These days, when one thinks of Maurice Abravanel, his long association with the Utah Symphony comes to mind.  Indeed, he was there from 1947-79 building a fine orchestra and making numerous recordings.  As the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians notes, this is "notable sociologically.  Utah is one of the poorest states, with no tradition of philanthropy toward the arts, yet under Abravanel's leadership, has become the state with the highest concert attendance."  But his career began much earlier, and included a great deal of opera.

He was born in January of 1903 of Spanish-Portugese-Sephardic stock.  An ancestor is reputed to have been chancellor to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.  Maurice was brought up in Lausanne, and studied medicine.  Then on Busoni's recommendation, he went to Berlin in 1922 to study composition with Kurt Weill.  After working in several German theaters, in 1933 he moved to Paris, where he conducted ballet, and in 1934-35 toured Australia as conductor of the British National Opera.  He told me that doing performances of Wagner in English was where he learned to speak the language!

On the recommendation of Bruno Walter, Abravanel came to New York and conducted opera at the Met.  Later, he turned to leading Broadway musicals of Kurt Weill.  He also did operas in Chicago for a season, and eventually wound up in Utah.  Except when he was in the hospital for heart surgery, he never missed a performance in 55 years of conducting.

What follows is a conversation I was privileged to have with the maestro a year or so ago.  In most of my interviews the format is "Q & A", but this time, Abravanel told so many wonderful stories that I hardly had to ask him anything.  One memory led to another, and with little prodding from me, he expounded on two subjects:  Wagner, and Massenet.

So, in place of the usual style for these interviews, I have let the maestro just talk to you very much like he talked with me -- in large chunks of interesting memories.  I'll write a few words between each large segment, but I now turn the typewriter over to Maurice Abravanel . . . . . . . . .


     I love to talk about Massenet.  In New York, I was once asked by a singer named Maximova to talk during her lecture/recital.  That would have been around 1938.  I said something about Massenet to the effect that he was a very great composer.  In those days, this was shocking because he was totally "out"; he was no good.  Most of the audience thought I was kidding, but Emilio De Gogorza was in the audience and thought I was condescending about it.  He grumbled audibly because he knew that Massenet was a great composer.  (He was probably the only one in the entire audience who felt that way.)  If you read Debussy's articles penned as "M. Croche", you'll see he felt Massenet was good.  I have always had a great love of Massenet, and a great respect and admiration for his works.  Take Manon, which is of course a masterpiece.  He expressed beautifully those things he wanted to express.  When he wrote an aria in the ABA form, after the short middle (B) section, the repeated A section is shorter because he has condensed it.  In the five acts of Manon, he has an amount of music -- if you call melody music -- which any sane musician should not hesitate to do.  Milhaud said that the essence of music is melody.  No one can quite define melody -- it's like jazz:  you know it when you hear it!

     That was her American debut.  It was a Saturday matinee, and I remember Rene Maison caught a cold.  When I arrived at the stage door, there was a message that the tenor would by Sydney Rayner.  He was an excellent tenor, really, except he could not sing softly very well.  So here was Rayner with a heavy voice, and Sayão with a very small voice.  It was exquisite, but not as good as it would be later.  She would close her eyes to express emotion.  Now onstage, you don't close your eyes because it doesn't communicate.  The performance was not very good because without a rehearsal there was no way of finding any reasonable balance between Sayão and Rayner.  And she was very tiny, and he was quite robust.  The scene in St. Sulpice is always very dangerous if the singers are not about the same size.  When she grabs him and takes him to the footlights, it must be believable.  Here was timid Miss Sayão and enormous Sydney Rayner who was singing like a heldentenor.  But when I got home and read the review in the Sunday Times, Olin Downes wrote a glowing review of her -- and of me, too.  I threw my arms up in the air!  It had been what I thought was my worst performance at the Metropolitan Opera.  Later I enjoyed working with Sayão immensely, but that first performance was not good at all.  At the end of the second act, which is so tricky, she was all over the place.  She did not as yet have the know-how to sing that, to appear very agitated and yet be solid as a rock technically.  I remember meeting Rayner for the first time.  He was an American, but nobody at the Met spoke English at the time.  So he greeted me with, "Bon jour, maître."  He said it with a horrible accent.  I didn't respond.  He knew I'd been at the Berlin Opera, so he said, "Guten Tag, Kapellmeister."  Again, I didn't respond.  So he said, "Bon giorno, maestro."  I finally looked up and said, "Why don't you try English?"

