(b Giessen, Upper Hesse, 7 Nov 1839; d Munich, 13 May 1900). German conductor. Descended from a line of distinguished rabbis, he attended the Mannheim Lyceum (1851–3) before withdrawing to study music with Vinzenz Lachner; from 1855 to 1858 he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Moritz Hauptmann (music theory) and Julius Rietz (composition and conducting). Following several months in Paris, he became music director at Saarbrücken in 1859; two years later he deputized as associate conductor of the Mannheim Opera, on Lachner's recommendation, before being appointed Kapellmeister of the Hoogduitse Opera at Rotterdam (1862–4). As Hofkapellmeister in Karlsruhe (1864–72), he became a friend of Clara Schumann and, through her, of Brahms. From 1872 he was Hofkapellmeister in Munich, and was made general music director of the city in 1894, retiring in 1896.
A distinguished and serious-minded artist of great personal qualities and musical gifts, Levi was encouraged by the initial reception of his own Schumannesque compositions but became persuaded by 1864 – having also been nudged in this direction by Brahms – to give up composing and dedicate himself to conducting. He was an esteemed interpreter of Brahms, with whom he formed an intimate friendship, influencing such works as the Schicksalslied and the Piano Quintet. Levi became increasingly preoccupied with opera, however, having begun to conduct Wagner's works in 1862, and for many years sought in vain to find a suitable operatic subject for Brahms, a composer whom, as late as 1871, he still hoped would ‘demonstrate the right path for operatic composition’.
Recommended to Wagner by Pauline Viardot-García and Nietzsche, Levi impressed Wagner in 1870 by refusing to conduct an unauthorized performance of Die Walküre at Munich. After meeting Levi in 1871, Wagner drew the conductor into his sphere of influence, going so far as to compliment Levi on not having changed his patently Jewish surname. Levi was increasingly won over as much by Wagner's music as by his artistic message, even defending the aesthetic underlying Das Judenthum in der Musik. In 1875 Levi participated in rehearsals for the first Bayreuth Festival, but was still busy arranging a performance of Brahms's First Symphony so as to advance the composer's dubious reputation in Munich. Though Levi made increasingly desperate attempts to forestall a personal breach between them, Brahms was prepared to renounce their friendship because of Levi's Wagnerism.
Wagner was never in any doubt about Levi's artistic pre-eminence, preferring his conducting to that of Hans Richter, but it did not please him that Parsifal, with its Christian symbolism, was to be conducted by a Jew, and he made clumsy attempts to convert Levi to Christianity. When in July 1881 Wagner showed Levi a letter which urged the composer to keep Parsifal pure and not allow it to be conducted by a Jew, Levi asked to be excused from his assignment, but relented when Wagner assured him that baptism was not a prerequisite. On 26 July 1882 Levi conducted the première of Parsifal to great acclaim, and his inspired renditions of this score until 1894 (except in 1888 when he was ill) place him, along with Richter, Mottl and Seidl, as one of the greatest of the first generation of Bayreuth conductors.
Levi led an illustrious professional life in Munich (1872–96), receiving numerous Prussian and Bavarian state honours. He gave the German premières of operas by Gounod, Delibes, Messager, Chabrier and Berlioz (Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens), and made successful translations of three of Mozart's Italian operas, versions routinely used by German opera houses into the 1930s. Levi took his role as Wagnerian aesthetic heir seriously in his patronage of Bruckner, whose success with the Munich public he assured in 1884 when he presented the Adagio from the Seventh Symphony following a performance of Die Walküre. It was Bruckner, not Brahms, whom Levi toasted as symphonist in the 1880s as the successor to Beethoven, and Bruckner, for his part, revered Levi, though 15 years his junior, as his ‘artistic father’. In a letter of 1887 Levi criticized the first version of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, citing the ‘dubious development’ of the themes and the ‘impossible orchestration’, thereby shattering Bruckner's self-confidence and consigning him to several years of soul-searching revisions. Levi was also a champion of the young Richard Strauss, who dedicated his Overture in C minor (1883) to him. Levi, who had long suffered from poor health, retired in 1896. The ‘spiritual’ quality of Levi's interpretations was widely admired, and the economy of his gestures, as well as his masterly technique, exercised an influence on a number of conductors of the following generation, especially Weingartner.
MGG1 (R Schaal)
NDB (I. Fellinger)
C.F. Glasenapp: Richard Wagner's Leben und Wirken (Kassel, 1876–7, 3/1894–1911 as Das Leben Richard Wagners, 5/1910–23; Eng. trans. of 3rd edn rev., enlarged 1900–08/R by W.A. Ellis as Life of Richard Wagner [vols. iv–vi by Ellis alone]
H.S. Chamberlain: ‘Richard Wagner's Briefe an Hermann Levi’, Bayreuther Blätter, xxiv (1901), 13–42
E. von Possart: Erinnerungen an Hermann Levi (Munich, 1901)
L. Schmidt, ed.: Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit H. Levi, F. Gernheim sowie den Familien Hecht u. Fellinger, vii (Berlin, 1910/R)
F. Gräflinger: Anton Bruckner (Munich, 1911)
R. Du Moulin Eckart: Cosima Wagner (Munich, 1929–31)
J. Kniese: Der Kampf zweier Welten um das Bayreuther Erbe (Leipzig, 1931)
E. Newman: The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933–47/R
P. Gay: ‘Hermann Levi: a Study in Service and Self-Hatred’, Freud, Jews, and other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978), 189–230
H. Zelinsky: ‘Der Dirigent Hermann Levi: Anmerkungen zur verdrängten Geschichte des jüdischen Wagnerianers’, Geschichte und Kultur der Juden in Bayern, ed. J. Kirmew and N. Treml (Munich, 1988), 411–30
L. Dreyfus: ‘Hermann Levi's Shame and Parsifal's Guilt: a Critique of Essentialism in Biography and Criticism’, COJ, vi (1994), 125–45
F. Haas: Zwischen Brahms und Wagner: der Dirigent Hermann Levi (Zürich, 1995)
LAURENCE DREYFUS