Christoph von Dohnanyi, the internationally renowned conductor best known for his long, harmonious tenure at the helm of the Cleveland Orchestra — a marriage between a symphony and its leader that was considered one of the most felicitous in classical music — died on Saturday in Munich. He was 95.
His death was announced by the Cleveland Orchestra.
A German of Hungarian extraction, Mr. Dohnanyi (pronounced DOKH-nahn-yee) served as Cleveland’s music director from 1984 to 2002, during which time the orchestra was widely described as one of the foremost in the world. At his death, he was the ensemble’s music director laureate.
A sought-after guest conductor with symphonies and opera companies around the world, Mr. Dohnanyi also held the title of honorary conductor for life of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, where he was principal conductor from 1997 to 2008.
Mr. Dohnanyi was esteemed for his meticulous, unfussy interpretations; fealty to composers’ intent; and broad historical compass. He was associated in particular with the music of Germanic composers — his Brahms was especially admired — and he was also an ardent champion of 20th-century repertoire, a notoriously hard sell for contemporary American audiences.
“Dohnanyi’s podium style is neither effusive à la Leonard Bernstein — whose method borders on the balletic — nor is it tautly economical in the tradition of Szell and Fritz Reiner,” the classical music critic Tim Page wrote in 1989 in a Newsday profile. (George Szell had reigned in Cleveland from 1946 until his death in 1970.)
“Dohnanyi’s interpretations tend to be calculated, disciplined, transparent, unsentimental but deeply committed,” Mr. Page added. “He is a reserved but demonstrative conductor; players and audience have no difficulty following his beat. And the orchestra plays with reflexive power and clarity for him.”
Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra is the youngest of the so-called Big Five — the cohort of high-wattage American ensembles that also includes the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Dohnanyi was only the sixth music director to serve in Cleveland, succeeding Lorin Maazel, who had in turn succeeded Szell, whose masterful, iron-fisted quarter-century tenure was considered chiefly responsible for the orchestra’s impeccable sheen, precision and transparency.
Mr. Dohnanyi was widely credited with having restored that sheen, which many reviewers described as having coarsened during the Maazel years. He was also lauded for his tightly disciplined yet strikingly democratic control of the orchestra’s musicians, among the most skilled in the world: “this Rolls-Royce of orchestras,” he called the ensemble.
Under his stewardship, the Cleveland Orchestra attracted younger audience members, recorded prolifically and commissioned new works from the German composer Matthias Pintscher, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and the American Philip Glass, among many others.
“I am very selfish, really,” Mr. Dohnanyi told Newsday in the 1989 article. “I want to conduct everything. I don’t want to specialize in contemporary music, but I could not live with myself if I did not understand it.”
But partly because he and Mr. Szell shared a Central European orientation, Mr. Dohnanyi, for all his success in Cleveland, would spend his years there as an object of inevitable comparison.
“We give a great concert,” he observed dryly, “and George Szell gets a great review.”
Mr. Dohnanyi was a surprising choice when he was named Cleveland’s music director designate in 1982. Comparatively unknown in the United States, he had built a respected if not explosive career in Germany, rising through the ranks of opera houses across the country, a time-honored trajectory for that country’s conductors.
But a single, well-received week as a guest conductor in Cleveland in 1981 appeared to convince most of the orchestra’s personnel, and later its board, that he was the right person to lead.
“Normally, one or two or five musicians come to say goodbye,” Mr. Dohnanyi told The New York Times in 1984, recalling the end of that auspicious week on Cleveland’s podium. “In this case, at least 20 musicians came. So, I was happy, but I didn’t think anything more about it.”
Some critics found his musical style pedantic, but most praised the sound he drew from the orchestra for its lucidity — the texture of every note could be heard plainly — and for a warmth that belied his deeply cerebral approach to his craft.
It was a craft, as Mr. Dohnanyi’s interviews suggested in subtext, whose intense focus and profound reflectiveness had been shaped by the wrenching losses he had suffered as the child of members of the German Resistance.
Christoph von Dohnanyi was born in Berlin on Sept. 8, 1929. His was a distinguished family: His paternal grandfather, Erno Dohnanyi (known in Germany as Ernst von Dohnanyi), was a well-regarded Hungarian composer. His father, Hans von Dohnanyi, was a prominent lawyer in the German ministry of justice. Christoph’s mother, Christine (Bonhoeffer) Dohnanyi, a botanist, was a sister of the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Christoph began piano lessons as a boy, but his studies were interrupted by the war. His parents, uncle and other family members had actively opposed the rise of the Nazis: Hans von Dohnanyi helped supply money and papers to Jews fleeing Germany and, in March 1943, played a central role in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler.
