the early and mid-sixties, but it was not until the Six-Day War of 1967 that the musicians of the IPO realized just how good a friend Zubin Mehta was. The following year the musicians voted themselves a music director, for the first time in the orchestra's history. They offered the job to Zubin Mehta.

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Officially, Zubin could not accept. His Los Angeles contract ruled out his taking another music director post. After a great deal of arguing, the Los Angeles board overruled John Connell and allowed Zubin to accept the job of "music adviser" to the Israel Philharmonic.

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Jerusalem Symphony, "Zubin has a real knack for getting the headlines."

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When the war broke out, Zubin was already in Israel, so there was no need for a repetition of the 1967 odyssey. With friends Isaac Stern and Daniel Barenboim, he took the orchestra to military outposts on both fronts. At an Israeli Air Force base in the Sinai Peninsula, they played what one newspaper called "a concerto for orchestra, Phantoms and Skyhawks." An unexpected guest appearance was put in by entertainer Danny Kaye, an old friend of Zubin's, as well as of his orchestras in Israel and Los Angeles. To further aid the Israeli war effort, Zubin led the orchestra in a number of additional afternoon concerts, asking the audience to contribute whatever it could.

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For Zubin and Daniel, friends for seventeen years, the experience was reminiscent of those exuberant days after the Six-Day War, with the Victor) Concert and the wedding and "Moshe Cohen" holding the chupah. The biggest difference was that this time Jacqueline du Pre was not with them in Israel, forced to remain in London because of an illness.

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In the summer of 1977, when Lebanon's internal difficulties had served to ease relations between that nation's government and its Israeli neighbors, Zubin took the orchestra to the Good Fence, at the IsraelLebanon border. There he conducted a concert for an audience of one thousand Christian Arabs and Jews, some in uniform, others in mufti.

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A Lebanese Army captain was assigned to escort the orchestra, and a fast friendship grew between him and the conductor. When Zubincalled on "Captain George" to translate his remarks to the Lebanese, Israeli journalists saw an example of international brotherhood at work. The captain's picture turned up on the front pages of newspapers on both sides of the Good Fence.

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Some weeks later, Zubin and the IPO were giving concerts aboard a Greek luxury liner when they received word that the young Lebanese captain had been shot and killed. The Palestine Liberation Organization claimed responsibility for the assassination, branding the officer a "traitor" and a "collaborator with the Zionists."

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Zubin's close musical friends, many of whom are Jewish, have tried to account for his affinity with Israel and the Israelis. To Isaac Stern he is simply "more Jewish than a lot of Jews I know"; moreover, Stern finds in Zubin a number of traits that have also been used to describe the "Jewish personality."

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"His grasp of the human condition, his mixture of seeing into the heart of a problem and at the same time seeing its humor. His certain manner of self-deprecation, a mocking attitude that covers up a strong mind and a clear will. His way of being a strict disciplinarian, of demanding close attention to what he is saying, yet always mellowing his words with a gentle touch and a smile. This is Zubin Mehta to me."

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Zubin admits to a special feeling for Israel, not only for the professional musicians there, but for the man on the street, who "is as big a fan of his orchestra as are Brazilians of their favorite soccer teams. If the first horn player comes down with a cold, everybody knows about it."

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The IPO musicians have defined their dedication to music as "the same spirit the Israeli Army fights with," and Zubin confirms that comparison. "They pour their hearts out when they play," he says, "and that makes my whole life worth living."

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Summing up his contributions as a builder of the Israel Philharmonic, Zubin cites three principal improvements in personnel.

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For four years the Musica Viva series filled Fredric Mann Auditorium to capacity, its concerts becoming what Zubin describes as "the snob events of the cultural season." Contemporary music became so au courant in Israel that it was played by the Jerusalem Symphony on the radio, in museum concerts, at last finding its way into the Israel Philharmonic's subscription series.

