Of all the mountains in a man’s life, those of his youth are forever the tallest. In my own musical growing up, one figure stands supreme. Pierre Monteux, the French conductor who led the riot-ridden 1913 premiere in Paris of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, remains the most extraordinary musician I have ever known, and his greatness haunts me still.

When I, as a child of ten, first played the piano for Monteux in San Francisco in 1945, I knew nothing of his place in history. I am quite sure that I had never heard of Stravinsky at all, and I could have had no way of appreciating the real distinction of Monteux’s service after World War I conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in this country and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in Holland. Before I sat down at the piano in his Fairmont Hotel suite, he was for me only a short, impossibly rotund and mustachioed figure I had seen waving his arms (and a stick) in front of a large number of orchestra musicians in concert. When I had finished playing—the F minor Concerto of Bach—he signified, in barely comprehensible (to me) English, that he had liked my playing, and that I would play with him and the orchestra. My teacher, and my parents, were ecstatic and so, willy-nilly, was I.

I don’t remember very much about my eventual appearance with Monteux and the San Francisco Orchestra not too long thereafter. It must have been a pleasurable experience, for when I next went to play for him, a bit more than a year later, I was unprepared for the irritation and even glacial hostility with which I was now received. Having been primed by my piano teacher to treat Monteux as an eager buyer of my self-proclaimed talents rather than as the musical sage he was, I soon found myself on the receiving end not of praise but of execration. This tide of denunciation soon extended from me to my teacher; the fact that this important person in my life was thus quickly reduced to cowering lackey-like in the presence of a master only rendered the whole situation more horrible. As a result of the audition, this time I did not play with Monteux.

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But in musical life, the dice are sometimes rethrown. By 1951 I had a new piano teacher, and a rich sponsor to boot. I was now sixteen and I was playing better. Another, patron-arranged, audition with Monteux found him ready not only to have me play with him on the regular subscription series in San Francisco the next season, but also to take me on as a student at his summer school for conductors in Maine. Properly supported for both travel and tuition by my sponsor, I dutifully went to the school, where I began to study not conducting but piano with Monteux, taught not as piano playing but as musical execution. From this association with Monteux, I began my first approach to knowing him as man and musician.

Unfortunately for my amour propre, my first playing at his school for Monteux did not take place in a lesson but rather in a concert. I played the Chopin G minor Ballade three days after my arrival at L’Ecole Monteux. It is a hard piece technically, structurally, and stylistically. The performance was raw, I was raw, and Monteux passed me afterward without a word or even a glance. The next morning I had the temerity to ask him how he had liked my Ballade. “Not at all,” he answered, and once again passed me by. I never did work on the Chopin with him. Instead my lessons began with the Beethoven C minor Concerto, the work I was to play with Maître (the obligatory term of reference used by his students) when we would all return to San Francisco.

Now at last I found myself face to face with the best and toughest musicianship I ever was to encounter. From my tentative opening scales, played on Monteux’s sluggish and tonally constricted relic of a Chickering grand, nothing that I did was right, nothing was natural, nothing was musical. And Monteux, no matter how strict he was with me, was correct. He knew the piece; how he knew the piece! He did not just know it as a conductor, and he certainly did not know it as pianist—for he wasn’t a pianist (though he had been married to one). He knew Beethoven’s work as if he had written it himself. So much was he in possession of this serene masterpiece from the inside that for the first time in my life I had the feeling I was not just playing for the composer, but that I was face to face with the good God responsible for Beethoven’s greatness.

We worked—or rather he worked with me—day after day. Though he was impatient, he nonetheless seemed to have unlimited time for the job. I did not feel I was responding terribly well to Monteux’s mandated perfectionism, but I suppose I must have convinced him that my manifest technical and musical inadequacies would not incapacitate my performance. I played the work in Maine with the administrative head of the school conducting, and I guess I passed, though I did not hear this from the great man himself.