     The first few days we were idle, then I started rehearsing.  I was one of three foreigners.  There was a coach from the Berlin Opera, whom I had recommended, who had been an assistant to Leo Blech, and there was a tenor who had been at the Met [and Chicago!], a Belgian named Octave Dua.  The British singers told me I'd have an interesting experience in Australia because every company that went there brought its own orchestra either from London or from Milan.  They had taken companies with the likes of Toti Dal Monte and Apollo Granforte.  But opera had never been done in Australia with a local orchestra.  So we arrived there and I had my first rehearsals which I felt were dismal, but was told they were the best musicians they had.  The man who ran the company was Sir Benjamin Fuller, who had made a lot of money in vaudeville.  His wife suggested that since he had made so much money, why not bring Grand Opera instead of vaudeville.  He agreed, and that was why we were brought there with a 13-week contract with an extension of another 13 weeks.  The man who was supposed to have conducted the company was Sir John Barbirolli, but before signing to go he was advised that something might turn up in America.  So he didn't want to be so very far away.  Then they asked Albert Coates, but his mother was Russian, and so he wanted in his contract that he could do all kinds of Russian operas that were then (and are still) rather unknown.  He also wanted an enormous orchestra.  There were no opera houses, so we played in theaters that could accommodate 45 or 50 players at most.  At that time, I had made quite a splash in Paris preparing Don Giovanni with French singers for Bruno Walter.  I had conducted at the Berlin Opera, so I was not an unknown quantity.  So the manager of the company engaged me as the Music Director.

     The first rehearsal was so dismal that I told Sir Benjamin Fuller that I had to have two three-hour rehearsals every day in order to make it go.  I got that, and we opened with Aïda.  The day we arrived in Melbourne, Octave Dua, who had travelled a great deal in his career, knew exactly the Italian restaurant which was very good.  In those days, most restaurants in Australia were pretty awful.  So we went to this Italian restaurant, and the owner came to say hello, and lamented that we had a British company.  How could opera by sung by British?  It's out of the question, especially when you're doing operas only in English.  It was ridiculous.  That's when I learned that an Italian company had performed everything -- including Lohengrin -- there.  So the small Italian colony decided to sabotage the English company.  We started, and there were five different operas in the first five days, and I conducted them all.  They were all Italian operas because I'd been told that this is what the companies play in Australia.  It was what people wanted, and what would fill the house.  There were also a few French operas -- Faust, Carmen, and I insisted on Pecheurs de Perles because I had done the premiere of a new version and it had been a big success in Berlin.  Furtwäangler also had conducted it.

     But the man in the restaurant was right.  The word had been passed by the Italians in Sydney and Melbourne that it was ridiculous.  So we sat down with the producer, Sir Charles Moore, and decided to switch from Italian to Wagner.  During the next six months in Sidney and Melbourne, I conducted twelve performances each of Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Walküre, and Tristan.  Those British singers knew their parts.  Even in Kassel, even in Berlin, singers needed a prompter, and even so they would make quite a few mistakes.  But those British singers knew their parts and could sing beautifully without any prompter!  It was very satisfying.  They knew their parts inside out and were very good singers.  We filled the house!  It was hard work for me with the orchestra, but I was young so I could do it.  Anyway, when you do Wagner, no matter what you do it sounds good, and the Australians were so tickled that their own musicians could play so beautifully, that the talk was how wonderful the orchestra was and they were proud that they, Australians, could play Wagner.  It's more interesting to play than Verdi, so they think it's more difficult.  The performances were all in English, and that's how I learned the language!  Sub-consciously I was translating from the German, having been eleven years in Germany.  I'm not kidding -- that's a very good way to learn English -- conduct something in English that you have known in your own language!  [Slyly]  That option is not open to everybody . . . .  [Both laugh]