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Another "hole" in the musical life of Israel when Zubin took command of the Philharmonic was opera. Under Carlo Maria Giulini the orchestra did several small-scale works by Mozart and Rossini, but for nearly a decade opera had been missing from the repertoire.

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I he FideUo cast was headed b) Gundula Janowitz as Leonore and Jon Vickera as Florestan. I he sets, designed by Munich's Gunther Schnekler-Siemssen, blended so perfectly with the rocks of the Roman amphitheatei al ( aesarea thai the audien< c could never be quite certain where realit) ended and fantasy began. Tint Fidelia,91 says Zubin, "was the « rowning ae hievement ol everything I had done in opera.*1

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1975 the Vienna Philharmonic, which had been taken over four years earlier by his old friend Claudio Abbado, extended to Zubin a rather unprecedented invitation. The orchestra wanted him as permanent conductor of its gala New Year's Eve concerts. It was, says Zubin, "a great and unexpected compliment" to be considered equal to that most Viennese of Viennese assignments.

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Recalling the first time he had watched and listened to the revered Willi Boskovsky conduct the waltzes and polkas of Johann Strauss, Zubin longed to accept. But looking at his calendar, filled with New Year's engagements far into the future, he knew it would be impossible. He was forced to decline the invitation.

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"Today when I stand in front of the Vienna Philharmonic," Zubin says with a smile, "I am conducting all my old colleagues. Eighty percent of those musicians were my schoolmates. I suppose that I am closer to them personally than even to my musicians in Los Angeles. After all, we studied under the same teachers and we went out with the same girls."

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In 1977 several of the Vienna Philharmonic bass players told Zubin that his old bass professor, Otto Ruhm, had been placed in an old-age home outside the city and was not getting along very well. They decided to drive out and see the old man.

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The Vienna Lohengrin was, in some ways, the beginning of what Zubin calls "my dedication of the next ten years to Wagner." Since his first exposure to the music and spirit of Wagner, Zubin has kept the Wagnerian sound in his ear. In the 1980s the seed that was planted nearly

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The two different Rings will begin in 1979 with Das Rheingold and end in 1981 with Gotterdammerung. "And then in June of 1982 — " and here Zubin grins, rubbing his hands together like a child anticipating Christmas — "we'll do the whole Ring at once in Vienna, all four operas in sequence! That's what I'm waiting for."

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There would have been even more opportunity to conduct Wagner had Zubin accepted the offer of musical directorship of the Berlin Opera. But that would have meant giving up Los Angeles, and at the time the offer was made Zubin was not ready to do that. However, Zubin has continued to build his reputation as an opera conductor, even without a permanent position at any opera house.

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Many of the famous singers who have worked with Zubin over the years have commented on his exceptional ability to control the diverse elements of an opera while at the same time drawing out the most delicate nuances of the music. Says tenor Placido Domingo, who has sung under Zubin many, many times. "Aside from the power and drama he generates, it's also fun to work with Zubin. He has the ability to relax us just when the tension seems to be beyond endurance."

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Beverly Sills calls Zubin "the most exciting conductor I have ever worked with." Recalling a concert performance in Los Angeles of the final scene of Bellini's Anna BoUna, the soprano remarked to Zubin, "I had done that scene .it least sixty times before and I was never driven in it the way you drove me. Thai was unquestionably my best performance ever of th«»t final scene."

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Perhaps the ultimate praise for an opera conductor came from Mehli Mehta when he asked Zubin to get him a front row-center seat at the Metropolitan.

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"But, Daddy," Zubin protested, "nobody sits right behind the conductor — you won't be able to see the opera."

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For Americans, the much-publicized broadcast was an all-too-rare opportunity to experience Zubin Mehta's abilities as an opera conductor. Although his reputation in the field has increased steadily in Europe and Great Britain, his opera work in the United States ended, for the most part, with his brief, five-season tenure as an intermittent guest conductor at the Metropolitan. His warmest recollections of the Met are of conversations in the Viennese dialect with Rudolf Bing, rather than of conducting achievements.

