Pierre Monteux

Monteux during his conductorship of Les Ballets Russes, c. 1912

Pierre Benjamin Monteux (pronounced [pjɛʁ mɔ̃.tø]; 4 April 1875 – 1 July 1964) was a French (later American) conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1907. He came to prominence when, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company between 1911 and 1914, he conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and other prominent works including Petrushka, The Nightingale, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, and Debussy's Jeux. Thereafter he directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century.

From 1917 to 1919 Monteux was the principal conductor of the French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1919–24), Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (1924–34), Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (1929–38) and San Francisco Symphony (1936–52). In 1961, aged eighty-six, he accepted the chief conductorship of the London Symphony Orchestra, a post which he held until his death three years later. Although he was known for his performances of the French repertoire, his chief love was the music of German composers, above all Brahms. He disliked recording, finding it incompatible with spontaneity, but he nevertheless made a substantial number of records.

Monteux was well known as a teacher. In 1932 he began a conducting class in Paris, which he developed into a summer school that was later moved to his summer home in Les Baux in the south of France. After moving permanently to the US in 1942 and taking American citizenship, he founded a school for conductors and orchestral musicians in Hancock, Maine. Among his students in France and America who went on to international fame were Lorin Maazel, Igor Markevitch, Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn and David Zinman. The school in Hancock has continued since Monteux's death.

Life and career

Early years

Pierre Monteux was born in Paris, the third son and the fifth of six children of Gustave Élie Monteux, a shoe salesman, and his wife, Clémence Rebecca née Brisac. The Monteux family was descended from Sephardic Jews who settled in the south of France. The Monteux ancestors included at least one rabbi, but Gustave Monteux and his family were not religious. Among Monteux's brothers were Henri, who became an actor, and Paul (1862-1928), who became a conductor of light music under the name Paul Monteux-Brisac. Gustave Monteux was not musical, but his wife was a graduate of the Conservatoire de Musique de Marseille and gave piano lessons. Pierre took violin lessons from the age of six.

The building which housed the Paris Conservatoire in Monteux's student days (21st century photograph)

When he was nine years old Monteux was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris. He studied the violin with Jules Garcin and Henri Berthelier, composition with Charles Lenepveu, and harmony and theory with Albert Lavignac. His fellow violin students included George Enescu, Carl Flesch, Fritz Kreisler and Jacques Thibaud. Among the piano students at the Conservatoire was Alfred Cortot, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship. At the age of twelve, Monteux organised and conducted a small orchestra of Conservatoire students to accompany Cortot in performances of concertos in and around Paris. He attended the world premiere of César Franck's Symphony in February 1889. From 1889 to 1892, while still a student, he played in the orchestra of the Folies Bergère; he later said to George Gershwin that his rhythmic sense was formed during the experience of playing popular dance music there.

Monteux as viola player in quartets (2nd from right), with Johannes Wolff, Joseph Hollmann and André Dulaurons, and with Gustave Lyon (Administrateur Délégué of Pleyel) at the rear and Edvard Grieg in front, Salle Pleyel, April 1903.

At the age of fifteen, while continuing his violin studies, Monteux took up the viola. He studied privately with Benjamin Godard, with whom he performed in the premiere of Saint-Saëns's Septet, with the composer at the keyboard. Monteux joined the Geloso Quartet as violist; he played many concerts with them, including a performance of Fauré's Second Piano Quartet with the composer at the piano. On another occasion he was the violist in a private performance of a Brahms quartet given before the composer in Vienna. Monteux recalled Brahms's remark, "It takes the French to play my music properly. The Germans all play it much too heavily." Monteux remained a member of the Geloso Quartet until 1911. With Johannes Wolff and Joseph Hollman he also played chamber music for Grieg. Years later, in his seventies, Monteux deputised with the Budapest Quartet without rehearsal or score; asked by Erik Smith if he could write out the parts of the seventeen Beethoven quartets, he replied, "You know, I cannot forget them."

