Farewell to Herbert Blomstedt. A life on the podium, right up to the very end

There is a moment of silence that inevitably sets in when we are struck by unexpected news, and sometimes it lingers until it almost takes our breath away. This is what happened to so many upon hearing of Herbert Blomstedt’s death. His advanced age (he would have turned one hundred in eight months’ time) made his passing possible, and almost natural; yet this offers little comfort when faced with a life entirely devoted to music. In recent years, despite a lighter schedule, he had continued to travel the world. Orchestras adored him and never stopped seeking him out, even when a series of falls had forced him to conduct whilst seated and old age had made his already very slender frame even more frail.

Just two years ago, he had been the architect of another moment of silence. It was November 2024, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. He took to the podium on the first violin’s arm and conducted Mahler’s Ninth without a baton, seated on a stool, raising his hands just above his chest. At the final note, he held his arms aloft for thirty seconds, and the hall remained motionless with him, before rising to its feet all at once.

A few brief gestures were enough for him to shape a vast world of sound (confined to the symphonic realm: he conducted very few operas during his long career). In that restraint one could recognise the influence of Arthur Nikisch, who had led the Gewandhaus a century before him, and that of his mentor Igor Markevitch, from whom he had also learnt to conduct from memory – the only way in which he felt truly free. He did so in Rome too, in May 2023, at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. In these columns we reported on a brilliant performance of Bruckner’s Fourth, in which serenity and clarity translated into a youthful enthusiasm. ‘As soon as I hear the sound of the orchestra, I am transformed,’ he had told the Berliner Philharmoniker, and on the podium his body and age seemed to vanish.

To those who asked him the secret of such vitality and longevity, he replied that it was a gift, and that diet had nothing to do with it: “Churchill drank whisky, smoked enormous cigars and he too had reached the age of ninety”. He spoke of music as an ethical force and, whilst not naively believing that after a Bruckner symphony everyone would leave the concert hall determined to become better people, he thought that something along those lines did happen. He leaves behind an extensive discography, a sort of spiritual testament in which the symphonies of Beethoven and Schubert, recorded in Dresden, stand out; Nielsen and Sibelius, recorded in San Francisco; Mahler’s Ninth, recorded live in Bamberg when he had just turned ninety; and the Brahms symphonies with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, released when he was ninety-three.

He spent his final spring on the podium: Leipzig, Berlin, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony received with enthusiasm in Detroit and, a few days later, the same symphony in San Francisco, conducting the orchestra that had once been his own. He had arrived already tired. On the evening of 15 May, halfway through the third movement, the music stopped; he was moved from his stool to an armchair, and it was he who signalled to the orchestra where to resume. He carried on until the very last note. The doctors forbade him from giving any further performances, and that remained his final public appearance. In the draft of the Ninth, Mahler had written ‘Leb wohl’, farewell.