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I he date of thai historic com ei 1 was April 29, 1936, the same day that Zubin Mehta was horn.

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1 here are am number of obscure connections that might be drawn between \i tuio I osc .mini and Zubin Mehta. The more obvious ones are the ii sh.ii ing ol lido as Metropolitan ( )pera debuts and their attachment to the Israel Philharmonic, lose .mini having conducted that orchestra's fit st conceits. Zubin serving as its first music director. There are also those ice ui ring referent cs to Zubin, notably f>\ Josef Krips and Charles

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Although Zubin never met the Maestro and never heard him except on recordings, he was to form friendships with Toscanini's daughters,

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Wally and her own daughter, Emanuela, have been guests at the Mehta home, while in Italy Zubin has been granted the privilege of studying the Maestro's personal collection of scores, containing markings that unlock Toscanini's unique insights into their music. For his own music librarian in Los Angeles, Zubinhired the man who had served as Toscanini's librarian in New York, James Dolan. Zubin also developed close relationships with three of Toscanini's five successors to the New York podium, Sir John Barbirolli, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and, of course, Leonard Bernstein.

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With the New York Philharmonic itself, Zubinhad had a rather tentative beginning at Lewisohn Stadium in 1960. His regular-season debut with the orchestra was to have come eight years later, but was postponed for yet another six years by his imprudent "place-to-bury-one's-worstenemy" remark. When, in May of 1974, Zubin finally faced the orchestra in Philharmonic Hall, he decided it was time to apologize.

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It was a program Zubin had chosen for dramatic effect, beginning not with one overture but with three, all from rarely performed Weber operas. Then came Olivier Messiaen's huge tone poem, Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, followed by the almost-as-huge Organ Symphony of Saint-Saens. The concert got the attention of the audience and of the critics as well.

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In the New York Pas*, Speight Jenkins used the better part of a tabloid page to describe an evening in which Zubin strove for and achieved "the big effect: big sounds, dramatic crescendoes, overwhelming sonority . . . a very successful debut by a major conductor."

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In an interview with the New York Times, Zubinsaid, "I'm thirty-nine years old now, and I've developed three orchestras. Today I have a real Rolls-Royce in Los Angeles. Why should I go somewhere else and start the same rigmarole? I'm an old man now."

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Indeed, Zubin had two "Rolls-Royces" in Los Angeles, one in his garage, and the other on the stage of the Chandler Pavilion. In fourteen years he had become a wealthy man as he took a good second-class orchestra and molded it into a group of musicians capable of playing alongside any orchestra in the world. He had taken the Philharmonic on a dozen international tours. Together they had made more than forty recordings and given nearly thirteen hundred concerts in Los Angeles alone. He was married to a woman who loved Los Angeles; his parents had made themselves a permanent home there; his own home was all a man ( ould want.

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On the final da) of 1975, Zubin showed a visitor the magnificent view of Catalina Island from his front vard and remarked, "I can never conceive of leaving this plac e. I he next day he received another visitor, the president of the New York Philharmonic, Carlos Moseley,

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They spent several hours in ( onversation before Zubin left to conduct a New Year's Night concert of light and happy music. The following morning, January 2, 1976, Moseley boarded an airplane at Los Angeles Intel national Airport, where he was greeted by a surprised Martin Bookspan and his wife Janet, on their wa\ bac k to New York, coincidental on the same plane.

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Latei that evening, Mehli Mehta was in his living room, studying an orchestra score, when Zubinwalked in and sat next to him on the sofa.

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"No, tell me," Zubin persisted. "What do you think? I want to know."

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"Well, you know, I have wonderful memories of the New York Philharmonic. That was the first orchestra I ever heard, outside of my own, and I listened to it night after night in Carnegie Hall, under the most famous conductors. That orchestra had a great sound in those days and it could have that sound again. Zubin, you could make them play that way again."

