Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor and composer whose hundreds of symphonies were as mysterious as his pronouncements about them, died on Oct. 9 in Helsinki. He was 80.
His son Jan said he died in a hospital after a brief bout of pneumonia.
In a small country with a unique musical culture, Mr. Segerstam occupied a singular place: He was the “king of our country’s cultural industry,” the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote after his death. He himself said he was “the Jesus of music,” explaining, “In the world of music I have truths that are just as valuable as the teachings of Jesus.”
He led Finland’s principal orchestras as well as other major orchestras in Europe; he shaped his country’s world-leading crop of conductors; and he was an unequaled interpreter of its greatest musician, Jean Sibelius, bringing a composer’s creativity to his uncompromising, barren scores.
“The conductor was at the summit of the art of rubato” — the practice of expanding and contracting rhythm — “which made absolutely exquisite the slightest melodic curve,” Pierre Gervasoni of Le Monde wrote in a review of Mr. Segerstam’s 1998 Paris performance of Sibelius works with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. That was typical of the way critics reacted to Mr. Segerstam’s instinctive accounts of Sibelius.
“Music is in time, but you shouldn’t stop and find out, because then you lose the time, because time doesn’t exist,” Mr. Segerstam said, mysteriously, to the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 1997.
Mr. Segerstam “is an alarming person to interview,” James Jolly, the editor in chief of Gramophone magazine, wrote in 2002. “He doesn’t speak in sentences or even paragraphs: instead his ‘thoughts’ come streaming out in torrential pages.”
He also mystified his countrymen with an unstoppable flow of symphonies, 371 in all, Many of them have never been performed or published, but that total may well make him the all-time champion symphony writer.
“There is always more of it,” the Finnish National Broadcaster YLE said of him, “a mass among which the human ear tries, often in vain, to find harmonies or regularity.”
In the summer of 2014, for instance, he composed 14 symphonies. “My compositions are like sperm,” he once told a Finnish interviewer. “There must be a huge number of them in order for some to survive.”
Great blocks of shifting, unconducted sound, with no bar lines, little development and much left up to the musicians, the symphonies have whimsical titles like “More Dreamings by Sofia (a Dog),” No. 329, or “When a Cat Visited,” No. 289. “One should just follow the tracks made with the paws,” Mr. Segerstam explained, “and at the end enjoy the purring motor.” Symphony 319, “A Human Wonder,” was composed for the infant son of the Finnish president Sauli Niinisto and his wife, Jenni Haukio, who attended its first performance.
With his flowing white hair, his long Methuselah-like beard and his Santa Claus physique, his occasional screams during performance — “He had this concept of the primal scream,” his son Jan explained in an interview — and the tongue-lashings and insults to which he sometimes subjected students and players, Mr. Segerstam was “a personality who always somehow seemed larger than life itself,” the American conductor Robert Treviño, a former student, wrote in Gramophone after his death.
But there was no gainsaying the control he had over orchestras or the subtlety of his performances of Sibelius, with whom he felt an identification, having sung his songs as a boy. Like Sibelius, Mr. Segerstam was a Swedish-speaking Finn; his country had been under Swedish control for 500 years. The Sibelius scholar and critic Robert Layton called his 1996 recording of the early tone poem “Kullervo,” on which he achieved the quietest of pianissimos in the beginning, “refreshingly straightforward and agreeably free from expressive point-making.” His recording of the major tone poem “Tapiola” “is among the most impressive we have had since Karajan,” Mr. Layton wrote in 1996.
“He had an enormous sense of drama,” the conductor Hannu Lintu, a former student of Mr. Segerstam’s and one of his successors at the Finnish National Opera, said in an interview. “Sometimes bombastic. Big noise. Big gestures,” he said, adding, “From him we all learned that the sound is between the beats.”
In Sibelius, “the scores are not ready,” Mr. Lintu said. “You have to recompose them. He could do that.”
But Mr. Segerstam’s unpredictability made him an intimidating figure, Mr. Lintu recalled. “You never know what comes out when he opens his mouth.”
“I was afraid of him,” he said. “He could say weird, insulting things. I admired him but didn’t want to spend time with him.”
Mr. Lintu recalled that Mr. Segerstam “always had his pockets full of scores,” and Patrick Garvey, his agent, said that “in order to get him, orchestras had to play his symphonies.” He was, Mr. Garvey added, “a total genius” and “the trickiest of the customers.”
Leif Selim Segerstam was born on March 2, 1944, in Vaasa, Finland, while his country was at war with the Soviet Union, fighting alongside Nazi Germany. He was the son of Selim Segerstam, a high school music teacher who compiled a widely used book of songs for Swedish-speaking Finns, and Viola Maria Kronquvist, who had been born in the mining community of Coal Creek, Wash., to Finnish immigrants.
Young Leif was composing by the age of 6, and in 1953, at 9, he gained a spot playing violin in the Helsinki Youth Orchestra. Soon after he was taken to play for Sibelius at Ainola, his home, with other young musicians from the orchestra.
He received two diplomas from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, in violin in 1962 and conducting in 1963, the same year he won a Fulbright fellowship to attend the Juilliard School. He studied there alongside James Levine and Leonard Slatkin and received a conducting degree in 1965. When he returned to Finland that year, he was hired as a conductor at the Finnish National Opera; he became its music director in 1973, after occupying the same post at the Royal Swedish Opera.
Over the next decades he was a guest conductor at opera houses in both Europe and the U.S., including the Deutsche Oper Berlin, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. He was principal conductor of a number of European orchestras, including the Danish National Radio Symphony and, from 1995 to 2007, the Helsinki Philharmonic.
After a period of relatively conventional modernism in the 1960s when he composed four string quartets, among other works, he entered into more radical, jokey, games-playing experiments in the 1970s. His sixth quartet of 1974, which he wrote should be played “in the spirit of Gustav Mahler,” was played with “a ghostly figure made of chicken wire and papier-mâché who sat at a piano, silently,” the critic Lynn René Bayley recalled in 2016.
Mr. Garvey noted that his client’s orchestral compositions were not so much symphonies as recollections of the 18th-century concerto grosso, featuring as they often did concertante-style dueling pianos. Mr. Segerstam also made numerous well-received recordings of the 19th-century symphonic repertoire, including Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner, and of modernist operas like Berg’s “Wozzeck.”
He was, Mr. Lintu suggested, deliberately provocative and enigmatic and “enjoyed baffling people around him.” “You have to motivate the sound,” Mr. Segerstam said in one interview. “Music is not that which sounds. Music is why that which sounds, sounds like it sounds, when it sounds.”
In addition to his son Jan, from his first marriage, to the violinist Hannele Angervo-Segerstam (who died this year), Mr. Segerstam is survived by his daughter Pia, also from that marriage; two daughters and a son, Violaelina, Iirisilona and Selimoskar Segerstam, from his marriage to the harpist Minnaleena Jankko, which ended in divorce; his third wife, Eija; and six grandchildren.
Jan Segerstam, recalling a last encounter shortly before his father’s death, said the veteran conductor suddenly became engaged in the conversation when he recognized music tones in the words the two were exchanging.
“He found tones, music, in everything,” he said. “He experienced the feeling of being one with the music. And he had an immense will to communicate, through the music.”
The post Leif Segerstam, Provocative Finnish Conductor and Composer, Dies at 80 appeared first on New York Times.
