William Steinberg

William Steinberg (Hans Wilhelm Steinberg) was a conductor of German birth, born in Cologne on 1 August 1899 and dying in New York on 16 May 1978. His career spanned interwar Europe, the exile of the 1930s and a long career in the United States, where he came to lead some of the country's leading orchestras.

Childhood and training

Steinberg showed musical gifts from an early age. He composed, played the piano and the violin, and at thirteen conducted a work of his own for chorus and orchestra setting passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. He studied conducting with Hermann Abendroth at the Cologne Conservatory, a foundation that would shape his whole career on the podium.

First posts in Germany and Czechoslovakia

His first significant professional step was the Cologne Opera, where he worked as assistant to Otto Klemperer and, from 1924, as principal conductor. A year later he took a post in Prague. In 1929 he moved to Frankfurt as music director, and there he conducted the premières of Schoenberg's Von heute auf morgen and Antheil's Transatlantic, as well as an early performance of Weill's Mahagonny. He also conducted regularly at the Berlin Staatsoper.

The rise of the Nazis and exile

With Hitler's accession to power, his activities were confined to concerts for the Jewish Culture League in Frankfurt and Berlin. He emigrated in 1936 and, together with Bronisław Huberman, co-founded the Palestine Orchestra, later known as the Israel Philharmonic. After the inaugural concert, conducted by Toscanini, Steinberg became its first conductor.

The United States: NBC, Buffalo and Pittsburgh

At Toscanini's invitation he went to America in 1938 as associate conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and he appeared as a guest with many other orchestras and at the San Francisco Opera between 1944 and 1948. From 1945 to 1953 he was music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and from 1952 to 1976 of the Pittsburgh Symphony, a post he combined with others: the London Philharmonic (1958-1960), the New York Philharmonic as senior guest conductor (1966-1968) and, finally, the Boston Symphony (1969-1972), where he succeeded Leinsdorf.

Final years

By the time he reached Boston, his health and strength were already diminished. In his seventies he curtailed his activity, and his always economical gestures became minimal.

Character and style

Steinberg was a cultivated man of exceptionally private temperament. He embodied the integrity and selflessness of Toscanini and Klemperer, the two conductors who most influenced his career. In his best years his baton technique was hard to surpass for cleanness and clarity. Until the late 1960s, however, he disfigured with cuts some of the music of Bruckner, Mahler and Elgar, composers for whom he felt the deepest sympathy; that he thoroughly reconsidered such a practice relatively late in his career is very telling. When young he was receptive to new music, though later his performances of modern works rarely went beyond dutiful note-reading. He excelled in Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner and Elgar, and in Strauss, whose music he approached with an elegantly understated manner that few could match. His Boston performances of Verdi's Requiem, given on the centenary of Manzoni's death, were not fiery, but were among the most honest and moving since Toscanini's.

Legacy

Steinberg left the image of a solid, clear-minded conductor of rare artistic integrity, formed in the tradition of Toscanini and Klemperer and faithful to a German and Romantic repertoire that he defended with rigour.