Instead I was invited to give half a solo recital in early September following the official closing of the summer term. Here I had better luck, for the pieces I was playing—the Beethoven Sonata in D minor, opus 31, no. 2, and the Liszt Variations on a Theme of Bach—were ones I had known for two years and had already played several times in public. Not only did Monteux tolerate my Beethoven, he even seemed to like my Liszt. Perhaps his acceptance of the Liszt had something to do with the fact that he had known this unfamiliar work for many years and revered it as a work in the class of the famous Chaconne of Bach. But again the miracle was his knowledge of music written for an instrument he did not play. He found notes I had read wrong, and that my teacher had not corrected; he corrected wrong rhythmic values without reference to the printed music; he demanded utmost fidelity to what was in the score, and he did not stop until I had it right—or was exhausted.

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I worked on the Beethoven concerto with him again in November before the San Francisco Symphony concerts. He allowed me the usual two rehearsals with the orchestra. The first passed without incident. The second afforded me my first glimpse of the fabled Monteux wit. When I came to the long and brilliant cadenza in the first movement of the concerto, Monteux departed from the ordinary time-saving practice of skipping it with the words, “Play your cadenz’ for the orchestr’—zey will enjoy sitting and listening to eet.” I played it; I don’t know whether or not they enjoyed it, but they certainly sat.

The two performances themselves went well. Monteux stopped in at the coffee shop in his hotel where I was having an ice-cream soda after the concert, and chided me for staying up late when there was a performance the following afternoon. I had already been both unnerved and ultimately reassured by another, rather more concrete example of his watching over the soloist: during the first performance of the Beethoven, I had come in just slightly late at an entrance in the concluding rondo. From that moment on—and during the entire performance the next day—Monteux sang my entrances softly to me just in advance of when I was to come in. To put this feat in its proper context, I should add that he was accompanying me by memory.

The next year, my sponsor and both Monteuxs—for his wife Doris was a full-time and energetic participant in all her husband’s activities—decided that I should go with Maître to Europe during the spring. His sixteen-year tenure at the helm of the San Francisco orchestra was now up, and along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director Charles Munch, he was taking the Boston orchestra on its first tour of the continent in many years. I was not to play on the tour, just to learn from association with the great. Still only seventeen, I was scared but eager. On the trip I got to know both Monteuxs better, and even achieved some semblance of a personal relationship with the old man. Because the occasion for the BSO tour was Nicolas Nabokov’s (and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s) festival, “The Art of the Twentieth Century,” in Paris, I got a chance to hear not just Monteux conducting the Sacre in the same hall—the Theatre des Champs-Elysées—where he had done the premiere almost forty years earlier, but also Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (presented with Alice B. Toklas in attendance) and some wonderful conducting by Igor Markevitch of Soviet music then banned by Stalin. One learning opportunity I did miss: the Monteuxs thought that my education would not be harmed by not hearing Munch conduct. On those nights we all went to something rather more diverting.

On this trip I had a chance to contrast the worshipful way Monteux was treated in Holland when he conducted the Concertgebouw, and in London when he conducted the BBC Symphony, with the demeaning behavior displayed toward him by his own French musical world. At the end of May 1952, he conducted a French orchestra in a concert for the United Nations at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The program included Aaron Copland’s rousing El Salón Mexico, an orchestral showpiece then still rhythmically problematical even for American orchestras. But what was chancy for American players seemed impossible for the French. The first rehearsal, in a hired room, was a disaster, an outcome not mitigated by the timeworn diversion of the orchestra string players who pushed a mute along the floor with their bows from one stand to the other until it had traversed the entire section—while the orchestra was playing or the conductor was talking. In Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalter Suite, the harpists missed their cue because they were openly filing their nails. The final insult to this grand old man of French music took place when he (with me carrying his briefcase) turned up at the hall the morning of the concert a half-hour before the rehearsal and was told by the commissionnaire that he had no right to be there and should go away immediately.

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On my return to this country I found myself back in Maine, preparing a recital with a very talented young cellist and waiting for Monteux’s return from various conducting engagements. He finally arrived a week before the concert, and we played for him our chosen program—sonatas by Beethoven, Brahms, and Shostakovich. Again he knew every note, and demanded that we do each one correctly. Again I suppose I passed—though not without various comments on my failure to clean the piano keys after I had finished practicing—and I received as a reward a new, and terrifying, assignment: to learn the Franck Quintet for Piano and Strings in seven days, for a performance at the weekly chamber-music concert the Monteuxs sponsored at their home. I worked like a slave, and Monteux once more worked with me. He again taught me the music as if he had been responsible for having it written. The first violinist was even more insecure than I was, and Monteux kept the actual performance together by turning my pages and conducting when necessary. At the end he paid me what seemed a great compliment. As I bowed, he whispered in my ear, “You were not zee worst.”