     Then the company went back to London, but I was asked by Sir Keith Murdoch, who, unlike his son Rupert Murdoch, was epitome of good taste, distinction, and refinement.  His wife was even more so, but Rupert is known to be as cheap as they come.  He'll do anything as long as it makes money.  The father on the contrary was a gentleman and a wonderful man, and wanted to try having a couple of symphony concerts.  So he engaged me to come back, and the musicians in Sidney also asked to have me back.  They had no symphony; they had tried one, but it didn't go.  So I did the concerts and they asked to form an Australian National Orchestra.  At that moment, the Australian Broadcasting Commission had a monopoly of symphony concerts.  They brought Sir Thomas Beecham and later Eugene Ormandy and Sir Malcolm Sargent for three concerts in Sidney, then three in Melbourne.  They engaged me to do two operas in concert on the air, and gave me carte blanche as to the choice of operas.  All they wanted to know four weeks in advance was whether I wanted two evenings or three evenings in one week, and how long each night would last.  I put my ordinary watch on the table and read through the score, and the timing I gave them turned out to be accurate within one minute.  I did Rheingold and Parsifal both totally uncut because it was on radio.  In the theater, I did lots of cuts in the works because there were cuts at the Met and even in Berlin in those days.  Sometimes that works to great advantage, as you know.  The new school that says you have to do everything the composer wrote including repeats is the most ridiculous thing because even Brahms himself not only condoned but recommended not to repeat his own sections.  He said that when the works were new, he wanted people to hear the tunes a second time, but later, when audiences knew the works, he didn't think they needed to be repeated.  Toscanini, Furtwängler, Walter, Weingartner would never observe the repeat of the exposition (the first part of the first movement in the symphonic form).  Remember, when they were written these works were new and could stand the extra playing to get them across.  There is no question that in most operas, the composer -- or if not the composer, the producer -- would discover that the opera went much better with cuts.  There is something very profane, very mundane, very dirty called "success."  If they notice that people were excited instead of yawning, the composer would approve.  I have yet to find a composer who is not happy, no matter how you take his work, if the public likes it.  I also did the first performances in Australia of Rosenkavalier, Prince Igor, and Boris Godunov.  I had a free hand, but wanted operas they had not heard.

     Of course.  Opera is the craziest, most un-logical thing.  (...)

     Critics have completely reversed themselves.  Before the First World War, they condemned anything that was different from what they were used to.  Now, they condemn anything new that is at all accessible on first hearing!  That was so in the twenties, but it went full-blast after the Second World War.  So an opera that would be pleasing the first time is dismissed as being not original.  But in spite of that, opera goes on and on.  Take the Ring.  Everybody knew that Wagner had his peculiarities, but everybody knew that the music was tremendous and his operas were marvelous.  Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, would leave his office early in order to go to the few uncut performances of the Ring at the Met.  I saw him many times.  I conducted his orchestra, the New York City Orchestra, so I knew him quite well, and I would see him there.  I would say, "Hey, you are the Mayor of a big city, and you spend five hours here!"  He said, "Well, I work harder in the morning!"  He never missed an uncut performance of Wagner.  When Melchior sang Walse Walse, nobody on this planet can approach that kind of timbre.  It never sounded forced or pushed, just loud, but the whole house was vibrating.  It was incredible and very beautiful.  Then Bing came and he didn't like Wagner, and many people were against Wagner.  It was supposed to be poison at the box office, but you have McEwen putting on a Ring in San Francisco, and it was completely sold out months ahead.  I wanted to go, but my wife was very ill at the time and I didn't have the heart to make the trip then.  But I understand it was done without gimmicks and without so-called innovations.  I admit it's very difficult to do it as Wagner asked without being ridiculous.  With Karajan, the dragon was off-stage.  He didn't want to try it in front of the audience, so it was never seen.  Lotte Lehmann remarked to me that it was always difficult to stage the first act of Lohengrin because of the swan which has to be on the water.  To do it at all, the river must be at the back of the stage which meant that the choristers would have to turn their backs in order to see the swan and sing the lines about it.  And turning their backs to the conductor and the audience is not good for the chorus.  Well, Lehmann came back from Bayreuth and told me how the choristers were standing so still during this, and asked me if it was right.  I told her that of course it was not right -- the music was full of agitation and excitement.  So how could they be like statues?  That is unartistic and totally stupid, and totally against the music.  But it was perpetrated by the heirs of Wagner.  Karajan and I were together when he came to America for the first time in the early 50s, and he came to the tabernacle where we played.  He invited me for lunch and kept me for three hours.  He told me about using Lucite material for the scenery so that the chorus could look offstage and still see the assistant conductors, and yet their voices would be reflected back into the auditorium.

© 1985 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on June 22, 1985.  The Massenet portion was published in the Massenet Newsletter in July, 1986, and the Wagner portion was published in Wagner News in January, 1988.  Portions were used on WNIB (along with recordings) in 1993 and 1998.  The transcription was re-edited in 2014, photos and links were added, and it was posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.