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It was not an easy decision, but Zubin knew his job in Los Angeles was over. He saw in New York the tradition of greatness his father described, a greatness that had reached its highest level in the Toscanini years, years that ended on the day he was born. To carry on that tradition of greatness was a challenge he longed to meet.

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Later that morning, Olive Behrendt went before her board of directors in Los Angeles to make the official announcement. "Zubin Mehta has decided not to renew his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in order that he might accept the position as music director of the New York Philharmonic."

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Zubin has contributed immeasurably toward making the Los Angeles Philharmonic one of the world's great orchestras. His superb artistry, wisdom and enthusiasm have given the people of Los Angeles and Southern California an exciting, thriving musical culture of the highest international standards. New York is lucky to get him, but we in Los Angeles have been immensely fortunate to have enjoyed his musical leadership for longer than most leading

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From the board meeting, Zubin went straight to a rehearsal to break the news personally to his musicians.

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Zubin looked up again and went on. "I need a change of atmosphere or whatever you want to call it. Whether I'm doing the right thing or not, only time will tell."

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For some time I have been torn with the feeling that perhaps both Los Angeles and ZubinMehta needed a change. At first I thought that devoting more time to opera would satisfy my urge to meet new challenges. It was, however, only when I was confronted with a firm offer from the President of the New York Philharmonic that everything came into focus.

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In the next morning's New York Times, Harold Schonberg speculated that the Philharmonic's final list of candidates had included Zubin, Daniel Barenboim, Lorin Maazel, Colin Davis, Seiji Ozawa, and Bernard Haitink. New York Philharmonic board president Moseley said there were "mam reasons*1 for ( hoosing Zubinout of that list of distinguished candidates.

Page 214
Later, Zubin spoke to reporters of his frustration at being virtually "the onl) show in town" in Los Angeles. He longed for a return to

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Since Zubin's contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic did not expire until mid1978, he would not be able to start work in New York until the 1978-79 season, more than two years away. But the time has flown more quickly than either Nancy or Zubin would have liked.

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Zubin's children are also happy about the decision. Merwan, in particular, a student at Colgate University near Syracuse, expects to s< great deal more of his traveling father. Zarina, who has taken up resi dence with Zubin and Nancy in the last two years, thinks she will enjoy the proximity to other people when she travels home from be i midwestern college; the isolation of the Brentwood mountain has been something of a nuisance to her.

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As for Zubin's "other family," his close musical associates, they all look forward to his arrival in New York, no doubt feeling something akin to pride: the challenge is monumental, but they are certain he's up to it. Lukas Foss, who knows as well as anyone the size of that challenge, asserts that "if anyone can do what needs to be done with that on hestra, Zubin Mehta can."

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incredible complexity of the New York organization. Zubin's abilities as an administrator make him superbly equipped to handle that. The rest of it is the musicians. They can play magnificently when they get all fired up. Zubin has to work with them until they play that way at almost every concert. He can do it. He's the right guy in the right place at the right time."

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"I'm not saying Pierre [Boulez] was not a kind person, but Zubin has a different way of going about things, of getting to know and dealing with each person in the orchestra as an individual human being. A brotherto-brother relationship. The atmosphere just bubbles somehow when he's around; I have seen it in Los Angeles and in Israel."

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This confidence in Zubin's ability to inspire the New York Philharmonic is made all the more noteworthy by his friends' certain knowledge of the difficulties he faces. Perhaps foremost among these is the adversary relationship that has existed in recent years between the orchestra and its management. It is a problem Zubin has not had in Los Angeles since Ernest Fleischmann's taking over as general manager.

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"I have noticed an extremely frank relationship between the orchestra and its management in New York," says Zubin. "The new music director must be the bridge in that relationship. If a musician feels somebody is constantly looking down His throat and threatening to fire him, he's not going to play with his heart and soul. He's probably not even going to play well."