With this hardly extravagant praise still ringing in my ears, I now returned to California to enter college and be relieved of the pressure of all my association with greatness. Monteux was pleased neither by my going to school nor by my returning to my old teacher. The first he must have considered a waste of a talented musician’s time, the second, he told me, was positively harmful. I did not see Monteux again until the next summer, when I studied the Tchaikowsky Concerto with him and played it with the conducting-school orchestra. I hardly had the kind of easy, unforced technical approach which appealed to his Gallic and classicist sensibilities. Particularly did I come a cropper at the end of the piece, where Tchaikowsky marks the beginning of the brilliant scale passages in sixteenth notes Molto più mosso—much faster. I did not—I could not—play them any faster than the preceding tempo, and to this day I know no one who really does—but such knowledge would not have done me any good, for Monteux was right and knew it.

The next summer Monteux introduced a new feature to his morning conducting classes. Now the aspiring leaders could practice accompanying soloists with the orchestra. I was one of the guinea pigs, with the Beethoven “Emperor” concerto as my portion. The accompaniment didn’t go well, but the general anarchy was enlivened by two notable flashes. Monteux himself conducted the marvelous exposition from his position in the midst of the orchestra, eyes flashing and mustaches trembling in majesty. Just before the final return to E flat major which prepares the solo entrance, he kept the orchestra down for what seemed an infinity of time. And then, suddenly, like sunrise from a mountain top, he arrived at the triumphant resolution. So impressive was the phenomenon that the student conductor—the other guinea pig—must have forgiven Monteux for a brilliant joke at his (the student’s) expense: “You must follow,” Monteux growled, “but not from behind!”

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At about this time I was preparing for the Town Hall debut recital I was to give at the end of 1955. One of the pieces on the program was the now ubiquitous Sonata of Franz Liszt. Then not yet played to death, the sonata was both a pianistic and a musical test: the pianistic test was to get all the notes, and the musical one was to make a 25-minute work hold together in the face of the composer’s extravagant virtuoso display and mid-19th-century romantic sentimentality. Monteux seemed impressed that I was getting most of the notes, but he was plainly very unhappy about my straining for musical effect in the lyrical passages. Everywhere he found me guilty of stopping before melodic climaxes, of interrupting the easy flow of the beautiful tunes. I had encountered a principal tenet of Monteux’s musicmaking: no devices, à la Stokowski, allowed. “It’s all in the music,” as he used to say (and as his wife titled a 1965 book of his recollections); just play the notes properly, no more and no less.

I had another experience of this most firmly held of Monteux’s artistic positions the next year, just a few days before my Town Hall appearance. As I came into his hotel suite near the Metropolitan Opera House (where he was that night conducting Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann), he told me that he had heard alarming reports concerning my playing of the Beethoven Sonata opus 110, which I was to perform just before intermission on the program. A pianist whom he (and I) respected had heard me do the piece the week before, and had found that I was changing tempo throughout the first movement. There must be one tempo, he told me. Play! And as I played, he showed me (though he would never have put it that way) that in art beauty was not caprice but discipline, and that musicality was not an added value but an inherent quality present (or not) in the very way one went about satisfying the requirements of the composer.

I did what Monteux said, and I was rewarded. He came to my debut, and even came backstage, the cynosure of every musical eye, to embrace me when it was over. So impressive was his presence on this occasion that I have always credited to it the enthusiastic review I received for this concert from John Briggs in the New York Times.

Sadly, this concert marked the end of my real musical contact with Monteux. Though I did play two more concertos for him in the next summers—the Schumann and the Mozart B flat major, K. 450—he did not attend my next Town Hall recital (in 1956), understandably preferring to return to his home in Maine for much-needed rest. He was, after all, by this time eighty-one. And perhaps it was indeed age and tiredness which explain what he said when I phoned him and his wife the next day to tell them how the concert had gone. “‘Ow were zee review?’” he asked. “Not very good, I’m afraid,” I answered. “Too bad. ‘Eer eez Doris.”

