Greek Tragedy

Biography Turns A Sympathetic Ear To Mitropoulos

October 15, 1995|By John von Rhein, Tribune Music Critic.

If the annals of conducting ever produced a genuine martyr to music, it was Dimitri Mitropoulos.

During the decade before his death in 1960, he was considered in some musical circles to be the equal of Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwaengler.

Those who had followed his patient efforts, as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1949 to 1958, to drag that notoriously recalcitrant orchestra into the 20th Century, recognized him as an exceptional musician, a conductor of conscience and influence--a man who had climbed to the top of the mountain of American musical culture and had gotten people to consider what that culture meant.

Yet, only a few years after his passing, Mitropoulos was forgotten, lost to the mists of history. Most of his recordings had vanished from circulation and his musical achievement was all but erased from our cultural memory bank. The thrashing and bashing he had endured at the hands of the critics for much of his time at the Philharmonic was having a pernicious residual effect.

An inveterate mountain climber, Mitropoulos always said he imagined the perfect way for him to die was a long fall from the top of a mountain. Although the actual cause of his death was a massive heart attack suffered during a rehearsal of the Mahler Third Symphony with the La Scala orchestra, the metaphor proved sadly apt.

Thirty-five years after Mitropoulos' passing, the question remains: Did he fall from the mountain, or was he pushed?

As one finishes combing through the nearly 500 pages of William R. Trotter's detailed, absorbing, carefully balanced and beautifully written biography, "Priest of Music: The Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos" (Amadeus Press), the answer seems clear: The man resignedly leapt to his death, with the full connivance of his "friends."

With the Greek conductor's 100th birthday anniversary coming up in 1996, the need to rehabilitate Mitropoulos' reputation was perhaps never so timely.

Beyond the insights it provides into one of the century's most gifted, if misunderstood, musicians, Trotter's book takes us deep into the lion's den of New York's musical life during the 1940s and '50s, where Mitropoulos found himself playing the role of David--or was it Goliath?

Trotter works from detailed notes and more than 300 hours of taped interviews compiled over eight years by the late Oliver Daniel, producer of the Philharmonic's radio broadcasts during Mitropoulos' tenure and author of the definitive biography of Leopold Stokowski, "Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View."

"Priest of Music" portrays Mitropoulos' brilliant ascent and humiliating fall as the stuff of a modern Greek tragedy, the saga of a decent, well-meaning man brought low by forces he seemed powerless to control. It builds a convincing thesis that the conductor was victimized by his own temperament and personality as well as by those around him--musicians, managers, patrons, impresarios, composers, critics, even proteges.

Take Leonard Bernstein, for example. Mitropoulos, who did so much to help launch Bernstein's spectacular rise, was repaid for his kindness with a knife in the back. Bernstein--so claims Trotter in one of the book's more sensational revelations--scotched his mentor's chances of succeeding Serge Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony by disclosing Mitropoulos' homosexuality to the homophobic Koussevitzky.

Raised for the priesthood, Mitropoulos grew up to be a celebrant of music as a high and holy rite. Music was for him a spiritual necessity, and, despite the rumors that swirl around his name even today, music supplanted sex in his life. That the conductor lived alone and remained virtually celibate all his life did not stop the gossip within the Philharmonic about his gayness; this, Trotter writes, "contributed significantly to the gradual undermining of Mitropoulos' authority."

Mitropoulos' unorthodox conducting style doubtless didn't help, either. He shunned both baton and score, choosing to commit everything to his amazing photographic memory. He conducted, nervously and even violently, with his entire body, not just his hands and arms. (One critic wrote he looked like "a Greek bartender vigorously shaking cocktails.") Still, his total absorption into the scores he conducted, his physical dynamism, intensity and concentration could rivet every member of an orchestra.

Trotter chronicles Mitropoulos' early fame as a pianist, his renouncing the international limelight to work with his orchestra in Athens and his dozen years, 1937-49, as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, during which he turned a provincial band into one of the nation's best second-tier orchestras.

When the New York Philharmonic tapped him to be its chief conductor, Mitropoulos, despite misgivings about leaving the Twin Cities, agreed; at 52, he knew he would never have such an opportunity again.