82 The Economist November 6th 2021
Obituary Bernard Haitink
Thewords“great conductor”and“humility”are notoften
found together. Almost inevitably, given the podium, the mag
ic baton, the formal dress and the commanding drama of the job,
conductors abound with ego. Bernard Haitink had no time for
that. He was a man of few gestures and even fewer words, humbly
performing the mysterious task that had become his life.
On the podium he did nothing showy: a lift of a finger, a mean
ingful glance, a vestige of a smile. His musical personality, he
thought, said everything necessary, and orchestras round Europe
and America—especially the Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw,
where he was chief conductor for 27 years, and the London Phil
harmonic (lpo), where he stayed for 12—learned to read it perfect
ly, mood for mood. In rehearsals and offstage he said as little as
possible, not wanting words to get in the way, and equally afraid of
saying some stupid thing. For the same reason he kept out of mu
sic politics, unless seriously provoked.
When he did speak, it was often to put himself down. He played
the violin as a child, but “badly”. At school he was a “lazy pig”, just
not interested. He did not impress the Amsterdam conservatoire
and scraped into the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, in the back
desk of the second violins. Sheer luck got him into conducting,
when he was asked to fill in for the Cherubini Requiem, but he had
no tools for that work at all. When he went to the Concertgebouw
in 1961 he was “totally chaotic”, far too young, at 34, to conduct it.
His first attempts at opera were “neardisasters”. And so on.
Terribly, cripplingly shy as he was, this was a way of closing
down a subject. It also helped keep his feet on the ground, as crit
ics increasingly marvelled at the beauty, pace and clarity of his
work. There was no better guide, they said, to the architecture of a
Mahler symphony or the spiritual complexities of Bruckner, no
better painter of the seaandsky colours of Debussy; some of his
interpretations approached the supernatural. How was it done?He did not know. As he saw it, he could always be better.
With orchestras he was a teamplayer; he had been a lowly
backdesker, after all. The orchestra and himself were a communi
ty, a family, and he took ideas from them as much as vice versa. He
gave them freedom to perform the music as they felt it, with only
the smallest nudges: “I hope you agree,” he would say, or “If you
don’t mind.” As in any family, there were rows; eventually he re
signed from both his longterm orchestras and (until he quickly
relented) from the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, where he
worked from 1987 to 2002. But the rows were usually with manage
ment or government, over funding and cuts, and every time he
stood with his players as one of them. At a desperate point in 1998
he appealed to the audience at “Götterdämmerung” to save Covent
Garden, and it was saved. Just a few words, but from him they
seemed to work. Or maybe the music did it.
When it came to programmes, he did not impose himself. His
favourite symphonic repertoire was heavy on Mozart, Beethoven
and 19thcentury romantics, but also on Stravinsky and Britten,
and he championed contemporaries. Opera productions often
struck him as odd, but he raised objections only once, when Wag
ner’s “Ring” at Covent Garden featured Rhine maidens in latex fat
suits and Wotan and Fricka in a battered limousine. He endured it
by closing his eyes to live in the music. About opera, too, he had
plenty of doubts when in 1978, with limited experience, he was
hired for Glyndebourne with thelpo. But in the end it did wonders
for him. He learned to be more dramatic, just a little, and could
lose his ego even more when he was in the pit, almost unseen, col
laborating with sopranos and setdesigners and all the rest.
He could focus entirely on the music then, at the service of the
genius who had produced it. Both were impenetrable mysteries.
Wagner could be horrible, Beethoven irascible, Mozart loved filthy
jokes; and then they wrote these sublime works, inexplicably. He
was their simple conduit to the world, channelling each compos
er’s dream like a beautiful flower that unfolded itself. The shape of
the piece was the most important thing, the onward drive and
flow, knowing just where he was going. Yet the delicate inner dis
coveries were endless. No matter how often he had performed a
piece he would buy a fresh score for each season, and start again.
When he talked about music, fear frequently came into it. This
was not just stagefright, which everyone had. He feared he might
be inadequate to the task he had taken on. Almost to the end he
shied away from Bach, too great for him, with so much counter
point and with such religious fervour, when he had none. How
was it then that he had been drawn from the age of nine to Bruck
ner, with his intensely Catholic mysticism? He could not say.
Mysteries of this sort explained much of his humility. But he al
so lived with another strange and disturbing thought. In his first
years of conducting he had been such a lucky young man, seeming
to sleepwalk into international fame, not planning anything.
There was a dark reason, however, for that. Growing up in Holland
in the German occupation, he had seen his Jewish friends gradual
ly disappear from class and Jewish players vanish from the Con
certgebouw, where he already spent his leisure time. One day he
went to see a young Jewish violinist play Beethoven’s “Kreutzer
Sonata” at his house. It was wonderfully done. Then he was gone.
His own family had suffered, too: his father sent for three
months to a concentration camp, everyone eating tulips in the
Hongerwinter of 194445. Yet he was ashamed both of Dutch indif
ference to the Jews and of the postliberation outbreaks of violent
vengeance, a shame that fed his later conviction that he was not
Dutch any more. And he felt that his life had prospered largely be
cause more talented people had lost theirs.
On the podium he was everaware of hundreds of eyes on his
back. It was the last place, you would think, for someone so shy.
But he was there not simply to channel the music, though that was
the main point. He was also bound to do his humble best to fill in
for an assembly of ghosts. nMusic, not wordsBernard Haitink, conductor, died on October 21st, aged 92