The Telegraph, 15 Feb 2002  [Text only] GÜNTER WAND, the German conductor who has died aged 90, did not attain international recognition of his extraordinary gifts as an interpreter until he was nearly 70; indeed, most of his career was spent in Cologne and Hamburg, where he was a Kapellmeister in the highest tradition. Although he made his London debut in 1951, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a Beethoven programme at Covent Garden, it was not until 1981, when he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra, that he made the kind of impact on the British public and critics that the elderly Klemperer had made 25 years earlier. This appearance led to his appointment for several years as chief guest conductor of the BBC orchestra. His London concerts thereafter became occasions at which one could be confident of encountering the traditional virtues of lucidity, balance and integrity. In recent years, his visit to the Edinburgh Festival with the North German Radio Orchestra of Hamburg, usually to perform a Bruckner symphony, was the musical climax of the festival. He was especially fond of the Eighth, which he also took to the London Proms on several occasions. Ironically, when he unexpectedly succeeded Klaus Tennstedt as the orchestra's conductor, it was booked for the Festival with Tennstedt. But because at that time no one in Edinburgh had heard of Wand, the booking was cancelled. The Proms invited him instead and enjoyed a triumph, often repeated. The performance he conducted of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony in the Festival Hall in November 1986 was by common consent held to be one of the greatest in the hall's 35 years of existence. His Schubert Great C major had a momentum and vitality akin to Sir Adrian Boult's in this work, and his interpretations of the Brahms symphonies - fortunately available on discs, like his Schubert - were distinguished by tempi that sound exactly right, and by an inner fieriness that one feels comes direct from the music and not from something alien imposed upon it by the conductor. For Wand, time, space and light were of the essence. It was, though, in Bruckner that Wand could be heard at his finest, not only in the monumental splendours of the last three symphonies but in the more problematical early examples, such as Nos 1 and 2, where cogency and enthusiasm combined to give a deeply satisfying result. He favoured the editions by Robert Haas. He recorded all the nine symphonies with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, preferring to work with radio orchestras because they provided more rehearsal time, and re-recorded most of them with the Berlin Philharmonic or Hamburg orchestras. His style of conducting was unflamboyant, although he did not eschew the occasional expansive gesture. Flashiness, however, was outside his ken. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, he looked almost too frail to reach the podium but, when he got there, unleashed a remarkable Bruckner Eight. Gunter Wand was born at Elberfeld on January 7 1912. After lessons in Wuppertal and at Cologne University, he studied at Cologne Conservatory and High School for Music under Phillip Jarnach for composition and Paul Baumgartner for piano. He worked as repetiteur and assistant conductor at Wuppertal and Allenstein before becoming chief conductor at Detmold. He was then principally an opera conductor, specialising in Mozart and Verdi. He was a conductor at Cologne Opera from 1939 until 1944, when the opera house was destroyed. For a year Wand went to Salzburg to conduct the Mozarteum Orchestra, but returned to Cologne in 1945 as music director of the opera. Cologne's population had been reduced by war from nearly half a million to 40,000, and Wand wanted to take part in the revival of the city initiated by his friend Konrad Adenauer. He now began to study the orchestral repertoire so that from 1946 he could take over the Gurzenich concerts which had once been conducted by Fritz Steinbach. This engagement, on a 10-year contract, was later extended to a life appointment. Wand also joined the teaching staff of Cologne High School for Music, becoming a professor in 1948. Although Wand's programmes usually had a classical basis (some would say bias), he did not neglect contemporary music. He conducted much Stravinsky and Bartók (he recorded the latter's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) and works by the Cologne composer Bernd-Alois Zimmermann. He also conducted works by Messiaen, Varèse and Ligeti. In 1974 he resigned his Cologne posts and went to Switzerland as guest conductor of the Berne Symphony Orchestra. He then began his regular association with the Hamburg Radio Orchestra, becoming its chief conductor in 1982, and with Munich. He was also a composer. Wand was not the easiest of men to deal with. In his autobiography, Sir John Drummond, who encountered him when he was Edinburgh Festival director and later as Controller of BBC Radio 3, described a visit to the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995 when Wand was "frail, short-tempered, and endlessly critical of the orchestra". At dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel after a successful concert, Drummond asked Wand to cheer up and was shouted at for his pains. This, Drummond wrote, was typical of Wand's "Janus-like behaviour - all sweetness and light and `Du, mein lieber Freund' one moment and foul language and boorish behaviour the next". Wand and his wife lived in Switzerland in recent years. [Note: A tribute from The Guardian by Sir John Drummond appears at the bottom of this webpage.]

In January of 1989, conductor Günter Wand made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  His program included the Symphony #1 of Brahms (which was recorded by RCA, photo at left) and the Schubert Unfinished Symphony.  Early in the following season he would return for the Bruckner Symphony #5.  Despite his lack of self-aggrandizement, he agreed to meet with me the day after completing his first series of concerts.

