Episode Details

In January 2014, thousands stood in silence outside La Scala while Daniel Barenboim conducted Beethoven's funeral march to an empty hall, mourning Claudio Abbado. Born in Milan in 1933 into a musical family, Abbado grew up under Nazi occupation, where his mother was imprisoned for harboring a Jewish child and his own Viva Bartok graffiti at age eleven triggered a Gestapo hunt. This episode traces how those early encounters with totalitarianism shaped his rejection of the dictatorial podium style he saw in Toscanini.

We follow Abbado from Leonard Bernstein telling him at fifteen that he had the eye of a conductor, to his Vienna years secretly watching Karajan rehearse alongside Zubin Mehta, his Koussevitzky competition win, and his return to La Scala as music director in 1972. We cover his cheap performances for factory workers and students, his election to the Berlin Philharmonic in 1989 succeeding Karajan, his stomach cancer diagnosis in 2000, his frail but electric Mahler Sixth return in 2004, and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra he built from friends in 2003.

• Why he wanted a symphony orchestra to play like a string quartet, communicating through eye contact
• How he replaced Karajan's wall of sound with transparency where individual instruments could be heard
• The youth orchestras he founded that grew into the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Mahler Chamber Orchestra
• Why he never completed a Mahler cycle with a single orchestra
• His death in January 2014 at 80 and burial in a chapel cemetery high in the Swiss Alps