In 1893, when he was eighteen, Monteux married a fellow student, the pianist Victoria Barrière. With her he played the complete Beethoven violin sonatas in public. Neither family approved of the marriage; although the Monteux family were not religious, both they and the Roman Catholic Barrières were doubtful about an inter-religious marriage; furthermore, both families thought the couple too young to marry. There were a son and a daughter from the union.

During his formative years Monteux belonged to a group which toured with the Casadesus family of musicians and the pianist Alfredo Casella. The combination played supposed "ancient pieces", allegedly discovered in libraries by one or other of the Casadesus family; Marius Casadesus later revealed that he or his brother Henri had written the music. While still a student, in 1893 Monteux was successful in the competition for the chair of first viola of the Concerts Colonne, of which he became assistant conductor and choirmaster the following year. This gave him a link via the orchestra's founder, Édouard Colonne, to Berlioz. Colonne had known Berlioz, and through the older conductor Monteux was able to mark his scores with notes based on the composer's intentions. He was also employed on a freelance basis at the Opéra-Comique, where he continued to play from time to time for several years; he led the viola section at the 1902 premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande under the baton of André Messager. In 1896 he graduated from the Conservatoire, sharing first prize for violin with Thibaud.

First conducting posts

Saint-Saëns at the keyboard, with Monteux (right) on the rostrum, 1913

Monteux's first high-profile conducting experience came in 1895, when he was barely 20 years old. He was a member of the orchestra engaged for a performance of Saint-Saëns's oratorio La lyre et la harpe, to be conducted by the composer. At the last minute Saint-Saëns judged the player engaged for the important and difficult organ part to be inadequate and, as a celebrated virtuoso organist, decided to play it himself. He asked the orchestra if any of them could take over as conductor; there was a chorus of "Oui – Monteux!". With great trepidation, Monteux conducted the orchestra and soloists including the composer, sight-reading the score, and was judged a success.

Monteux's musical career was interrupted in 1896, when he was called up for military service. As a graduate of the Conservatoire, one of France's grandes écoles, he was required to serve only ten months rather than the three years generally required. He later described himself as "the most pitifully inadequate soldier that the 132nd Infantry had ever seen". He had inherited from his mother not only her musical talent but her short and portly build and was physically unsuited to soldiering.

Returning to Paris after discharge, Monteux resumed his career as a violist. Hans Richter invited him to lead the violas in the Bayreuth Festival orchestra, but Monteux could not afford to leave his regular work in Paris. In December 1900 Monteux played the solo viola part in Berlioz's Harold in Italy, rarely heard in Paris at the time, with the Colonne Orchestra conducted by Felix Mottl. In 1902 he secured a junior conducting post at the Dieppe casino, a seasonal appointment for the summer months which brought him into contact with leading musicians from the Paris orchestras and well-known soloists on vacation. By 1907 he was the principal conductor at Dieppe, in charge of operas and orchestral concerts. As an orchestral conductor he modelled his technique on that of Arthur Nikisch, under whose baton he had played, and who was his ideal conductor.

Ballets Russes

For some time, Monteux's marriage had been under strain, exacerbated by his wife's frequent absences on concert tours. The couple were divorced in 1909; Monteux married one of her former pupils, Germaine Benedictus, the following year.

Monteux continued to play in the Concerts Colonne through the first decade of the century. In 1910 Colonne died and was succeeded as principal conductor by Gabriel Pierné. As well as leading the violas, Monteux was assistant conductor, taking charge of early rehearsals and acting as chorus master for choral works. In 1910 the orchestra was engaged to play for a Paris season given by Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company, the Ballets Russes. Monteux played under Pierné in the world premiere of Stravinsky's The Firebird. In 1911 Diaghilev engaged Nikolai Tcherepnin to conduct the premiere of Stravinsky's Petrushka. Monteux conducted the preliminary rehearsals before Tcherepnin arrived; Stravinsky was so impressed that he insisted that Monteux conduct the premiere.

