“A coda is a musical element at the end of a composition that brings the work to its conclusion. It can vary enormously in its length. The coda of my life has been generous and rich. Life is precious.” This is how he said goodbye, hereinafter MTT, in February 2025, after announcing the return of the brain tumor that had been diagnosed in August 2021.
Fourteen months later, this Thursday the 23rd, that coda has been closed at his home in San Francisco. He was 81 years old. Just two months earlier, Joshua Robison, her husband and manager for almost half a century, had died. With his disappearance, the last great American director-pedagogue, direct heir to a model—that of Leonard Bernstein—that articulated podium, composition, television dissemination and civic vocation, and that will hardly be reproduced again, becomes extinct.
MTT was born in Los Angeles, in December 1944, and his founding legend was written in October 1969. That fall, recently awarded the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood and barely 24 years old, he made his debut in Boston as William Steinberg’s assistant conducting the Boston Symphony. Halfway through the concert, Steinberg felt unwell and the young concertgoer had to take the podium without prior rehearsal. Critics praised him the next day and that episode—one of the great “public births” of a director in the 20th century—inaugurated a career that would no longer see setbacks.
But the genealogy began much earlier, and not on the podium, but on the stage. MTT was the grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, founders and patron figures of the New York Yiddish theater of the Lower East Side in the first half of the 20th century. This heritage explains a good part of its artistic physiognomy: the primacy of the scenic, programming conceived as dramaturgy and the conviction that cultured music should dialogue with popular music without apologizing.
Trained at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, in his youth in Los Angeles he worked as a pianist in the Monday Evening Concertsan environment in which he came into direct contact with the avant-garde—Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen—and with central figures of the American tradition such as Aaron Copland; a first-hand heritage of modernity that very few American directors of his generation were able to exhibit.
In 1971 the symbolic relief took place: the New York Philharmonic entrusted him with the Young People’s Concerts which Leonard Bernstein had created and abandoned two years earlier. Continuity was much more than a television assignment. MTT became, almost in spite of itself, the legitimate successor of the Bernsteinian model, and assumed it with full awareness. Those years of learning were divided between ownership of the Buffalo Philharmonic (1971-1979) and a first decisive European commitment: the London Symphony, of which he was principal between 1988 and 1995, where he signed his first major recordings with CBS/Sony – Mahler, Stravinsky, Berlioz – and where he later maintained, until his death, the title of conductor laureate.
They were also the years of his most far-reaching pedagogical project. In 1987, together with philanthropists Ted Arison and Lin Arison, he founded the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami Beach, conceived to train young musicians in the transition between the conservatory and the professional orchestra. The inauguration in 2011 of the new building designed by him—an acoustic and audiovisual laboratory with no equivalent at the time—consolidated that institution as the most unique and lasting commitment of his career.
The big chapter would come in 1995, when he assumed the musical direction of the San Francisco Symphony. The twenty-five years at the helm of the Californian orchestra—until 2020, when he became conductor laureate—completely transformed its sound and international projection. Under his command, the SFS became one of the great orchestras in the country, gained strength in Mahler, Ives, Copland, Adams and Reich, and launched SFS Media in 2001, its own label created just when the classical recording industry began to collapse: a visionary decision that allowed it to document live, among other projects, its Mahlerian integral.
Completed throughout the first decade of the century, that comprehensive is probably his greatest recording legacy. More analytical than Bernstein’s, less confessional, more translucent in textures and more contained in rhetoric, he proposed an alternative and deeply personal American Mahler. The series, broadcast on PBS between 2004 and 2009 and dedicated to unraveling the great works of the repertoire for the general public, completed Bernstein’s double project of dissemination and registration in those same years.
To all this we must add two dimensions that European critics systematically undervalued. The first, his activism for American music of the 20th century: the complete symphonic of Charles Ives, the premiere of The Desert Music of Steve Reich, his constant devotion to Copland or his sustained work with living composers. The second, his own work as a composer, signed with that unfolding so characteristic of the great American musicians: From the Diary of Anne Frank, Showa/Shoah —written for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—, Meditations on Rilke o Urban Legend. Twelve Grammy Awards throughout his career reflect recognition that he never lacked in his country.
He faced the illness with a rare transparency. He made the diagnosis public in August 2021 and, instead of retiring, he reduced his schedule and continued conducting where he felt indispensable: the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His last concert took place on April 26, 2025, in San Francisco, in a belated celebration of his 80th birthday. Robison’s death on February 22, after almost fifty years of life together, left a silence that the disease ended up sealing. In his farewell letter he asked not to mourn the end, but to celebrate what he himself called, with an elegance that sums up his character, a “generous coda.”
