(b Athens, 2 Feb 1896; d Milan, 2 Nov 1960). American conductor, pianist and composer of Greek birth. In his youth he was strongly attracted to a life of service in the Greek Orthodox Church, but turned to music when informed that the church allowed no instrumental music within its precincts. He displayed natural gifts as a pianist and was ‘discovered’ at the age of ten by Armand Marsick. He enrolled in the Athens Odeion Conservatory in 1910 and graduated with highest honours in 1919. One year later, his opera Soeur Béatrice attracted the praise of Saint-Saëns and his international career was launched. After studies in Brussels with Gilson (1920–21) and in Berlin with Busoni and Kleiber (1921–4) he returned to Athens to teach at the conservatory and to conduct its orchestra for the next 15 years. His breakthrough came with the Berlin PO in 1930, when he appeared at short notice in Prokofiev's Third Concerto, conducting from the keyboard. He toured widely with this piece in Europe and the USSR, eventually coming to the attention of Koussevitzky, who invited him to conduct in Boston in 1936. The Boston concerts were a sensation and a year later he succeeded Ormandy as conductor of the Minneapolis SO, a post he held for 12 years.
Often to the bewilderment of his audiences, Mitropoulos turned Minneapolis into an internationally recognized centre for contemporary music, programming major works by Berg, Krenek, Sessions and Shostakovich, and making the first recording of Mahler's First Symphony. During the 1940s he also conducted widely in America (he became an American citizen in 1946), most notably with the Philadelphia Orchestra, NBC SO and New York PO. He shared the directorship of the New York PO with Stokowski for a season (1949–50), then became sole musical director until his resignation in 1958, when he was replaced by his former protégé, Leonard Bernstein.
A simple, generous and ascetic man whose idealism took a constant pounding in the rough cultural climate of New York, Mitropoulos was an intensely physical conductor who directed with his entire body. He used no baton (until ill health forced him to adopt one in his final years), and directed every score, no matter how vast or complex, from near-perfect memory. He had a genius for mounting memorable performances of monumental works such as Wozzeck and Elektra; but in the central Classical and Romantic symphonic repertory he could be wildly erratic, conveying explosive excitement on one night, inexplicable wrong-headedness on another. His achievements in the opera pit were considerable, beginning with a legendary Metropolitan Opera Salome in 1954 and continuing for every subsequent season until his death; in 1958 he conducted the première of Barber's Vanessa at the Metropolitan. Throughout his life he retained an almost missionary zeal for music that other conductors deemed too difficult or too obscure. His continual advocacy of Mahler and other unfashionable composers alienated conservative listeners but were a revelation to more adventurous ears.
Though plagued by failing health, Mitropoulos scored triumphs in his final years with a number of European orchestras, especially with the Vienna PO and the Cologne SO. He died on the podium, of a heart attack, while rehearsing Mahler's Third Symphony with the La Scala Orchestra. In America his reputation went into rapid eclipse, but in recent years there has been a revival of interest in his work, stimulated by the reissue on CD of many of his recordings. Outstanding among these are Mahler's First Symphony (1940), a searing reading of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony (1956), and a version of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, recorded shortly after he gave the work's American première in 1954, which captures as few subsequent recordings do the music's dark introspection and hard-won triumph.
Mitropoulos's compositions cover a period of 15 years; about 40 works survive, some of them written in a startlingly advanced and highly original idiom. They include a symphonic poem La mise au tombeau de Christ (1916), a Piano Sonata (1919), incidental music for plays and other piano and chamber music. Perhaps his finest works are the Ten Inventions on Poems of Cavafy for soprano and piano (1927) and the Concerto grosso (1928).
D. Amram: Vibrations (New York, 1968), 45–9, 381–2
H. Shanet: Philharmonic: a History of New York’s Orchestra (New York, 1975), 271–2, 327
J.K. Sherman: Music and Maestros: the Story of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (Minneapolis, 1952), 85, 228–30, 235–9
J.L. Holmes: Conductors: a Record Collector’s Guide (London, 1988), 195–8
W.R. Trotter: Priest of Music: the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos (Portland, OR, 1995)
WILLIAM R. TROTTER