Stravinsky (l) with Nijinsky as Petrushka, 1911

Petrushka was part of a triple bill, all conducted by Monteux. The other two pieces were Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade, a balletic adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite of the same name. The three works were choreographed by Fokine. In later years Monteux disapproved of the appropriation of symphonic music for ballets, but he made an exception for Scheherazade, and, as his biographer John Canarina observes, at that stage in his career his views on the matter carried little weight. Petrushka was a success with the public and with all but the most diehard conservative critics.

Following the Paris season Diaghilev appointed Monteux principal conductor for a tour of Europe in late 1911 and early 1912. It began with a five-week season at the Royal Opera House in London. The press notices concentrated on the dancers, who included Anna Pavlova as well as the regular stars of the Ballets Russes, but Monteux received some words of praise. The Times commented on the excellent unanimity he secured from the players, apart from "occasional uncertainty in the changes of tempo."

After its season in London the company performed in Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Berlin. The tour was successful, artistically and financially, but was not without untoward incident. A planned visit to St Petersburg had to be cancelled because the Narodny Dom theatre burned down, and in Vienna the Philharmonic was unequal to the difficulties of the score of Petrushka. The illustrious orchestra revolted at the rehearsal for the first performance, refusing to play for Monteux; only an intervention by Diaghilev restored the rehearsal, by the end of which Monteux was applauded and Stravinsky given an ovation. In the middle of the tour Monteux was briefly summoned back to Paris by the Concerts Colonne, which had the contractual right to recall him, to deputise for Pierné; his own deputy, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, took temporary musical charge of the Ballets Russes.

In May 1912 Diaghilev's company returned to Paris. Monteux was the conductor for the two outstanding works of the season, Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet version of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, made with the composer's approval, and Fokine's Daphnis et Chloé to a score commissioned from Ravel. Monteux later recalled "Debussy was behind me when we played L'après midi d'un faune because he did not want anything in his score to be changed on account of the dancing. And when we came to a forte, he said 'Monteux, that is a forte, play forte'. He did not want anything shimmering. And he wanted everything exactly in time".

In February and March 1913 the Ballets Russes presented another London season. As in 1911, the local orchestra engaged was the Beecham Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra's founder, Thomas Beecham, shared the conducting with Monteux. At the end of February Beecham had to take over Petrushka when Monteux suddenly hastened to Paris for four days to be with his wife on the birth of their daughter, Denise.

The Rite of Spring

During the 1913 Ballets Russes season in Paris, Monteux conducted two more premieres. The first was Jeux, with music by Debussy and choreography by Nijinsky. The choreography was not liked; Monteux thought it "asinine", while Debussy felt that "Nijinsky's cruel and barbarous choreography ... trampled over my poor rhythms like so many weeds". The second new work was Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring given under the French title, Le sacre du printemps. Monteux had been appalled when Stravinsky first played the score at the piano:

I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian. ... My one desire was to flee that room and find a quiet corner in which to rest my aching head. Then [Diaghilev] turned to me and with a smile said, "This is a masterpiece, Monteux, which will completely revolutionize music and make you famous, because you are going to conduct it." And, of course, I did.

Despite his initial reaction, Monteux worked with Stravinsky, giving practical advice to help the composer to achieve the orchestral balance and effects he sought. Together they worked on the score from March to May 1913, and to get the orchestra of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to cope with the unfamiliar and difficult music Monteux held seventeen rehearsals, an unusually large number. Monteux's real attitude to the score is unclear. In his old age he told a biographer, "I did not like Le Sacre then. I have conducted it fifty times since. I do not like it now." However, he told his wife in 1963 that the Rite was "now fifty years old, and I do not think it has aged at all. I had pleasure in conducting the fiftieth anniversary of Le Sacre this spring".