His English was quite good, though we had a translator on hand to furnish words and phrases as needed.  He would often repeat thoughts with slightly different words in hopes of making his ideas clear and understood.  At the end, he mentioned that the English he learned in school was still used in England, but it was different than

I had twenty-five or twenty-six hours of rehearsal, and not one musician came to me and said it was too much.  They all say, “We had a fantastic week with you.  Thank you, thank you.”  So, that’s my answer.  A conductor has to say some practical things to the music professional, not philosophical ideas.  It’s only in Chicago that I am always asked why I had five rehearsals.  I think it is better to look what happens after the rehearsals.  In the newspaper was written that I had a double rehearsal, like Georg Solti.  That’s not true.  He had four, I have five.  That’s all.  I see the orchestra the first time in my life, and it was very exciting.  It’s not so easy to come in a country that you have never seen.  It’s my first time in America.  Nobody speaks German and I don’t know what’s happening, but I am so happy to feel that the musicians agree with me.  That is the most important thing for a conductor — to have the feeling the musicians are also happy.

BD:    We are very happy that you have come to Chicago.

GW:    But you already know that before?

BD:    Some of us were anticipating this with great eagerness.

GW:    [Laughs]

BD:    You have the rehearsals and at the first performance you are pleased or not pleased.  Is the second performance and the third performance and the next performance after that better each time?

GW:    I hope it is better each time!  I try to do my best, and the musicians do too, but we are human beings.  Not every day is the same.  I was very happy on the Saturday concert.  I think it was the best of the three concerts. 

BD:    All the time in rehearsals and performances you’re working toward a musical perfection.  Do you ever get that musical perfection?

GW:    Oh, I think it’s not possible.  No human being can make it total perfection, no.  Nobody can do it.  Not in this time, not in earlier times, not in the future.  I am absolutely sure.  It cannot be.

BD:    Do you get very close to it, though?

GW:    A wonderful piano player is one person.  He has a wonderful instrument and he plays well.  A conductor has an instrument of eighty musicians or a hundred musicians, and each musician is a personality.  He has his own distinct effect, his own health and his own daily condition.  Perhaps he is frustrated and perhaps he hates the conductor.  I can understand that.  So how can you have perfection?  You are very happy to feel that all is ensemble in feeling with you.  The baton makes no sound and can’t produce a tone.  The music comes from the flute and the oboe and the trumpet and the horn and the strings and so on.

BD:    You talk about the conductor and the soloists and the orchestra.  Does the audience have all of these problems and expectations also?

GW:    Not so much.  When I begin to conduct, I forget absolutely what’s behind me.  It’s true.  Surely, if anybody coughs loudly I hear it, but I forget it.  I am of that ilk.  I forget everything except the music.

BD:    Do you have any expectations of the audience? 

GW:    That they are quiet; that is all.  That they listen also with their heart, not only with their ears.  I can feel it when it is absolutely quiet.  It’s fantastic in the proms in London.  Seven or eight thousand people.  I made there the Fifth Bruckner, the Eighth Bruckner, the Fourth Bruckner and Brahms, and you hear nothing!  You think there’s nobody there!  It’s fantastic.  It’s really fantastic.  It’s absolutely quiet.  Young people, old people, sitting people, standing room only, but it’s absolutely quiet.  It is similar in the NHK Hall in Tokyo with four thousand people.  It’s absolutely quiet.  I feel that I have taken the audience only for the music.

BD:    Can there ever be too much concentration on the music?

GW:    Not at all.

BD:    Let me ask a balance question.  In the concert music that you conduct, where is the balance between the artistic achievement and an entertainment value?

GW:    It belongs from the music that I do, but I think a Mozart serenade, like the Posthorn Serenade or the Haffner Serenade is also great music.  It is written for entertainment, but it is eternal music.  It’s Mozart!  You like a little flower from the meadow and you like a great big tree, but they both are creations of God.  You can serve God very seriously, and perhaps also when you are happy.  A Mozart serenade is entertainment music and also eternal music because it is so right and divine.  In my earlier years, I began with twenty years as a professional conductor in the opera house.  I conducted many operettas of Strauss and Lehar and I always tried to do them with all my professional knowledge and also with my musician

ou have the same music like from 1910.  There, Schoenberg is atonal, not dodecaphonic, not twelve-tone.  The atonal Schoenberg before becoming a dodecaphonist is the best!

BD:    Do you do any twelve-tone pieces at all?