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I have thus far dealt with Pierre Monteux only as he seemed to me as a teacher and, on the few occasions when I played with him, as a conductor. But during this period I of course heard him many times from the audience. I heard him in a widely varied repertory ranging from Bach through Mozart and Haydn, the romantic classics, the French composers of his youth, all the way to the contemporary music of such iconoclasts as Stravinsky and Milhaud. I heard him conduct opera too, including Beethoven’s Fidelio and Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher in San Francisco, in addition to the Hoffmann at the Met.

Because Monteux was the staple of my musical diet, I took his performances in San Francisco as my norm. They seemed not just the way things should be done, but the way they were done. I took for granted the precision, the apparent ease of orchestral execution, the lightness and restraint of the conception. I also took for granted the interesting repertory, the inclusion of a challenging modern work on almost every program, the easy stylistic passage from Wagner to Ravel and from Mendelssohn to Milhaud. I took for granted, too, the palpable air of respect which characterized musicians’ attitudes to Monteux, onstage and off, as well as the absolute veneration which marked the way the conductor was treated by the orchestra’s most powerful financial contributors.¹

This naive idyll was destroyed once Monteux left the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1952. As the 1952-53 “Season of Discovery” was succeeded by the 1953-54 “Season of Decision,” it became plain to me that Monteux’s norm was in fact not reachable by the platoons of younger hopefuls the orchestra management was trying out. Shorn of Monteux, the orchestra returned to what it really had always been: a provincial ensemble. Not until I heard Monteux conduct the New York Philharmonic in a 1955 Carnegie Hall performance of Berlioz, including the Overture to Benvenuto Cellini and excerpts from the dramatic symphony, Romeo and Juliet, did I realize his full power. Here, in the enormously difficult Queen Mab Scherzo (as conveyed, it is true, by a much better orchestra), the virtues of Pierre Monteux shone in all their directness and straightforward charm. What I had come to expect all those years in San Francisco was musical greatness, and now, sitting in a Carnegie Hall box, I could finally appreciate just how rare it was. Perhaps fittingly, I never heard Monteux conduct in live performance again.

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But thanks to the survival of recordings, performances can now live on in more than memory. Pierre Monteux made many recordings in that part of his long life graced by reasonably adequate sound reproduction. He seems to have begun his recording career in 1929 with, properly enough, the Sacre du printemps as played by the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. This performance was never released in America and, to my knowledge, has not been transferred to LP. In 1930 he recorded, with the same orchestra, La Valse of Ravel, short pieces by the same composer and by Monteux’s conducting colleague in Paris, Piero Coppola, as well as the complete Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz.

Of these records, only the Berlioz was issued in this country, though it too, like the short pieces, has never been available on LP. The next year he recorded, again with the OSP, the Fête polonaise from Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui; this disc seems to have vanished even from some of the reference books. In the same year he recorded two more Berlioz works, the Overture to Part Two of Les Troyens and the Overture to Benvenuto Cellini. These records were available in this country during the 1930’s, but like all those so far mentioned, they do not exist in LP transfer. I have not heard any of these discs; surely their historical importance, surpassingly great as it is in the case of the Sacre, requires more than their being relegated to archives where they may be heard only through earphones.

The next records Monteux made—the only ones he was to do until he resumed recording in San Francisco in 1941—were as accompanist for the then child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin, and with one small exception they may be found in record stores. Available on LP are the Bach Concerto for Two Violins, with Menuhin joined by his teacher, the Rumanian violinist (and composer and conductor) Georges Enescu, the Paganini Concerto no. 1 in D major;² and the “Adélaïde” Concerto, attributed to Mozart but now thought to have been written by the 20th-century violinist and composer Marius Casadesus.³ All these records, like the earlier ones, were made for His Master’s Voice. They show Monteux to have been a great follower as well as a leader, and a fine chamber-music player.

