(b Lébényszentmiklós, 12 Oct 1855; d Leipzig, 23 Jan 1922). Austro-Hungarian conductor. He was born of a Moravian father and a Hungarian mother, and at an early age he showed exceptional musical ability. He received his first music tuition privately and in 1866 became a student at the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Hellmesberger and composition with Dessoff. As a student he won various prizes for composition as well as violin and piano playing, but it was the violin on which he concentrated. He played in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Wagner at the laying of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus foundation stone. In 1874 he joined the Vienna Court Orchestra where he played under Brahms, Liszt, Verdi and Wagner, as well as Herbeck and Dessoff, and also took part in the first performance of Bruckner’s Second Symphony under the composer’s own direction.
In 1878 he became second conductor at the opera in Leipzig, the city with which he was to maintain connections for the rest of his life, becoming principal conductor in 1879. His career now entered upon a new stage of activity and fame. In 1889 he accepted the conductorship of the Boston SO and undertook many tours throughout the USA. In conservative Boston, his interpretatative liberties – as in Beethoven’s Fifith Symphony – ignited a storm of controversy; his Boston predecessors (and succesors) were more literal-minded. In 1893, he took over the Budapest Opera as musical director; but two years later he was offered almost simultaneously the conductorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (in succession to Reinecke) and of the Berlin PO (in succession to Bülow). He accepted both posts, retaining them to the end of his life, and in 1897 also succeeded Bülow as conductor of the Philharmonic concerts in Hamburg.
With the Berlin orchestra he toured Europe, travelling as far as Moscow. He appeared as guest conductor with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and Vienna PO and in 1921 gave concerts in Buenos Aires. Having conducted a series of concerts in London after coming back from America, he returned in 1902 and was a frequent guest conductor of the LSO from 1904 until 1914, touring America with them in 1912. Occasionally he also conducted at Covent Garden, notably Wagner’s Ring in 1913. In addition to his many other duties he was director of the Leipzig Opera (1905–6) and the Leipzig Conservatory, where he was also in charge of the conductors’ class.
Nikisch was the most impressive and influential conductor of his day. He excelled in Romantic music, and his performances of Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and Wagner, as well as of Beethoven, have remained famous. It was Nikisch who, with his première of the Seventh Symphony in 1884, first won wide fame for Bruckner, and who, after Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony had been coolly received under the composer’s direction in St Petersburg in 1888, vindicated it triumphantly in the same city. Tchaikovsky himself, who heard the 32-year-old Nikisch in 1887, has left an impression of his celebrated restraint and discipline:
Herr Nikisch is elegantly calm, sparing of superfluous movements, yet at the same time wonderfully strong and self-possessed. He does not seem to conduct, but rather to exercise some mysterious spell; he hardly makes a sign, and never tries to call attention to himself, yet we feel that the great orchestra, like an instrument in the hands of a wonderful master, is completely under the control of its chief.
Nikisch was famous for the passionate yet controlled beauty of the string tone he elicited from his players, as well as for his broad and flexible sense of tempo. He influenced a generation of conductors who followed him, including in different ways Furtwängler, his successor in Leipzig and Berlin, and Boult. Among the contemporary composers whom he supported were Mahler, Reger and Strauss. His own music is forgotten, but he also won fame as an accompanist, and in this respect his name will always be linked with that of his pupil Elena Gerhardt. He married the singer Amélie Heusner, and their son Mitja (1899–1936) had a successful career as a pianist.
F. Pfohl: Arthur Nikisch als Mensch und Künstler (Leipzig, 1900, 2/1925)
A. Dette: Nikisch (Leipzig, 1922)
H. Chevalley, ed.: Arthur Nikisch: Leben und Wirken (Berlin, 1922)
A.C. Boult: ‘Arthur Nikisch’, ML, iii (1922), 117–21
A.C. Boult: ‘Nikisch and Method in Rehearsal’, MR, xi (1950), 122–5
F. Herzfeld: Magie des Taktstocks (Berlin, 1953), 71ff
L.N. Raaben, ed.: Artur Nikisch i russkaya muzykal’naya kul’tura (Leningrad, 1975)
T.-M. Langner, ed.: ‘Arthur Nikisch’, Grosse deutsche Dirigenten: Hundert Jahre Berliner Philharmoniker (Berlin, 1981), 35–60
HANS-HUBERT SCHÖNZELER/JOSEPH HOROWITZ