GW:    Ja, other Schoenberg works like the Klavierkonzert, the Piano Concerto is twelve-tone music, also Lichtspielszene, Music for a Movie Scene, as well as the Variations for Orchestra.  It’s absolutely twelve-tone music, and it is so like in a straightjacket.  I feel it so.  The young Schoenberg, the atonal Schoenberg, is absolutely free, a genius thinking very much to the future!  It’s fantastic!  I made a Nonesuch record of this

Günter Wand Volatile conductor who specialised in Bruckner John Drummond, The Guardian, Friday 15 February 2002 20.46 EST    [Text Only] The German conductor Günter Wand, who has died aged 90, was a latecomer to the music scene in Britain, but in the past two decades he established himself as one of the great interpreters of the 19th-century tradition, impressing most especially in his interpretations of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. Though Wand made his British debut as long ago as 1951, it was only on his appointment as chief guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s that his visits became a regular feature of the London concert season, and were eagerly awaited and highly praised. Yet this late stage told only part of the story. Born in Elberfeld, he initially studied piano and composition at the Musik Hochschule in Cologne, a city he was to be associated with for much of his career. Beginning as a repetiteur, his early conducting engagements were in Wuppertal and Detmold, until, in 1939, he became a staff conductor at the Cologne Opera, where he worked until it was bombed in 1944. He moved for a year to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, but when the Cologne Opera reopened in 1945, he was appointed music director. In 1946 he became conductor of the Gurzenich Orchestra, the concert-giving element of the Cologne Opera Orchestra, and continued in this role until 1974. During this time he was much associated with the new music of Varèse, Messiaen, Zimmermann and Ligeti, something which no doubt will come as a surprise to his British fans, who only heard him in a much more traditional repertoire. In this he resembled Otto Klemperer, who had also turned away from the contemporary in his later years. But even after Wand moved to Hamburg in 1981 as conductor of the Nord Deutsche Rundfunk Orchestra, he maintained a much wider range of works in his programmes than he ever offered in Britain. In addition to recordings made with orchestras in Cologne and Hamburg, he recorded commercially with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His association with the BBC was the result of the then controller of music, Robert Ponsonby, checking out the new appointment in Hamburg. The orchestra, under their principal conductor Klaus Tennstedt, had been invited by me to the Edinburgh festival. When Tennstedt suddenly resigned, the management of the orchestra asked for a few weeks' grace to sort the situation out. After they appointed Wand, I felt unable to maintain the invitation since he was so completely unknown here. Ponsonby took the trouble to go to Hamburg to hear him, and the eventual result was the invitation to the BBC and many outstanding concerts. On succeeding Ponsonby, I, as it were, inherited Wand, whom I had still not met, though I had heard him and been much impressed. At our first meeting he insisted he would only perform Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Bruckner (though he did on one occasion conduct Stravinsky's Firebird Suite). I did not find this a problem, since his interpretations of the composers he wanted to concentrate on were both memorable and authoritative. He insisted on a minimum of eight rehearsals for a standard programme, a luxury that only a broadcasting organisation could afford to offer. His rehearsals were meticulous and much appreciated by the orchestra, who respected him as part of a vanishing tradition. He demanded the highest standards of players and their total concentration, finding it hard to cope with any absences, especially of players he came to know and like, notably the co-leader Bela Dekany. But with the passing of time, the problems became more worrying. He became extremely reluctant to commit to programmes in advance, and tended to want to change at the last moment. This usually meant the substitution of whatever he had agreed by one of his favourite Bruckner symphonies. In 1995, he refused at the very last moment to conduct a Prom programme of Mozart and Tchaikovsky and insisted on Bruckner's Eighth, the fourth time he had conducted it in five years. His rehearsals became more irascible, and usually included at least one walk-out with threats never to return. His English was limited, and after the retirement of Bill Relton, the manager, and Dekany, there was no one in the management who spoke good German. This led to misunderstandings and, coupled with increasingly poor health, to frequent cancellations. On one occasion, he cancelled a Prom after the first day's rehearsal, the more galling since he had appeared earlier that week in Edinburgh with his German orchestra. Though he spoke often of his veneration for Furtwängler, in many ways his behaviour reminded one of Klemperer, outspoken in his contempt for his colleagues, notably those such as Dohnányi or Pritchard who had followed him at the Cologne Opera. He was capable of great kindness and considerable charm, but also of appalling bursts of irrational rage, directed most often at his long-suffering wife. Like Klemperer, he chose to live in London in the Hyde Park Hotel and, since he always ate in the restaurant and liked very expensive wines, complained regularly that his hotel bill was more than his conducting fee. Despite the challenge of his unpredictable temperament, few conductors of our time have come closer to a deep understanding of either Schubert or Bruckner. Putting up with the insults was almost always worth it in the end. · Günter Wand, conductor, born January 7 1912; died February 14 2002.

This interview was recorded at his hotel in Chicago on January 23, 1989.  Portions were used (with recordings) on WNIB later that year, and again in 1997.  This transcription was made and posted on this website early in 2013.

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.