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From 1941 until he left the orchestra in 1952, all Monteux’s recordings (save one commercial disc with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and one set of performances done in 1944 with the New York Philharmonic for circulation to American troops) were made in San Francisco for RCA Victor, then the American affiliate of HMV. They include a fair representation of the repertory Monteux brought to San Francisco. This repertory was divided into three parts: the German classics, French writing from Berlioz to the contemporaries of the time, and Russian showpieces from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky. Of all the many records Monteux made in San Francisco, perhaps the most valuable are those of French music; taken together, they go far to justify Irving Kolodin’s remark in 1950 that “Monteux has found fertile soil in California for the French tradition of orchestral performance, and it has flourished impressively.”

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The best of these records testify to a kind of orchestral performance which cannot be heard in the United States of 1984, and can be heard in precious few other places in the world. The virtues of these San Francisco Monteux records are not those of individual sections or choirs, or even of first-chair players. The brass playing is in fact often spotty, and the string playing is quite plainly on less than the best-quality instruments. The virtues are rather those of a group of musicians thoroughly under the artistic control of a conductor with a perfect knowledge of the musical score, with a total command of both baton and rehearsal technique, a remarkable grasp of the styles of his own country’s works and of other traditions as well, a vibrant and interesting sense of rhythm, and an ear which immediately discerns every departure from his instructions.

Not surprisingly, it is the San Francisco recordings of French music which now make the greatest impact. Among the first discs Monteux made in San Francisco were those of the once widely played Symphony in D minor of César Franck.⁴ What is so outstanding about this performance is the combination of dynamism in Monteux’s conception and the elegance of the orchestral sound. The dynamism, I suppose, is hardly unexpected in a conductor who, after all, came to maturity with Stravinsky and Diaghilev; it is harder to believe that the orchestra whose finished execution is heard on this record was almost in its entirety the orchestra Monteux inherited from his distinctly workaday predecessors and which (due to union restrictions) he had hardly been able to infuse with talent from outside Northern California. Everywhere the orchestral attacks are precise, not because of a gross digging-in with accents, so popular today, but because of simple playing together of a kind which is possible only under a conductor who cares about, and can communicate, every detail. And the sonority is by turns limpid and cushioned, a tribute to the basic acoustics of the War Memorial Opera House, at that time the home of the San Francisco orchestra as well as of the opera.

A recording the next year of the almost unknown Symphony no. 2 of Vincent d’Indy,⁵ though not quite so surely played by the orchestra, is still marvelous in musical conception. In 1945, Monteux and the orchestra did several French pieces, including the Introduction to Act I of Fervaal and the Istar Variations, both by d’Indy; Debussy’s “Sarabande” from the suite Pour le Piano, in the transcription by Ravel; and the Second Suite from Milhaud’s Protée.⁶ Though all this music is French, it is highly varied in style and expressive purpose. The d’Indy is marked by the rapt immersion in French folk song and the orchestral tone painting of the Fervaal excerpt, and, in Istar, by the combination of ingenious variation writing with instrumental brilliance; the Debussy is a grave homage to a past century’s ceremonial formality, containing a lustiness only hinted at in the composer’s original piano writing but fully realized in Ravel’s sensuous orchestration; the Milhaud is an early post-World War I blend of wrong-note modernism with the Brazilian dance rhythms the composer learned during a stint in Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel (when the poet was acting as French ambassador). Monteux serves these different musical masters with perfect seriousness and sympathy, never exaggerating either orchestral effect or melodic sweetness. Everything coming from the orchestra is simple, natural, and, in one of Monteux’s often used French words, juste.

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The capstones of Monteux’s recordings of French music in San Francisco are undoubtedly his performances of two major works, one almost forgotten then and now, and one uniquely overplayed by star conductors. Ernest Chausson’s Symphony in B flat major (1890) is one of the monuments of the 19th-century French symphonic tradition, formally derived perhaps from Franck but vastly more long-lined melodically and lush in orchestration; Monteux’s 1950 recording⁷ of it properly suggests the composer’s reverence for the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde without submerging the music in an alien German introspection, and the orchestra produces an always beautiful and unforced tone. The Berlioz Symphonie fantastique,⁸ made in the same year, is a performance emphasizing clarity and straightforward, almost deadpan execution of all the music’s sensational aspects. The result can only please those (like myself) who find Berlioz often over-theatrical in emotional effect and artificial in musical construction. As Monteux does this piece, all the excitement souped-up in most readings emerges as fresh and powerful, precisely because the music is allowed to speak for itself.

