speaks quietly. At 70, he is less a grand old man than elfin. He wears black clothes, pants creased to a knife-edge, loose shirts with mandarin collars. His bald head gleams in the light. “Ascetic” is a word that comes up a lot when people talk about him. “Monkish” is another. “There’s a beatific quality to him,
there’s no question,” says Ravinia Festi- val chief executive Welz Kauffman. “But there’s also this tremendous sense of humor. And a great love of life.” That’s a side of Eschenbach that’s
harder to unlock. He is gracious but guarded. Fiercely loyal to his friends, profoundly sensitive to criticism, he has learned to protect his public persona. Politely submitting to an interview, he offers a nugget of information, then re- treats, to see what effect it has made. His eyes never quite lose their air of anxiety, even when he smiles. He makes a point of speaking in the
language of the country he’s in. As music director of the Orchestre de Paris, a po- sition he held from 2000 until this year, he always conducted official conversa- tions in French, and at the beginning of his tenure there, people sometimes had trouble figuring out what he was saying. His English is more secure, his German accent eroding the sentences as if they were soft stone, adding a roughness to his voice. His main way of communicating,
though, is through music. When he conducts, he seems to lose himself, clos- ing his eyes, reaching out his arms, the blood rushing to his head so that his pale skin flushes as if inflamed. “I don’t select pieces for pleasing the
audience or pleasing the orchestra,” he says. “It’s more that if I’m convinced of a piece, I think that I can convince the orchestra and convince the audience, you know?” To his fans, Eschenbach is one of the
greatest conductors in the world, capa- ble of inspiring players and transporting audiences. Some of his detractors say he can’t communicate with an orchestra, and his performances are erratic. Others complain he’s New Age-y, wanting the music to be a transcendent experience, getting so caught up that he sometimes loses his place in the score during con-
certs and has to start over again. Yet to John Axelrod, a conductor who studied under Eschenbach (and who will make his debut with the NSO next year), his approach is old-style, “Prussian.” In Es- chenbach’s private lessons, Axelrod was drilled on scores, sitting in front of the maestro and conducting Brahms’s Sym- phony No. 2 in D Major from memory. Eschenbach would stop him at inter- vals, asking, “What is the second oboe doing now?” and expecting him to sing a note-perfect response — hardly the tutelage of someone who wants to go only with the emotional flow. Eschenbach knows about the con-
flicting opinions of his work. “People either love or hate my playing,” he’s said. “But, for me, that is a positive thing. You see, music is idiosyncratic, and it should be played in an idiosyncratic way.” He could have said this at almost any
time in his career. He could have said it when he was music director of the Houston Symphony in the 1990s, when everyone loved him, or when he was the controversial music director of the Phil- adelphia Orchestra in the 2000s, when not everybody did. He could have said it when he was testing his conducting chops in Zurich in the 1980s, or when he was a candidate for the music director position with the New York Philharmon- ic in 2000. But, in fact, he said it in an interview in 1974, when he was one of the hottest young concert pianists to come
12 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | september 26, 2010
out of Germany and his ambitions as a conductor were still largely unknown.
he’s not unknown anymore. For the NSO, landing Eschenbach as music director was something of a coup. It’s a good orchestra, but it isn’t on a par with the “Big Five” (the New York Phil- harmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orches- tra), traditionally held to be the best in the country. The NSO rarely makes any- body’s Top 10 list. As a world-renowned conductor and acclaimed concert pia- nist, Eschenbach is a step or two up on the classical music food chain. The relationship between a music
director and an orchestra is a famous- ly tricky marriage. Orchestras, despite constant personnel changes, tend to maintain distinct personalities over time. Music directors reign as auto- cratic tyrants — George Szell struck fear into musicians’ hearts as he shaped the Cleveland Orchestra into a world- class ensemble in the 1950s and ’60s — or lead as first among equals, like the more democratic Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic. The job is to forge an artistic partnership, by con- ducting (Eschenbach will lead about half of the NSO’s subscription concerts in 2010-2011, which is about par for the course), selecting repertory, making sure technical standards are upheld, and su-
1966 PHOTOGRAPH BY SIEGFRIED LAUTERWASSER, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA; 1944 PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH
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