Buoyed by Brahms

By Zubin Mehta; As told to Barbara Isenberg

Without question, the major turning point in my life was in 1954, the first time I heard Karl Bohm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I went into what I think is the finest concert hall in the world, the Musikverein of Vienna, and heard one of the great orchestras play Brahms. I didn't know such a sound existed.

It was my first concert. All I had heard before this point in my native Bombay was our local, semiprofessional orchestra or records, and records in the early 1950s didn't have the sound we are used to today.

My principal inspiration was my father, who founded our Bombay Symphony and was its concertmaster. He taught violin and played quartets in our house. When he left us for four years during the '40s to study with the great violin teacher Ivan Galamian in New York City, there was less music at home. I played piano, and I listened to recorded music incessantly, every free moment I had. By the time he came back, I knew at least by ear most of the major works of the symphonic repertoire.

My father had built a little cupboard for our records, and every night after dinner I would pick another symphony or tone poem to listen to. I would sit on the sofa in the living room and sometimes get up and conduct in my own way. I never had a baton. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was conducting. I had wanted to be a conductor since I started helping my father with his orchestra. When he was preparing at home for rehearsals, I would conduct and he would play the violin part.

The records were our only means of connection with this world that we couldn't experience live. The advantage in those days was that the records we had were conducted by Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Leopold Stokowski and Sir Thomas Beecham. So although the sound was quite primitive, the tempos were right. These were interpretations that I have carried with me ever since. And I must tell you, in those days I thought it was a good sound--until I went to Vienna.

I went there to study at the Academy of Music, and that Brahms concert was on one of my first days there. After I enrolled in school, I started going to rehearsals of the Vienna Philharmonic. I learned by looking at the great conductors firsthand and by studying at the academy with one of the great teachers of the 20th century, Hans Swarowsky. The Vienna Philharmonic opened my ears and Swarowsky opened my mind to the treasures of the Viennese classics. To this day, the huge musical arc that starts with Haydn and goes to Webern constitutes 80% of my repertoire.

A highlight for me, when I was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was my first concert with the orchestra in Bombay, in 1967, when I went back home for the first time. It had been 13 years. After the rambunctious welcome, I went alone for a walk on the streets where I grew up, and I felt as if I had never left. --As told to Barbara Isenberg