Sadly, Monteux’s San Francisco performances of his beloved German classics were not extensively documented. Three Beethoven symphonies, one each of Schumann and Brahms, and a few smaller works—this hardly does justice to a conductor who, after all, liked to close San Francisco seasons with the Beethoven Ninth. Still, two of the Beethoven symphonies he did record, the Second and the Eighth,⁹ are once again available. These performances show us a pure Beethoven, marked by lack of affectation and by scrupulous attention to the unexaggerated flow of the music. Just to hear the beginning of the Eighth Symphony as Monteux does it, all in one unforced tempo, is to realize how much today’s vaunted artistic self-expression is no more than a lack of musicality.

Because Monteux recorded no Wagner commercially in San Francisco, it is a stroke of good fortune that a 1943 radio performance of the “Prelude and Lovedeath” from Tristan is now available on a “private-label” disc.¹⁰ With the great Lotte Lehmann as the vocally affecting and clear-worded soloist, Monteux shows how powerful this music can be when it is performed correctly rather than with “feeling.” The opening bars of the Prelude in Monteux’s performance, played, for once, without pauses, and in the correct rhythm, demonstrate once again that beauty is something implicit in music, not added to it.

Further evidence of what Monteux might have accomplished in recordings of German music in San Francisco is contained on a disc (available until recently) of the Wagner Siegfried Idyll and the Strauss Death and Transfiguration.¹¹ Though these performances date from two days of recording in San Francisco in 1960 (when Monteux was eighty-four), they demonstrate both Monteux’s characteristic musical virtues and a quality of orchestral performance not audible in any of the orchestra’s other work at the time. The Wagner is again full of sentiment without being in any way sentimental, and the many joints in this piece, which betray its origin as a wordless product of Wagner’s work on the opera Siegfried, are handled with suppleness. The Strauss performance is a revelation. The conductor’s holding-in of every merely emotive feature of this highly emotional music is all the more remarkable in view of his own comment that when he played this work he thought of the victims of Hitler’s crimes. But the musical gain from self-discipline is great; what for other conductors is all climax is for Monteux long melody and inexorable progression.

Precisely because Monteux was always such a serious musician, it is somewhat daunting to realize just how well he performed music which in other hands seems damnably meretricious. An outstanding example of this side to his talent is his 1942 San Francisco recording of the Scheherazade of Rimsky-Korsakov.¹² This peculiar—and by now hackneyed—blend of Russian nationalism, pseudo-Orientalism, and international orchestral effects is today pop-concert fare. In Monteux’s hands, aided by brilliant orchestral playing and the superbly idiomatic rendition of the violin solos by Naoum Blinder, the orchestra’s long-time concertmaster (and the teacher of Isaac Stern), the piece is striking for its wealth of musical invention and its structural integrity.

Though Monteux did record the Sucre du printemps in San Francisco in 1945, it was never released on a full-price LP. That honor was reserved for his performance with the Boston Symphony in 1951, the only commercial recording he made with another orchestra during his tenure in San Francisco.¹³ As in the case of so many of his other performances, this one seems a polar opposite to those of most great conductors today. Dry where others are sensual, precise rhythmically where they are self-indulgent, tonally clarified where they are marked by an unrelenting impasto of sound, the performance reflects Monteux’s awareness of the music’s origin in the ballet house, not the concert hall. The result bears much resemblance in mood to Stravinsky’s own 1928 Paris recording of the work. One hopes that the gods of EMI, when they consider transferring Stravinsky’s discs to LP, pay similar attention to those of Monteux.

