The Most Vital Conductor of Beethoven Is Ninety-four

The ninety-four-year-old Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt has achieved a longevity that is almost unprecedented in his profession. Various conductors have remained active past the age of ninety—Leopold Stokowski made it to ninety-five—but no nonagenarian has sustained a schedule anything like Blomstedt’s. Earlier this month, he spent nearly two weeks at Tanglewood, working with the Boston Symphony and with students from the Tanglewood Music Center. At the end of the summer, he will take the Vienna Philharmonic on an eight-city European tour. In the fall, he goes to Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Leipzig, Munich, Bamberg, Oslo, and Paris. More American dates are slated for next year, including a return to the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1985 to 1995. With the recent retirement of Bernard Haitink, who is ninety-two, Blomstedt is effectively ensconced as the elder sage of the podium.

The assumption that conductors of great age radiate incalculable wisdom is a dubious one, smacking of musty personality worship. Then again, the classical-music world makes an equally dubious cult of fresh-faced youth. The esteem in which orchestras and audiences now hold Blomstedt is a belated reward for a resolutely unshowy musician who has gone about his business decade after decade. What he offers, above all, is a kind of preternatural rightness: no gesture feels out of place, no gesture feels routine.

So it was with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which the Boston Symphony played under Blomstedt’s direction at Tanglewood. Like most conductors of any stature, he has recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies; indeed, he has traversed them twice, first with the Dresden Staatskapelle and then with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The Dresden version, dating from 1975 to 1980, is as sure-footed a Beethoven cycle as can be found. It rivals the authority of contemporaneous efforts by Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan while avoiding their intrusive mannerisms. The Leipzig set, recorded between 2014 and 2017, documents Blomstedt’s latter-day preference for cleaner textures and quicker tempos. Improbably, it is just as absorbing as the beloved earlier version. Very few conductors have produced two Beethoven cycles that can serve as benchmarks for future interpretations.

At Tanglewood, Blomstedt maintained his crisp Leipzig tempos, though he may have slowed the pace just a little in the Allegretto. Superficially, his approach matched the prevailing fashion in Beethoven: with the days of late-Romantic expansiveness long gone, conductors these days vie with one another to see who can drive ahead most impetuously and jab at accents most aggressively. Brisk, brusque Beethoven has, in fact, become the norm, as predictable as the old Wagnerian wallow. Blomstedt is aware of the pitfalls. At the dress rehearsal, he stopped several times to hum passages to the orchestra, seeking more varied, songful phrasing.

The result was a performance that surged with vitality without boxing the ears. Balances were handled with particular care, so that solo voices, especially in the winds, held their own against swirling strings and crunching brass. In the opening bars, the first big A-major chord landed with a grand thump, but the tuttis in the third, fifth, and seventh bars were a shade more recessed, ceding space to the intervening oboe, clarinet, horn, and flute solos. For comparison, I turned to a recent recording by the gifted but erratic young conductor Teodor Currentzis and his musicAeterna ensemble. There, all the tuttis are hammered in bizarrely brutal fashion.

Throughout the symphony, Blomstedt found an equilibrium between headlong force and melancholy lyricism. In the Allegretto, few conductors can resist unleashing a juggernaut of sound when the processional main theme rises to its climactic fortissimo, but here again Blomstedt held back, making sure that the countermelody in the first violins came through clearly, with its legato all aglow. The strategy of restraint achieved a glorious payoff in the last pages of the finale, when the orchestra let loose with a frothing energy that bordered on animal joy.

After the performance, I went backstage for what I assumed would be a brief chat with Blomstedt. He had the mien of a bookish village pastor, his face free of sweat. I had resolved not to ask the obvious, dumb question: How can he still be so vigorous at his age? Some have credited his pious, abstemious habits: raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he has never had a drink or eaten meat. But, as he told Michael Cooper, of the Times, in 2017, “That’s not the reason. It’s a gift.” Blomstedt added wryly, “Churchill drank lots of whiskey and smoked enormous big cigars, and he lived to be ninety or so.”

Perhaps one factor behind Blomstedt’s longevity is his restless, inquisitive relationship with even the most familiar scores. When I asked about the evolution of his Beethoven, he said, “It changes with every new performance, a little bit. But it especially changed when the new edition, the Bärenreiter, came out, around 2000.” In that edition, Beethoven’s metronome markings appear at the top of the page, not in a footnote. “They’re not sort of optional,” Blomstedt said. “They’re binding—perhaps not to the letter but to the spirit.” Like many musicians, he once considered those tempos impossibly fast, but original-instrument performances led by John Eliot Gardiner and by Roger Norrington helped convince him otherwise. Indeed, in the case of the “Eroica” Symphony, the markings produce a formal balance that is lacking in the monumental readings of Wilhelm Furtwängler, whom Blomstedt admired in his youth. “I felt as a young musician that the finale was weaker,” he told me. “Now, in tempo, it is the crown.” He sang themes from the first and last movements, demonstrating the continuities.

What guidance does Blomstedt give to the Boston players? “Well, they are used to the faster tempos,” he replied. “You in America are lucky that you got Toscanini—he was very modern in that way.” Other issues occupied Blomstedt’s attention. He sang the rising-and-falling second theme from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which was also on the program, with Joshua Bell as the soloist. The falling fourth at the end of the first phrase, he explained, should be “DEE daw”—stressed, unstressed. “But they play it DEE DAW. Like BAW-STON. If they would speak the way they play, everyone would laugh. I try to work as much as possible on that. I try to show it with my hand. The return I get is when I notice that the musicians are happy, and they do it even more beautifully than I could imagine. It is a two-way thing—I give something to them, and they give me even more back.”

During a break in the dress rehearsal, Blomstedt had remained on the podium for several minutes, conversing with Haldan Martinson and Julianne Lee, two principals from the second-violin section. They brought up a passage in the recapitulation of the Seventh’s first movement, in which the winds jump prematurely into D major while the strings stay in A. Can this be right? “It’s an interesting question,” Blomstedt told me afterward. “Of course it’s right. It is like the ‘Eroica,’ where in the first movement the horn comes in in E-flat while everyone else is still on the dominant. There are a few other examples like this in Beethoven, where some parts of the orchestra pull the whole thing along. So here the woodwinds are saying, ‘Come here, we want to come in this direction.’ ”

We went on talking for nearly an hour: about the upcoming Bruckner bicentennial, in 2024 (Blomstedt is booked up through that year); about his notoriously acid-tongued Swedish colleague Sixten Ehrling, who died in 2005; about his favorite Swedish composers, from the innovative Romantic symphonist Franz Berwald to the eclectic modernist Ingvar Lidholm. But I felt that I should wrap up the conversation, mainly because I was ready for bed. Blomstedt stepped out of his dressing room to greet a young conductor, Felix Mildenberger, who was serving as his travel assistant, and who was also looking a bit sleepy. The sage strode down the hall, as agelessly robust as the symphony he had just conducted. ♦