Herbert Blomstedt, the Swedish American conductor who enjoyed one of the longest careers in music history and whose vigor kept him in high demand on the podium in his 90s, died Wednesday. He was 99.
His management agency, KSG, did not provide a cause of death.
In the New Yorker in 2021, music critic Alex Ross enumerated Mr. Blomstedt’s engagements for the second half of that year: After two weeks at Tanglewood, leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra and teaching in the center’s elite music school in western Massachusetts, Mr. Blomstedt took the Vienna Philharmonic on an eight-city tour of Europe and later served as guest conductor in Dresden, Germany; Berlin; Tokyo; Leipzig, Germany; Munich; Bamberg, Germany; Oslo; and Paris.
Ross concluded that Mr. Blomstedt, who was 94 and whose professional life spanned 70 years, was “effectively ensconced as the elder sage of the podium.”
Mr. Blomstedt was best known in America for his work as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1985 to 1995 and helped build into one of the finest orchestras in the country. During his tenure, the symphony made more recordings than ever before, at a time when orchestral contracts with record companies were drying up everywhere.
He recorded the complete symphonies of Schubert, Brahms, Sibelius and Danish composer Carl Nielsen, and he made two recordings of the Beethoven symphonies — 40 years apart — with the Staatskapelle Dresden in Germany. In the 1990s, he won two Grammy Awards, for Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and the Brahms “German Requiem,” both with the San Francisco Orchestra and Chorus.
Mr. Blomstedt (he pronounced it “BLOOM-stet”) was the opposite of the glamorous, heaven-storming maestro caricatured in articles and films. He was a modest, unassuming vegetarian who neither smoked nor drank.
He was a Seventh-Day Adventist and refused to rehearse on Saturdays, which his church recognizes as the Sabbath. Yet he did not hesitate to conduct in performance on that day. “Rehearsal is intense, draining work,” he explained to the New York Times in 1986. “But a concert is a celebration, a spiritual communication.”
Mr. Blomstedt’s leadership was precise and never overly demonstrative. He never “danced” on the podium, and his motions were intended only for the musicians. His goal was to present a composer’s work as accurately and persuasively as possible.
His methodical self-effacement meant that he was sometimes dismissed as a bland interpreter, particularly early in his career. But his performances were effective and affecting, and he was never known to bully his musicians in rehearsals.
“In Blomstedt’s hands, the finest gradations between soft and loud became a detailed expressive vocabulary,” San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman wrote in 2023 about a San Francisco Symphony concert that included Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony.
“All of this was achieved with an array of economical podium gestures — a cue here, a terse wave of the arms there,” Kosman added. “Even in his younger years, Blomstedt was never a very physically demonstrative conductor; but nowadays he seems to be operating through some kind of mind meld built of sheer experience and authority.”
After long experience on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. Blomstedt shared his views on the differences between European and American orchestras and what each stood to learn from the other.
“In America, we think that virtuosity and brilliance are very important,” he told the Times in 1986. “We also have very large halls so that orchestras think they have to play very loud to be heard. Sometimes we have to learn to play less loudly and listen to each other a little more.”
He also found that the style of an American orchestra was often defined by its conductor, for better and for worse. “The sound of European orchestras is very fixed and often has been for many years,” he said. “It supersedes personalities.”
Herbert Thorson Blomstedt was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1927. His mother, an American of Swedish ancestry, was a conservatory-trained pianist. His father, born in Sweden and orphaned at 9 after his parents contracted tuberculosis, had been sent to live with relatives in Minnesota.
The elder Blomstedt became a Seventh-Day Adventist minister and served his faith in Minnesota and New England. The church summoned the family back to Sweden when Mr. Blomstedt was 2.
Mr. Blomstedt said his first memory was one of lying under the piano as his mother played Chopin in their Gothenburg house.
“It was the best place I know,” he told the Sacramento Bee in 1989. “I can still remember her Chopin. She had a most wonderful touch. The piano sound was sweet — rich but sweet.”
As a boy, Mr. Blomstedt studied violin and piano. His brother played the cello and was equally involved with music. “We sat together at concerts, discussed the music, hummed the tunes walking home through the streets,” Mr. Blomstedt recalled. “We were just in heaven.”
He considered becoming a theologian and then a doctor. But he finally decided on attending the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where he studied conducting with Igor Markevitch, and went on to do graduate work at Uppsala University.
With a grant from the Sweden-America Foundation, he came to the United States and studied first with Jean Morel at the Juilliard School in New York and then with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood. There, he won the prize for outstanding student conductor in 1953.
The following year, Mr. Blomstedt made his professional debut with the Stockholm Philharmonic and settled in the industrial Swedish city of Norrköping, where he served as chief conductor of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. He remained there for seven years. It was, he later said, a good place to make his first mistakes.
He subsequently held the position of chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic while also leading the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Copenhagen. From 1975 to 1985, he was chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, with which he toured Europe and the United States.
His immediate impression upon arriving in Dresden, then part of East Germany, was one of shock. “Everything was dark, dirty, unfriendly, soldiers everywhere,” he told the Bee.
But he loved the orchestra immediately. The sound, he said, “was so incredibly beautiful. No matter what I did with my hands [the musicians] were absolutely there. As I listened to that sound, I remembered it — from 30 years before, when every Sunday morning, at my grandparents’ house, I tuned in to the German radio.”
Mr. Blomstedt served simultaneously as chief conductor in Eastern Bloc and Western countries when he worked with the Staatskapelle Dresden, serving at the same time in Copenhagen and later Stockholm.
In 1955, he married Waltraud Petersen. She died in 2003.
Mr. Blomstedt had four daughters, Elisabet, Cecilia, Maria and Kristina. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
“I’m very happy to have been born in a deeply religious home where speaking and listening to God, and serving Him through serving my employers and public, has been the ultimate goal of life,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1986.
“You cannot go around saying, ‘I’m the world’s greatest conductor.’ You have to have friends who believe in you and invite you to work, and then be ready to do your part. In my life the challenges have been paced exactly right. I am a happy musician.”
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