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In many respects, Zubin has picked an especially good time to take over tin New \o\k Philharmonic. In terms of his own experience, and repertoire, as well as in terms of the orchestra's situation, the stage is set lor what Could be a dynamic relationship.

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In terms of repertoire, Zubin feels the orchestra is unusually well rounded. With the Philharmonic's long mmmhi. mid-September to

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mid-May, playing a new program every week, the orchestra covers virtually the entire musical spectrum in the course of three years. It is time, he feels, for a return to the heart of the central European repertory, what Zubin calls the "meat-and-potatoes music."

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This ties in perfectly with the current needs of Columbia Records, which has the New York Philharmonic under contract. Columbia executives have told Zubin that the orchestra's recordings of such basic-library music are old and electronically outdated. The music the orchestra must record is essentially the same music Zubin wants to program in subscription concerts.

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In Zubin's mind, the challenge is a personal one, but in the minds of many New Yorkers who have observed their Philharmonic over recent seasons, there is also the challenge of making great individual musicians play like a great orchestra. That may well be the job Zubin cut out for himself when he accepted the job of directing the New York Philharmonic. Indeed, the orchestra that, a decade earlier, he had characterized as artistically inferior to his own offered the only challenge interesting enough to end his musical marriage in Los Angeles.

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Despite his fervent desire to conduct more opera, Zubin has turned down offers from two of the world's great opera companies. Perhaps those offers will come again, but right now Zubin looks upon the New York Philharmonic as his last job.

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In 1978, as this volume goes to press, ZubinMehta is only forty-two years old, about half the average lifespan of conductors, who are an unusually long-lived breed. According to many reports, he is already at the summit of His profession.

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History does seem to have shown more than a passing interest in Zubin Mehta already. Born on that curiously coincidental day in 1936, he entered a world about to be torn apart by the most calamitous events in human history. His father already had a place in Indian history as the man who organized Bombay's first orchestra.

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As a child Zubin witnessed first hand the granting of Indian independence, then saw his country thrown into turmoil by the creation of Pakistan and the murder of Gandhi. His first public concert was given for the victims of another political turmoil, the Communist suppression in Hungary and the Revolution of 1956.

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In Israel, Zubin has gone out of his way to involve himself and his orchestra with that nation's struggle for survival. During the antiVietnam war movement in America, he organized volunteer orchestras to play concerts for peace on California campuses.

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The life of Zubin Mehta would seem to be a banner for those who believe in the force of destiny. Tehmina s jotisi, the astrologers, read greatness in his stars. Colleagues, professors, and eminent conductors of an older generation saw greatness in his earliest work. Zubinhimself has come to feel the presence of unseen powers in his life.

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And further east there is India, that teeming subcontinent still unrecovered from the shock of freedom, still very much the place Zubin left in 1954 and Mehli abandoned a year later, still a place unmoved by the

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220 / ZUBIN

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A second visit, in March 1978, was aborted when India's newly elected Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, refused to grant landing rights to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, a refusal that Zubin says "has broken my heart. What a great pity that I cannot bring together the two nations I love so dearly. I can only hope that the political madness that obsesses the people of the Middle East will end one day and allow people to bring joy to each other.

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Mehta, Nancy (Mrs. Zubin) Krauss, Clemens, 38 Krips, Josef, 37, 39, 102, 135, 203 Kubelik, Rafael, 26 Kudlak, Eddie, 48, 67, 82 Kuyper, George, 109, 160, 201

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also Mehta, Carmen (Mrs. Zubin) Lasky, Paul, 67, 170 Lee, Ella, 133

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Mehta. Carmen (Mis. Zubin), 48-50. 52-54, .. 92, 137, 138

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divorce from Zubin, 116, 117

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224 / ZUBIN

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birth of Zubin, 5

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tour of, with Menuhin, 1 1 Mehta, Merwan (son), 74, 84, 169, 178, 215 Mehta, Nancy (Mrs. Zubin), 194-197, 215.

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194, 215 Mehta, Zubin

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Mehta, Zubin (cont.)

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