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.
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