Dancers in Nikolai Roerich's costumes for The Rite of Spring: "knock-kneed and long-haired Lolitas jumping up and down"

The dress rehearsal, with Debussy, Ravel, other musicians and critics among those present, passed without incident. However, the following evening the premiere provoked something approaching a riot, with loud verbal abuse of the work, counter-shouts from supporters, and fisticuffs breaking out. Monteux pressed on, continuing to conduct the orchestra regardless of the turmoil behind him. Stravinsky wrote "The image of Monteux's back is more vivid in my mind today than the picture of the stage. He stood there apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile. It is still incredible to me that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end." The extensive press coverage of the incident made Monteux "at age thirty-eight, truly a famous conductor". The company presented the Rite during its London season a few weeks later. The Times reported that although there was "something like a hostile reception" at the first London performance, the final performance in the season "was received with scarcely a sign of opposition". Before the 1913 London performances, Monteux challenged Diaghilev's authority by declaring that he, not the impresario, was the composer's representative in matters related to The Rite of Spring.

Monteux believed that most of the anger aroused by the work was due not to the music but to Nijinsky's choreography, described by Stravinsky as "knock-kneed and long-haired Lolitas jumping up and down". With the composer's agreement Monteux presented a concert performance in Paris in April 1914. Saint-Saëns, who was present, declared Stravinsky mad and left in a rage, but he was almost alone in his dislike. At the end Stravinsky was carried shoulder-high from the theatre after what he described as "the most beautiful performance that I have had of the Sacre du printemps". That performance was part of a series of "Concerts Monteux", presented between February and April 1914, in which Monteux conducted the orchestra of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in a wide range of symphonic and concertante works, including the concert premiere of the orchestral version of Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales. His last notable engagement before the outbreak of war was as conductor of the premiere of Stravinsky's opera The Nightingale at the Palais Garnier.

The Met and Boston

Singing under Monteux at the Met: clockwise from top l. Geraldine Farrar, Louise Homer, Giovanni Martinelli and Enrico Caruso

After the outbreak of the First World War Monteux was again conscripted into the army, serving as a private in the 35th Territorial Regiment, with which he saw action in the trenches at Verdun, Soissons and the Argonne. He later described much of this period as one of "filth and boredom", although he formed a scratch band to divert his fellow soldiers. After just over two years on active service he was released from military duties after Diaghilev prevailed on the French government to second Monteux to conduct the Ballets Russes on a North American tour. The tour took in fifty-four cities in the US and Canada. In New York in 1916 Monteux refused to conduct Nijinsky's new ballet Till Eulenspiegel as the music was by a German – Richard Strauss – so a conductor had to be engaged for those performances. At the end of the tour Monteux was offered a three-year contract to conduct the French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and received the permission of the French government to remain in the US.

At the Met (as the Metropolitan Opera is generally called), Monteux conducted familiar French works such as Faust, Carmen and Samson and Delilah, with singers including Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Louise Homer and Giovanni Martinelli. Of his first appearance, The New York Times said, "Mr. Monteux conducted with skill and authority. He made it evident that he had ample knowledge of the score and control of the orchestra – an unmistakably rhythmic beat, a sense of dramatic values." Monteux conducted the American premieres of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel, and Henri Rabaud's Mârouf, savetier du Caire. The American premiere of Petrushka, in a new production by, and starring, Adolph Bolm, was in an unusual opera-ballet double bill with La traviata. Monteux's performances were well received, but, though he later returned to the Met as a guest, opera did not loom large in his career. He said, "I love conducting opera. The only trouble is that I hate the atmosphere of the opera house, where only too often music is the least of many considerations, from staging to the temperaments of the principal singers." Nor was he drawn to further engagements as a ballet conductor: "it offers special problems of fitting in with the dances and the dancers, most of whom, I'm sorry to say, seem to have musical appreciation confined to an ability to count beats." Nonetheless he occasionally conducted ballet performances, and even in his concert performances of the ballet scores he had conducted for Diaghilev he said he always had the dancers in his mind's eye.