“My father was, in a way, a person who was rather influential in those days,” Mr. Dohnanyi told NPR in 1992. “So we had the feeling he was a rather powerful man, and we felt kind of protected, also. And, of course, suddenly we noticed nice protection didn’t work any more.”
In April 1943, Christoph’s parents and uncle were arrested by the SS. His mother was released not long afterward. Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were imprisoned, tortured and, in the spring of 1945, hanged.
In a 2002 NPR interview, Mr. Dohnanyi made one of his rare public references to the lasting effects of his boyhood.
“What I lived through when I was a child, of course, has affected the development of my character, personality and so on, in positive ways, also certainly in negative ways,” he said. “You are more suspicious. You are more prepared that terrible things might happen. And it develops also your attachment to art, you know, because art, like religion and so on, is some kind of a help in those days.”
Though Mr. Dohnanyi remained passionate about music, he entered the University of Munich after the war to study law.
“In those days,” he told The Boston Globe in 2013, “we thought even if you are maybe inclining to be an artist or go into music, the most important thing is to build your country up again.”
Music soon won out, and he transferred to Munich’s Hochschule für Musik, where he won a top prize for compositions and conducting. Making his way to the United States, he studied composition with his grandfather, who was then teaching at Florida State University. At Tanglewood, in Massachusetts, Christoph studied conducting under Leonard Bernstein.
Returning to West Germany in 1952, he became an assistant conductor to Georg Solti at the Frankfurt Opera; his later conductorships included those of the Lübeck Opera and the West German Radio Symphony in Cologne. In 1968, after Solti’s departure, Mr. Dohnanyi succeeded him in Frankfurt. Before taking the Cleveland post, he was chief conductor of the Hamburg State Opera; his brother, Klaus, was the city’s mayor for most of the 1980s.
In Cleveland, Mr. Dohnanyi established a rapport with players that had been conspicuously absent during the Szell autocracy.
“Times have changed,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1995. “If Reiner or Szell wasn’t pleased about something, he would fire members of the orchestra. You cannot do this today, and I think it’s good you can’t. These days you have to convince musicians by what you know and what you want, rather than dictate terms to them.”
He also became known for the canny way in which he slipped contemporary music into nearly all his concerts: As the British newspaper The Independent reported in 1989, for instance, only two of the 26 programs in the orchestra’s 1988-89 season lacked a work by a 20th-century composer.
There was a strategy involved, Mr. Dohnanyi explained: “First you have to establish you’re not one-sided, you’re able to do Brahms and Mahler as well as contemporary works,” he told The Independent. “And they say: ‘OK, his Mozart was beautiful, why does he choose to do the other stuff? How can he like it? Are we missing something?’ That’s how you get along.”
Near the turn of the 21st century, however, Mr. Dohnanyi found himself increasingly unable to get along with Cleveland’s board. The trouble centered on a project that he described in 1998 as “my only real interesting challenge”: studio recordings with the orchestra of all four operas in Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle.
The first two, “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre,” were released by Decca to wide acclaim in the early 1990s. Then, in 1998, amid the collapse of the classical recording market, Decca canceled the project, along with all future recordings by Cleveland.
A proposed solution by the board — to record live concert performances of the two remaining installments, “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” — did not sit well with Mr. Dohnanyi, who did not want to forsake the minute acoustic control that studio recordings allowed.
“The reputation of this orchestra is hurt by not completing this project,” he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer that year. “In the 80 years of the Cleveland Orchestra, this is the major artistic thing that would last.”
Mr. Dohnanyi left the orchestra when his contract ended in 2002 — his tenure concluded with the third “Ring” opera, “Siegfried,” which went unrecorded — and he was succeeded by Franz Welser-Möst. (He appeared as a guest in Cleveland until 2015.) From 2004 to 2010, Mr. Dohnanyi was the chief conductor of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg.
As a guest conductor, he led ensembles including the remaining four of the Big Five, the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic, the Zurich Opera, and the Orchestre de Paris, of which he was principal guest conductor.He made many appearances at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, including the premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s “The Bassarids” in 1966.
Mr. Dohnanyi’s first marriage, to the German actress Renate Zillessen, ended in divorce, as did his second, to the German soprano Anja Silja. In 2004, he married Barbara Koller, an Austrian violinist and arts manager. She survives him, as does his brother, Klaus; two children, Katja and Justus, from his first marriage; and three children, Julia, Benedikt and Olga, from his second.
If, at the helm of Cleveland, Mr. Dohnanyi spent two decades laboring under Mr. Szell’s long shadow, that did not ultimately seem to trouble him very much.
“I don’t care about shadows; I care about light,” he told The Associated Press in 2001. “George Szell was for me a great light. I hope that I can bring a little bit of light to the orchestra as well.”
Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney.
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