Claudio Abbado, 1933–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

The conductor Claudio Abbado was famously punctilious with all of the great orchestras that came under his baton. When he worked as principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the early 1980s, his incessant criticism during rehearsals that the musicians weren’t together inspired the musicians to wear T-shirts emblazoned with his Italian-inflected admonition: “Noddagedda.”

Abbado was no less demanding of himself, said The New York Times. “He almost always conducted from memory, insisting that using the score meant that he did not know the work adequately.” Born into a Milan musical dynasty, he was encouraged to pursue conducting when Leonard Bernstein remarked that the teenage Abbado had “a conductor’s eyes.” After debuting at Milan’s La Scala, in 1963 he won a one-year assistantship with Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, and when he returned to Europe, “his career took off.” He was named director of La Scala and later of the Vienna State Opera, and was also principal conductor, in turn, of the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony.

In the 1980s, Abbado was in the running to direct both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Instead, he was selected in 1989 to replace Herbert von Karajan as the head of the Berlin Philharmonic, which was then “probably the top job in music,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Yet he “remained the opposite of the dictatorial bighead that top-flight maestros are supposed to be,” achieving his signature sound for his beloved Mahler, Schubert, and Bruckner by quietly insisting on excellence.