Germaine, Denise and Pierre Monteux, circa 1919

In 1919 Monteux was appointed chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was going through difficult times; its conductor, Karl Muck, had been forced by anti-German agitation to step down in 1917. Sir Henry Wood turned down the post, and despite press speculation neither Sergei Rachmaninoff nor Arturo Toscanini was appointed. At least twenty-four players of German heritage had been forced out with Muck, and orchestral morale was low. Shortly before Monteux took up the conductorship, the autocratic founder and proprietor of the orchestra, Henry Lee Higginson, died. He had steadfastly resisted unionisation, and after his death a substantial minority of the players resumed the struggle for union recognition. More than thirty players, including two important principals, resigned over the matter. Monteux set about rebuilding the orchestra, auditioning players from all kinds of musical background, some of whom had not played symphonic music before. By the end of his first season he had restored the orchestra to something approaching its normal complement. He trained the orchestra to a high standard; according to the critic Neville Cardus, Monteux's musicianship "made the Boston Symphony Orchestra the most refined and musical in the world."

Monteux regularly introduced new compositions in Boston, often works by American, English and French composers. He was proud of the number of novelties presented in his years at Boston, and expressed pleasure that his successors continued the practice. He was dismayed when it was announced that his contract would not be renewed after 1924. The official explanation was that the orchestra's policy had always been to appoint conductors for no more than five years. It is unclear whether that was genuinely the reason. One suggested possibility is that the conductor chosen to replace him, Serge Koussevitzky, was thought more charismatic, with greater box-office appeal. Another is that the primmer members of Boston society disapproved of Monteux's morals: he and his second wife had gradually drifted apart and by 1924 he was living with Doris Hodgkins, an American divorcée, and her two children. They were unable to marry until 1928, when Germaine Monteux finally agreed to a divorce.

Amsterdam and Paris

Willem Mengelberg, Monteux's colleague at the Concertgebouw

In 1924, Monteux began a ten-year association with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, serving as "first conductor" ("eerste dirigent") alongside Willem Mengelberg, its long-serving chief conductor. The two musicians liked and respected one another, despite the difference in their approach to music-making: Monteux was scrupulous in his adherence to a composer's score and straightforward in his performances, while Mengelberg was well known for his virtuoso, sometimes wilful, interpretations and his cavalier attitude to the score ("Ve vill make some changements", as an English player quoted him). Their preferred repertoire overlapped in some of the classics, but Mengelberg had his own favourites from Bach's St. Matthew Passion to Mahler symphonies, and was happy to leave Debussy and Stravinsky to Monteux. Where their choices coincided, as in Beethoven, Brahms and Richard Strauss, Mengelberg was generous in giving Monteux at least his fair share of them.

While in Amsterdam Monteux conducted a number of operas, including Pelléas et Mélisande (its Dutch premiere), Carmen, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, a Lully and Ravel double bill of Acis et Galatée and L'Heure espagnole, Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (also brought to the Paris Opéra) and Verdi's Falstaff. Toscanini had been invited to conduct the last of these, but he told the promoters that Monteux was his dearest colleague and the best conductor for Falstaff.

During the first eight years of his association with the Concertgebouw, Monteux conducted between fifty and sixty concerts each season. In his final two years with the orchestra other conductors, notably the rising young Dutchman Eduard van Beinum, were allocated concerts that would previously have been given to Monteux, who amicably withdrew from his position in Amsterdam in 1934. He returned many times as a guest conductor.

Salle Pleyel, base of the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris

In addition to his work with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, from 1929 Monteux conducted the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (OSP), founded the previous year. The orchestral scene in Paris in the 1920s had been adversely affected by the "deputy" system, whereby any contracted orchestral player was at liberty, if a better engagement became available, to send a deputy to a rehearsal or even to a concert. In most other major cities in Europe and America this practice either had never existed or had been eradicated. Alongside the opera orchestras, four other Paris orchestras were competing for players. In 1928 the arts patron the Princesse de Polignac combined with the fashion designer Coco Chanel to propose a new orchestra, well enough paid to keep its players from taking conflicting engagements. With financial backing assured, they appointed a triumvirate of musicians – Cortot, Ernest Ansermet and Louis Fourestier – to assemble the OSP. The following year Cortot invited Monteux to become the orchestra's artistic director and principal conductor. Ansermet, its initial musical director, was not pleased at being supplanted by a conductor of whom he was reportedly "ragingly jealous", but the composer