{ready for the upbea t }
some professional musicians, this kind of approach represents an unrealistical- ly romantic vision, a rosy idea of music as transcendent and magical. But it’s exactly this, this naivete of be-
lieving in the music at all costs, that is a hallmark of Christoph Eschenbach. It’s an attitude that has helped him build a star reputation in the conducting world — and has also threatened to be his un- doing. Some have called his conducting inspiring; others dismiss it as jejune. Now, as he prepares to take the helm of Washington’s struggling anw question is whether he can make the NSO, and its audience, believe in him.
There’s a reason eschenbach has such a passionate attachment to music. In a way, it saved his life. He was born in Breslau, Germany
(Wroclaw in present-day Poland), in February 1940, during a winter when the world was falling apart. Germa- ny had invaded Poland and begun its march across Europe. His mother died giving birth to him. A few years later his father, Heribert Ringmann, a musi- cologist and an opponent of the regime, was sent to the front in a so-called pun- ishment battalion, where people who had been arrested could serve out part of their sentences. Or they could, like Ringmann, be killed. A grandmother took the orphaned
boy in. Or rather, she took him out, because after the war ended in 1945, Breslau was disputed territory. The Rus- sians took control, and grandmother and grandson left the area. The Russians left; the two returned. The Poles came; they left again. They ricocheted around Central Europe before landing in Meck- lenburg, Germany, at a refugee camp ravaged by typhus during the worst win- ter of the century. The camp’s doctor died. The boy’s grandmother died. “I was practically the last survivor, of 60 people there in the one room,” he says. Before she died, his grandmother
had sent a postcard to a cousin, Wal- lydore Eschenbach. The postcard took weeks to reach her. She rushed to the camp, only to find it was quarantined; she bribed an official to get the little boy out. By then, Christoph Ringmann,
6 years old, sick with typhus, suffer- ing from skin diseases and lice, was too traumatized to say a word. He did not speak for more than a year. Lying in bed in his new home in
Mecklenburg, he heard his new moth- er playing the piano through the wall. By day, she taught piano and singing. At night, she played for herself: Bach and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff and Chopin. “I was just mesmerized,” Es- chenbach says. “Schumann and Bach were my first loves.” Schumann can be difficult to bring across, “but first of all she did it very well, and then, I was very complex, you know, inside, so it spoke to me. It moved things in me.” Eventually, he was asked whether he would like to play. As he remembers it, he spoke his first word after the long silence: “Yes.” Through music, he says, “I found the
way to express myself again.” His foster mother was his first
teacher, and his piano talents became formidable. At 11, after he first saw the great Wilhelm Furtwaengler and de- cided he wanted to be a conductor, she arranged to have the boy start violin lessons so he would have an orchestral instrument under his belt. He studied piano, along with con-
ducting and violin, at the Hamburg Conservatory. Although he wanted to be a conductor, it was as a pianist that he made a name for himself, bursting onto the scene with wins at Munich’s ARD competition and the Clara Haskil competition, and gaining internation- al attention as a concert soloist. But it wasn’t quite the expression he was look- ing for. “I felt lonely at the piano,” Eschen-
bach says. “I wanted to communicate with people.” What he didn’t want was to be “alone, you know, with this black animal with the white teeth” — the piano with its ivory keys. “And I wanted to be, to converse with musicians, mu- sically. And therefore I wanted from so early on to be a conductor.”
Conductors are supposed to be big, loud, authoritarian. Eschenbach is not. In a field that tends to attract people of healthy egos and dominant personali- ties, he projects a stillness. He waits. He
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