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After San Francisco, Monteux enjoyed a significantly expanded performing career, a career that was reflected in a large number of recordings with orchestras here and abroad until the very year of his death. In the late 1950’s he recorded for RCA with the Boston orchestra, most notably the last three symphonies of Tchaikowsky; for RCA too, he did (in Rome in 1956) a complete La Traviata of Verdi. A year earlier he did a complete Manon of Massenet in Paris for EMI. In 1960 he did a remake of the Franck Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for RCA; at about the same time he finished a complete set of Beethoven symphonies in Europe for RCA/Decca. He did other repertory for the same combination, and for Decca alone, including famous ballet scores of Stravinsky and important works of Debussy and Ravel. At the end of his life, he was recording for Philips. From this last association was produced a touching souvenir of Monteux’s direct approach to making music: a rehearsal record of the famous Marcia funebre from the “Eroica” Symphony of Beethoven.¹⁴ Here, spoken by Monteux, are the bywords of his musical faith—exactement, simple, naturel.

There are many splendid performances included in this Indian summer burst of Monteux’s performing activity. The opera performances are models of pure music-making in a genre almost occluded by bad habits.¹⁵ A 1955 recording of the three Nocturnes of Debussy with the Boston Symphony Orchestra¹⁶ is testimony to Monteux’s longstanding desire to present Debussy’s music unencumbered by the “impressionist” unclarity with which it is so often performed. But despite these specific examples of excellence, Monteux’s late recordings, whether of Beethoven or Berlioz or Stravinsky, seem on the whole devoid of the individual rhythmic personality so evident in San Francisco, of the delicately lush orchestral sounds and clear textures he drew from an essentially local orchestra on the shores of the Pacific. Understandably, these late records seem marked by a kind of matter-of-factness, by an increasingly tired going-through of motions rather than the reckless expenditure of purpose and energy which had marked his work in San Francisco. His was, after all, a long and special career, and he was surely entitled to some slackening of pace.

And yet, matters can hardly be left there. There are two remarkable sets of performances, made with the North German Radio (NDR) Orchestra in Hamburg in February 1964, which do provide a fitting epitaph to the life of this great musician. The first is of Wagner: the Overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, the Overture and Bacchanale from Tannhauser, and the “Prelude and Lovedeath” from Tristan.¹⁷ Here is Wagner played very much as we do not get him today—direct but committed, accurate but also full of feeling. The second set of performances is not just, like the Wagner, a musical lesson; it is a testament to the delicacy of Monteux’s feeling for the music of Mozart. Here, in these performances of the Symphony no. 35 in D major, K. 385 (“Haffner”) and the Symphony no. 39 in E flat major, K. 543,¹⁸ the orchestra is not first-rate, and neither is the recording technology employed. But all these details are merely contingent, and of this world. Monteux’s sympathy for the music, so miraculously present in these grooves, must, to judge from its present rarity on earth, be of the next world. This, at least, is the way I remember Pierre Monteux.

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¹ A fascinating account of Monteux's years in San Francisco is included in a new book by a member of the orchestra's string section. The San Francisco Symphony, by David Schneider, Presidio Press, 324 pp., $15.95.

² Both the Bach and the Paganini are on EMI (England) RLS 718.

³ Rococo (Canada) 2024.

⁴ The Franck originally appeared, on 78's, as RCA Victor DM 840; it was briefly available in an LP transfer, without the name of the conductor and with the orchestra called the “World Wide Symphony Orchestra,” as RCA Camden CAL 107.

⁵ On 78's, RCA Victor DM 943; on LP, RCA LCT 1125.

⁶ These recordings were collected on an LP, RCA Camden CAL 385.

⁷ First available on LP as RCA LM 1181, it has now been remastered in France and released as part of a Cycle Monteux on RCA (France) GM 43557.

⁸ Originally available on RCA LM 1131; now available in the Cycle Monteux on RCA (France) GM 43359.

⁹ Available in the 1950's on various RCA LP's, they too can be found in the Cycle Monteux on RCA (France) 43357.

¹⁰ Bruno Walter Society BWS 729.

¹¹ RCA VICS 1457.

¹² Variously available on LP in the 1950's, it may now be found in the Cycle Monteux on RCA (France) GM 43361.

¹³ RCA LM 1149.

¹⁴ Philips 6570 204.

¹⁵ Monteux's La Traviata was available on RCA VIC 6004; his Manon was on Seraphim ID 6057.

¹⁶ Originally available on RCA LM 1939; now, in the Cycle Monteux, on RCA (France) GM 43366.

¹⁷ Festival Classique (France) FC 435.

¹⁸ Vox Turnabout TV 34831.