Willem Mengelberg - Biography

Biography

Mengelberg was the fourth of fifteen children of German-born parents in Utrecht, Netherlands. His father was the well-known Dutch-German sculptor Friedrich Wilhelm Mengelberg. After studies in Utrecht with the composer and conductor Richard Hol, the composer Anton Averkamp (1861–1934) and the violinist Henri Wilhelm Petri (1856–1914), he went on to study piano and composition at the Cologne conservatory (now the Hochschule für Musik Köln), where his principal teachers were Franz Wüllner, Isidor Seiss and Adolf Jensen.

In 1891, when he was 20, he was chosen as General Music Director of the city of Lucerne Switzerland, where he conducted an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school, taught piano lessons and continued to compose.

Four years later, in 1895, when he was 24, Mengelberg was appointed principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a position he held until 1945.

In this position, Mengelberg was to premiere a number of masterpieces. For example, in 1898, Richard Strauss dedicated his tone poem Ein Heldenleben to Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, telling journalists that he "had at last found an orchestra capable of playing all passages, so that he no longer needed to feel embarrassed when writing difficulties." Among other notable premieres were those on March 29, 1939, when Mengelberg conducted the premiere of the Violin Concerto no. 2 by Béla Bartók with violinist Zoltán Székely, and on November 23, 1939, he would premiere the Peacock Variations of Zoltán Kodály.

Mengelberg founded the long-standing Mahler tradition of the Concertgebouw. He met and befriended Gustav Mahler in 1902, and invited Mahler to conduct his Third Symphony in Amsterdam in 1903; and on October, 23, 1904, Mahler led the orchestra in his Fourth Symphony twice in one concert, with no other work on the program. Mahler wrote to his wife Alma Mahler that this programming idea (presumably Mengelberg's) was a "stroke of genius." Mahler regularly visited The Netherlands to introduce his work to Dutch audiences, including also his First, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies, as well as Das Klagende Lied and Kindertotenlieder. Mahler edited some of his symphonies while rehearsing them with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, making them sound better for the acoustics of the Concertgebouw. This is perhaps one reason that this concert hall and its orchestra is renowned for its Mahler tradition. In 1920, Mengelberg instituted a Mahler Festival in which all the composer's music was performed in nine concerts

Mengelberg also founded, in 1899, the annual Concertgebouw tradition of performing the St. Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach on Palm Sunday.

One criticism of Mengelberg's influence over Dutch musical life, most clearly articulated by the composer Willem Pijper, was that Mengelberg did not particularly champion Dutch composers during his Concertgebouw tenure, especially after 1920.

Mengelberg was music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1928. Beginning in January 1926, he shared the podium with Arturo Toscanini; Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs has documented that Mengelberg and Toscanini clashed over interpretations of music and even rehearsal techniques, creating division among the musicians that eventually resulted in Mengelberg leaving the orchestra. However, the maestro did make a series of recordings with the Philharmonic for both the Victor Talking Machine Company and Brunswick Records, including a 1928 electrical recording of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben that was later reissued on LP and CD. One of his first electrical recordings, for Victor, was a two-disc set devoted to A Victory Ball by Ernest Schelling.

The most controversial aspect of Mengelberg's biography centers around his actions and behavior during the years of the Nazi occupation of Holland between 1940 and 1945. Some newspaper articles of the time gave the appearance that he acquiesced to the presence of the Nazi's ideological restrictions on particular composers. Explanations have ranged from political naiveté in general, to a general "blind spot" of criticism of anything German, given his own ancestry. Because of Mengelberg's co-operation with the occupying regime in The Netherlands during World War II, he was banned from conducting in the country by the Dutch government after the war in 1945. He was stripped of his honours and his passport. The original judgment was that Mengelberg would be banned from conducting in the Netherlands for the remainder of his life. Appeals by his attorneys led to a reduction in the sentence to a banning of six years from conducting, retroactively applied to start from 1945. This notwithstanding, he continued to draw a pension from the orchestra until 1949 when cut off by the city council of Amsterdam. Mengelberg retreated in exile to Zuort, Sent, Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1951, just two months before the expiration of his exile order.

Willem Mengelberg was the uncle of the musicologist and composer Rudolf Mengelberg and of the conductor, composer and critic Karel Mengelberg, who was himself the father of the improvising pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg.