Zubin Mehta

Zubin Mehta ranks among the foremost conductors active in the closing decades of the twentieth century, distinguished by a vivid and ardent manner of leadership at the podium. For extended periods he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Israel Philharmonic, appearing with ensembles across the globe while endeavoring to harness classical music as an instrument of reconciliation in regions marked by strife.

Born in Bombay, now Mumbai, on April 29, 1936, under British rule in India, Mehta grew up speaking Gujarati within a Parsi household. His father, Mehli Mehta, a violinist and conductor who helped establish the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, instructed him in violin, piano, and conducting from an early age; by his early teens Zubin was already overseeing sectional rehearsals for that ensemble and assumed full-orchestra duties at sixteen. Although his mother urged medical studies and he entered St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, for that purpose, he withdrew after two years and relocated to Vienna. There he subsisted modestly while studying conducting with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music and acquiring double-bass proficiency to secure orchestral employment. A competition victory yielded a one-year post as assistant conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which in turn opened guest engagements with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. These opportunities led, in 1960 and 1962 respectively, to music directorships with the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Charles Munch, impressed by Mehta at the Tanglewood Music Festival, supported the Montreal appointment. Although the model of a jet-setting conductor holding distant posts has since become familiar, Mehta was among its earliest exemplars and elevated the Los Angeles Philharmonic to major-orchestra stature.

He stepped down from Montreal in 1967 and began a sustained relationship with the Israel Philharmonic that lasted until 2017. One of his initial recordings was a 1973 RCA account of Puccini’s Tosca featuring soprano Leontyne Price. Departing Los Angeles in 1978, he succeeded Pierre Boulez as music director of the New York Philharmonic, remaining until 1991. He also assumed leadership of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, immersing himself in Florence’s musical life and eventually receiving honorary citizenship there. His inclination to engage deeply with an orchestra’s locale was especially evident in his Israel Philharmonic work, which encompassed performances during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon—where he conducted for both Israeli and Arab audiences, the latter responding with particular warmth—and the 1991 Gulf War.

By leading the globally televised Three Tenors concerts with Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, Mehta attained broad public visibility for a larger-than-life style ideally matched to those events. After leaving New York he became music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1998, serving until 2006, and took the same post at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, beginning in 2005. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s he presided over singular large-scale projects, including a 1992 real-time performance of Puccini’s Tosca, with Domingo as Cavaradossi, at the actual locations indicated in the score, and a 1998 production of Puccini’s Turandot in China, directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou and employing three hundred soldiers together with three hundred extras.

His discography, one of the largest compiled by any modern conductor, exceeds two hundred albums and centers on Romantic orchestral literature from the latter half of the nineteenth century while embracing an unexpected range that stretches from early American composer John Knowles Paine through Schoenberg, opera, and film scores—among them his 1971 Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels—to Vienna’s Summer Night and New Year’s concerts. Contemporary music appears infrequently in his catalog. Mehta sustained an active career well into advanced age, issuing a new recording of Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung, Hob. 21/2, with the Munich Philharmonic in 2021 at eighty-five, leading the Australian World Orchestra in Melbourne and Sydney concerts in 2022, and releasing further albums in 2024, among them performances of works by Bruckner and Schumann featuring pianist Martha Argerich in Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54, with the Vienna Philharmonic. By then his total recordings approached three hundred.