Gerhard Samuel, Legendary Maestro

Gerhard Samuel

Farewell to a Maestro

Samuel's retirement leaves a void at CCM

By Mary Ellyn Hutton

first published in The Cincinnati Post May 30, 1997

   Gerhard Samuel was born in Bonn, Germany in the shadow of Bonn native Ludwig van Beethoven.  Now, an ocean away, he casts a huge shadow himself.

   Samuel, 73, is retiring in June as director of orchestral activities at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He’ll move to his home near Seattle, where he will concentrate on composing, guest conducting and perhaps writing.  He would have much to write about.

   A legendary conductor and esteemed composer, Samuel has rubbed elbows with most of the great musicians of the last half-century.  He studied composition with Hindemith conducting with Serge Koussevitsky.  He has conducted on Broadway, organized a glittering musical “salon” in Paris and taken dancing lessons from Hanya Holm.

   He watched Toscanini rehearse, heard Schoenberg conduct his “Pierrot Lunaire” and Stravinsky read through “The Rake’s Progress” on the piano.

   “The breadth of his knowledge and experience has helped make him one of the great conducting teachers,” said Earl Rivers, head of CCM’s division of ensembles and conducting.  “You can walk to his door at any time and ask a question and likely he’ll know the answer.  He’ll tell you how to fix something in the orchestra, how to get something out of the score.  He knows editions, styles.  When he came here, I think he knew the core repertory absolutely cold.”

   Samuel represents “that transition from the grand European cultural tradition” that took place after the war and made the U.S. the center of musical study, said CCM dean Robert Werner.  “It will be a hard position to fill.”

Samuel leads his final concert as music director of CCM’s Philharmonia Orchestra at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Finneytown Performing Arts Center.  The program is “pure Samuel” two world premieres -- CCM professor Darrell Handel’s “Orpheus Left His Heart” and Samuel’s own “Remembering Orpheus” -- and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2.

   Samuel has championed new music all his life.  In 1994 he was awarded Columbia University’s prestigious Ditson Conductor’s Award for his contributions to American music, an honor previously conferred on Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and Michael Tilson-Thomas.

Samuel’s Liberty Hill apartment is filled with art, much of it by his father, a physician, violinist and painter who brought his family to the U.S. in 1929, just a step ahead of the Nazis.  He had been in and out of Nazi prisons.

   “They let him out a half-hour before our train left,” Samuel said.  His family was Jewish, with roots in Germany going back 500 years.  They arrived in New York with $50.  Samuel -- "Gary" as his friends still call him -- was 14.

   Unable to afford college -- he had planned to be a doctor-- he packed up his violin and headed for Rochester, N.Y. where he won a full scholarship to the Eastman School of Music.  As a graduate student at Yale, he accompanied Hindemith to the world premiere of the composer’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” conducted by Robert Shaw.

   Samuel as never applied for a job, he said.  His phone is likely to ring instead,

   After Yale, he was asked to conduct “Ballet Ballads,” which ran for more than a year on Broadway.  Hanya Holm, one of the choreographers, advised him to study dance.  A classmate was Butterfly McQueen, who portrayed Prissy in “Gone with the Wind.”

   In 1948-49, Samuel worked for the cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, arranging concerts attended by Copland, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Poulenc and Honnegger.

He was living on the Left Bank over an Arab nightclub and “one night there was a knock on the door.  It was one of the belly dancers.  I didn’t know what she was up to.” 

   It was a phone call from his mother telling him conductor Antal Dorati was looking for a violinist and assistant conductor for the Minneapolis Symphony; Dorati had heard about Samuel from Stravinsky.  Samuel got the job after a long prop-plane flight and a 2 a.m. audition in New York.

   Samuel’s glory years as a conductor were with the Oakland Symphony from 1959-1971.

   “At that time, the Oakland Symphony was a feather compared to the heavyweight San Francisco Symphony across the bay,” said Paul Hertelendty, music critic of the San Jose Mercury News, who was then with the Oakland Tribune.  “In five years, he turned it around to where it got most of the critical attention.”

   Samuel’s innovative programs “lit up the Oakland community” and gave the orchestra an identity it subsequently lost (it folded in 1986), Hertelendy said.  This month, when the San Jose Symphony honored composer Lou Harrison on his 80^th birthday, Harrison asked that Samuel conduct.

   Samuel went on to become Zubin Mehta’s assistant at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he found himself conducting more and enjoying it less.

   “I loved working with my own orchestra,” Samuel said, “but when I got with the Philharmonic, I got kind of disenchanted.  What disappointed me was that so many orchestra musicians didn’t seem to have a great love for music.  Very often you had to accomplish what you wanted in spite of them.”

   Concurrently, he joined the faculty of the California Institute for the Arts and “just fell in love with it.  I felt it was time to impart what I knew to other people.”

   Samuel came to Cincinnati in 1976 after a visit to Los Angeles by the CCM-based LaSalle Quartet.

   “The next morning (LaSalle second violinist) Henry Meyer called me,” Samuel said.

   At CCM, he as made the Philharmonic one of the world’s best conservatory orchestras, taking it to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Paris and London and recording world premieres by Hans Rott, Franz Schubert and Charles Ives.  He also founded CCM’s Contemporary Music Ensemble.

   Samuel has taught “generations of students who are in important posts all over the world,” said CCM’s Rivers.

   Although never invited to conduct the CSO, Samuel initiated its conducting assistant program, whereby CCM students serve apprenticeships with the orchestra.

   From 1983-92, he led the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, enriching its repertoire and raising its performance level for successor Keith Lockhart.

   Samuel has an unfinished opera waiting and guest conducting plans into 1999.  But he’ll be back in Cincinnati to aid the transition at CCM.  He’ll conduct Philharmonia auditions in the fall, lead two season concerts and take the orchestra to Portugal next March.

   Some people call it retirement.  Samuel calls it “changing his lifestyle.”

   Perhaps he should take his phone off the hook.