Thomas Schippers

Among American conductors, few matched the exceptional gifts of Thomas Schippers, whose advocacy for Samuel Barber’s music proved especially devoted. Early signs of his talent appeared when he gave a public piano recital at six and assumed duties as a church organist at fourteen. Piano training followed at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia from 1944 to 1945, after which he worked privately with Olga Samaroff between 1946 and 1947. He later attended Yale University, receiving composition lessons from Paul Hindemith.

In 1948 he earned second prize in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s young conductor’s contest. He soon took the post of organist at the Greenwich Village Presbyterian Church in New York and helped found the Lemonade Opera Company, a collective of young musicians that he led for several seasons. Shortly after Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera The Consul opened on Broadway in 1950, Schippers began conducting performances, an engagement that forged lasting ties with both Menotti and his housemate Samuel Barber. Those connections led him to direct the premiere of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera written expressly for television, which NBC broadcast on December 24, 1951.

On April 9, 1952, he conducted Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief at the New York City Opera, remaining on its roster through 1954. That same year he made his debuts with the New York Philharmonic, La Scala in Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera. When Menotti launched the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, he appointed Schippers music director. Frequent guest appearances with the New York Philharmonic followed, yielding several landmark recordings of Barber’s works. During the orchestra’s landmark 1959 tour of the Soviet Union under Leonard Bernstein, Schippers served as alternate conductor. On March 4, 1960, he was leading a performance at the Metropolitan Opera when baritone Leonard Warren collapsed and died onstage.

Schippers conducted the world premiere of Manuel de Falla’s cantata Atlantida in 1962 and made his Bayreuth Festival debut in 1964. The Metropolitan Opera regularly entrusted him with contemporary scores, among them the world premiere of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated the company’s new Lincoln Center house. In 1970 he became music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, one of the rare American-born musicians to hold that position with a major ensemble. Two years later he joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

His wife succumbed to cancer in 1973. Schippers himself developed lung cancer and could not open the Cincinnati Orchestra’s 1977 season; the management named him conductor laureate. He died before the year ended, leaving the orchestra a five-million-dollar bequest.