By Milton Esterow

One day in 1961, Thomas D. Perry, manager of the Boston Symphony, called Erich Leinsdorf. “Henry Cabot would like to meet you,” he said. “Could you have lunch with us on Monday?” Leinsdorf said he could. He was not sure what Cabot, president of the orchestra’s board of trustees, had in mind, but suspected that “Cabot wanted to look me over for future reference.” Cabot, it developed, was thinking not only about the future but also about the present. After some casual talk about a number of things, including how Cabot played the clarinet, he offered Leinsdorf one of music’s biggest plums—the post of musical director of the Boston Symphony.

“Later,” Leinsdorf recalls, “it occurred to me that I had never formally accepted. I sat down and wrote a note to Cabot. I said, ‘In general, when one is invited, one should reply. Since you have invited me, I just want to tell you “Thank you, I accept.”’”

Leinsdorf has a passion for thoroughness. “I think,” says a recording-company executive, “that he’d rather cut his throat than waste time.” A friend says, “He knows exactly what he’s going to do, when and how. If his car is to call for him at 7:30 at his house, you can be sure that at 7:29 he’ll come through the door. He’s tremendously organized, sort of a musical computer. There is this tremendous self-discipline.”

The word “discipline” evokes harsh images in Leinsdorf’s mind. “I think willpower is a better word than discipline,” he ·says. “I have limitless confidence in human willpower. “

You know, the difference between the professional and the amateur performer is one of control over his faculties. The amateur is the person who is equally gifted but says, ‘Tonight I don’t feel like doing Brahms. I must do the Schubert.’ The professional is the one who has a commitment to the public and must do the Brahms if Brahms is scheduled that night. I have a considerable feeling of responsibility to the audience.”

He smiles and adds: “I could be an absolute bum with the greatest of ease. I flatter myself that I could enjoy it more. The man in a world of competition is a prisoner; anyone who thinks differently fools himself. The freedom of the bum appeals to me.”

To the music world, the picture of Leinsdorf needing a shave and wearing tattered clothes is about as easy to conjure up as one of Jimmy Durante conducting the Boston Symphony in Beethoven’s “Eroica.”

In the 51 years since his birth in Vienna, the world has seen several Erich Leinsdorfs. One was the Wunderkind who skyrocketed to the top: assistant to Toscanini at 22, a New York debut as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera 14 days before his 26th birthday. Another was the Leinsdorf of the 1940s and early ‘50s: a roly-poly man with a reputation in some circles as “a bear with a short temper.” Today there is the Leinsdorf, short, thin and meticulously dressed, whose temper hasn’t exploded publicly in years, and with all of Boston—musicians and the public—in love with him.

What has caused the transformation?

“When I worked with Toscanini,” Leinsdorf explained, “what he consciously practiced and I admired was this: If an oboe or horn phrases a solo differently from your own conception, it is better for the end result to let him be, so long as he is anywhere in a reasonable avenue of good taste.

“I have not always managed this, but I think I can also say why. I have a short tolerance for any but the best musicians. Since I have not always been associated with them, this short tolerance has sometimes, I guess, made me impatient. I feel the most profound affection for the good musician.

“When I did the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra with the Rochester Symphony, that it couldn’t be done as well as with the Philadelphia Orchestra got me into a mood of intolerance that was not entirely reasonable. I have no tolerance for the second-rate. In Rome last year at a recording session, a musician came up to me. ‘Maestro,’ he said, ‘this year you are in such good humor.’ I replied, ‘Yes, I have a good orchestra.’“

Leinsdorf paused and went on. “What had been lacking, and it was not entirely my fault—it was partly through the political constellation of the world—was the normal minor-league experience. It’s a large order when you start at 22, Toscanini’s only assistant. At 26, you’re conducting at the Met. Obviously, there was a human lag. Everything is subject to change. What caught up with me was a complete realization that a technocrat is not what the world wants. It wants a rounded man. I might also suggest that I’m not the only one whose association with Toscanini led him astray.”

Leinsdorf credits Rudolf Bing with having played an important role in the transformation. “He’s exceedingly concerned for his personnel. The whole picture of a cruel lion tamer is something in which he has to indulge five or ten per cent of the time. He feels an intense loyalty and responsibility to the people he works with. Yet I’ve seen how this man, with a few strokes, got his name in the news with a totally different slant, as if seen through a false lens. I realized that this could, happen to anybody. What I’m saying is that I became aware that one may project oneself so that other people see one differently from how one sees one self. I have in the last five years learned more about what communicates to the outside world.

“My main problem was the lack of minor-league seasoning and the lack of a person whose advice I could trust. I don’t think people can exist without advice. I believed that if one had ability it was the beginning and the end of the story. One must have more than ability. You can pound the hell out of a piano. But the conductor’s instrument is the human being. The No. 1 thing when you work as a conductor is your ability with humans on a thousand different levels. Over the years, this gradually dawned on me.”

