Writing my previous post about Leonard Bernstein reminded me of another New York conductor who once reached great fame, but one whose career later plummeted and who met an untimely death of lung cancer at 47: Thomas Schippers.
To be honest, I had never heard of Thomas Schippers until I watched the documentary “The Opera House” during a Met-in-HD broadcast. He led the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center on September 16, 1966 with a performance of Samuel Barber’s “Antony & Cleopatra”, an opera that was panned by the critics in spite of the performers’ best efforts, including those of a stunning Leontyne Price. Schippers was also “handsome as a Hollywood leading man” (from the NYT obit), Leonard-Bernstein-kind of dashing, and like Bernstein he was a homosexual in spite of being married (his wife passed of cancer in 1973), although back then people didn’t talk about those things. They prefer to focus on his enormous talent.
He was considered a major contender to lead the New York Philharmonic after Leonard Bernstein stepped down in 1969 (his conducting A&C on opening day of the new Met in 1966, a great honor, suggests he was being groomed for a top job) but was ultimately passed over for Pierre Boulez and ended up at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, hardly a ringing endorsement of his future. But perhaps he would have staged one of those comeback stories Americans are so fond for, if lung cancer hadn’t felled him. Most of his recordings are out of print (Sibelius, to name just one), but a few remain (Barber's Adagio for Strings, highlights from Verdi's Il Trovatore).
His New York Times obituary mentions starkly: “Fortune gave him everything and then brutally snatched it away.” Although he is most remembered for conducting the A&C performance that opened the new Met, if he’s remembered at all, the 1977 NYT obit asserts that “One of Mr. Schippers's greatest Metropolitan triumphs came in 1974, when he conducted a new production of “Boris Godunov” in Mussorgsky's original version, a first for the company.” This gave me pause when I read it, because the Met has shown so many more productions of Godunov since then. Schippers’s story reminds me that even the greatest fame is fleeting, and for every Bernstein who remained at the top throughout his career, we also have to count many artists who were once promised to great things but left us too soon or didn’t quite live up to their early days. I don't know if there is any way to rescue from obscurity a conductor who has been dead for over 40 years, but I've done my part by ordering his 1970 recording of Lucia di Lammermoor with Beverly Sills and the London Symphony Orchestra, after he had left the Met but before Cincinnati, before his wife's death, before the lung cancer diagnosis. He only had 7 years left.
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