Of Leinsdorf before Boston, a friend says: “Erich was getting nowhere fast. He was getting lots of exposure, but he was like a lot of conductors who haven’t made it. They put on a big show, make themselves more important than they are. But all this irritation with life is a thing of the past.”

At rehearsals, a musician says, there is the iron hand in the velvet glove, but the velvet is very thick. “The Boston Symphony hasn’t worked so hard since the Koussevitzky days.”

“He’s amazing in sizing up a situation,” says one Boston observer. “You must be honest with him. If you try to wiggle, he zooms in on you. If you level with him, anything is all right. He will forgive you if you say ‘I don’t know,’ but if you’re not honest, well, then his eyes get steely. The musicians admire and respect him. I don’t think there is the same emotional relationship that they had with Munch. Munch was very warm, but with Leinsdorf there’s a certain formality. At the Berkshire Music Festival, Leinsdorf would wander into a class unannounced. The kids used to say, ‘Don’t relax. Big Daddy is watching you.’”

Leinsdorf was born on February 4, 1912. His father died when Erich was three. “I was started in music by my mother,” Leinsdorf said. “Her plan was to get me—through the help of one of her uncles, who was an editor—into the newspaper business. I started ·playing the piano when I was five. Up to my 15th year, I was in doubt what I was going to be. I was interested in soccer. I played left fullback, and when I was tired of running I was the goalie. I had a very good kick with my left foot.

“By the age of 18, I knew I was going to be a performer. I didn’t know in what capacity. At that age you can’t make up your mind. I tell the kids at Tanglewood that the casting is done a little bit by forces outside ourselves.

“I studied orchestral conducting in Vienna and tried to land any kind of position. Austria was in a depression, and the shadows across the border were large.” In 1933, he hiked 150 miles to Salzburg, where he got a job as Bruno Walter’s assistant in preparing operas for “the festival.

In 1934, Toscanini was in Vienna to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. “I was sitting and listening to one of the rehearsals,” Leinsdorf said. “One of the officials of the orchestra came into the hall and said they couldn’t find anyone to play Kodaly’s ‘Psalmus Hungaricus’ on the piano for the old man. I told him I could. Toscanini liked the way I played it.”

For the next three summers, Leinsdorf was Toscanini’s assistant in Salzburg. In 1938, Leinsdorf was hired as a conductor at the Metropolitan. How did he get the job in New York? “Lotte Lehmann had a lot to do with it. I knew her well in Salzburg. I coached her in some of her roles. But I’ve never quite pinned down who did what. Toscanini? He wasn’t on speaking terms with the Met. The direct line was Lehmann, Edward Johnson and Artur Bodanzky.

On Leinsdorf’s arrival in this country, there was visa trouble. His visa expired in 1938. “It took the help of a freshman Congressman named Lyndon Johnson to prepare the necessary 1egal formula for me to leave the country, go to Canada briefly, and apply to the American consulate for quick re-entry.”

Leinsdorf made his debut at the Met on January 21, 1938, conducting “Die Walküre.” Noel Straus wrote in The New York Times: “Although but 26 years old, the new director led his forces with a sure hand and in general made a favorable impression. If there was nothing startling about his work, it evidenced solid musicianship and was ripe with exceptional promise.”

Some months later, the Met was ripe with complaints. The Wagnerian wing, led by Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, felt that Leinsdorf was not yet ready to conduct at the Met.

“To my fairly accurate memory, there was never an overt fight between us,” said Leinsdorf. “There was a disapproval of my musical ways. Bodanzky had got them used to a style—to get through as fast and easily as they could. He speeded up Wagner’s tempos till it wasn’t even funny. Lauritz told me, ‘You know, you may be right with your· tempos, but nobody can sing these operas three times a week your way.’”

Leinsdorf was at the Met until 1943. He left to become conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. A few months later, he was inducted into the army. He was honorably discharged 18 months later. From 1947 to 1955, he was conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic. Then there was a season as director 0f the New York City Opera. He went back to the Met as guest conductor and was there until the call came from Boston.

Leinsdorf lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1939. They have five children: David, 21; Gregor, 19; Joshua, 18; Hester, 15; and Jennifer, 11.

At one time, Leinsdorf played bridge not infrequently. Now, he says, he finds all games, after the first few minutes, exceedingly boring. He reads a great deal about politics, government and European history. “My greatest relaxation is moving mentally in totally different directions, meeting people on a totally different track—for example, Cambridge or M.I.T. people.”

A Leinsdorf admirer says, “For the first time in his career, Erich is in the right job at the right time.”

Leinsdorf replies: “If this is true, one has to believe in certain constellations.” He adds: “I remember my first rehearsal, as guest conductor, in Boston. It was January 31, 1961, a Tuesday. From my first second on that stage, I was at home.”

Erich Leinsdorf, conductor of the Boston Symphony, was elected Musician of the Year in MUSICAL AMERICA’s 1963 poll of the nation’s music critics and editors.