By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Earlier this year, Sir André Previn (knighted in 1996) was dining with Sir Colin Davis following a performance by Davis of Elgar's First Symphony. In the course of the meal, Davis said, "You know, André, you and I are the only two English people who perform a great deal of Elgar."

Previn smiled. "It's very nice of you to say that, Colin. But actually I'm not English."

Davis was taken aback.

"In fact," Previn continued, "it was you who told me to look over the scores of Elgar's two symphonies about 25 years ago."

"Well you haven't closed them since!" Davis responded. "So I always took it for granted that it was in your blood."

The conversation illustrates André Previn's uniquely international image in the musical community. In fact, his British knighthood is a rare honor he shares with only two other Americans, Bob Hope and General Norman Schwartzkopf. German by birth, Previn himself finds his position amusing. "Because I lived in England for 20 years the British think I'm English; because I've had so much work in Vienna I feel completely at home there, and a couple of years ago I found myself included in a German coffee-table book about `Famous German Conductors.' But while I have predilections for other countries, I feel in my persona and my music to be completely American."

The Three Tenors aside, Previn is one of the few classical musicians whose name is familiar to the proverbial man in the street. He is certainly a Compleat Musician, whose versatility and personal charm have earned him esteem and affection in a variety of fields. He is a conductor of the world's leading orchestras and a superlative pianist and accompanist, a chamber musician of refinement, and a jazz musician of genuine creativity. Among his 400 recordings are major symphonic cycles of Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. On television, he was host, conductor, and pianist in the PBS series "Previn and the Pittsburgh" with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Add to that over 100 hours of programming for BBC television and a recent seven-part video series "Mozart on Tour" with the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he has enjoyed a long-standing relationship as guest conductor. He also teaches regularly at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Curtis Institute of Music.

A graceful, witty writer, his most recent book, the 1991 autobiography No Minor Chords-My Early Days in Hollywood (Doubleday), is a puckish blend of anecdote and self-deflating irony. And of course, there's the purely creative Previn, the award-winning composer of works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, stage and film, and now, his first opera: A Streetcar Named Desire, to a libretto by Philip Littell based on Tennessee Williams' drama. Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, it received its world premiere in September 1998 at the War Memorial Opera House, under Previn's own baton. Through a life crammed with incident and activity, Previn has also managed to retain a youthful attitude and appearance that belie the fact that he turns 70 in April. "I don't go around in a cloud of nostalgia," Previn said wryly, prior to the opening. "But occasionally it occurs to me that much of what I have done has simply been due to a series of events that proved fortunate."

Born April 6, 1929, in Berlin, André Ludwig Prewin (later Anglicized Previn) got his earliest musical exposure from his father, Jack, a prominent attorney and keen amateur pianist. "Though he was not a trained musician, he adored music and had taught himself to play," Previn recalls. "And though he played with lots of wrong notes, his great enthusiasm made it irresistible. I had received piano lessons early on, and every evening he and I would flog through four-hand arrangements of Beethoven symphonies, Brahms, Schumann, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, everything. He insisted that we maintain the tempo and not stop for mistakes, and it was fabulous practice that taught me to sight read like a demon."

André was nine, and studying at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik, when Nazism ended the Prewin family's comfortable life. They left all their possessions behind in their spacious Berlin apartment, lest the authorities grow suspicious, and slipped away to Paris, ostensibly for a brief visit. It lasted a year. Time wasn't wasted, though; André was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with, among others, the celebrated organist Marcel Dupré. Meanwhile, Prewin's law partners liquidated the family holdings, but as large sums of money could not be spirited out of Germany, they funneled as much as they possibly could into the most luxurious steamship accommodations available to New York, and thence to Los Angeles.

Jack Prewin had chosen Los Angeles because he had a distant cousin there. What he didn't yet know was that cousin Charles Prev- in was head of the music department at Universal Studios. It was Charles who persuaded Jack to adopt the American spelling of the name, to avoid a chronic mispronunciation that suggested a bi-syllabic prune.

At ten, the German-speaking André found himself at sea again when his father enrolled him in an ordinary public school. "For a while the kids thought I was a moron," he chuckles, "but I learned English with phenomenal speed." As a double feature cost a dime in those days, he would attend the same movie three days in a row. "As soon as I grasped the plot, I could pick up the odd phrase and build up my vocabulary." While conquering English, Previn continued his musical progress, especially score reading. "On Hollywood Boulevard there was a little music shop-now home of the Orange Julius and porno-where I would spend my allowance on miniature scores, which I'd read at the piano. Whatever I didn't know, I tried to teach myself."

Previn wasn't entirely self-taught. There were theory studies with violinist Joseph Achron, composition studies with the easygoing Italian, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and eventually conducting studies with Pierre Monteux. Engaged as a private accompanist by the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti, a staunch champion of new music, Previn waded through "reams of Bulgarian sonatas and other manuscripts continually sent to him."

"Just as I would have had a more `respectable' conducting background if I had put in some years as a répétiteur in the opera house in Baden-Baden," says Previn, "I would have had more credibility as a jazz artist if I had begun by hanging out at 4 in the morning in some joint in Kansas City."

By accident, Szigeti also revealed another world to Previn. "One day we finished reading through some unspeakable new things, and Szigeti suggested that we relax by playing some Beethoven trios with a cellist who was visiting. But when he asked me to choose one, I had to confess, in abject humiliation, that I didn't know any. So over the next few months we systematically played through the trio repertoire-Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann-and I discovered what chamber music is about. It was unbelievably generous of him." Previn remains an assiduous chamber musician and has initiated chamber programs with players of every orchestra he has conducted.

Other musicians weren't so unstinting. There was an awkward visit with a taciturn Arnold Schoenberg, who challenged Previn to a game of Ping-Pong, lost, and showed him the door. There was also a brief encounter with the very Teutonic Ernst Toch, who put young Previn through an afternoon's audition before declaring that he had no talent. "But I thought to myself, `To Hell with you! I do too have talent.' Fortunately, it just didn't occur to me that he could be right."

In the midst of all this, another audition bore fruit. In 1945, after playing for the cream of MGM's musical hierarchy-with the idea of a possible screen career as a boy genius-André was signed to a contract to work off-screen, in the music department. His first piece of work was a set of jazzy variations on "Three Blind Mice" for pianist José Iturbi to play in a comedy called Holiday in Mexico. After turning it in overnight (he was still in high school), he gained further respect from his veteran colleagues by orchestrating the piece.

Previn eventually wrote original scores and adaptations for dozens of films, achieving his first Academy Award nomination for the biographical Three Little Words (1950), in which Red Skelton and Fred Astaire portrayed the songwriting team of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. (He was a private in the Army at the time and received word of the honor while digging a latrine.) Kiss Me Kate (1953) brought another nomination, and Gigi (1958) clinched his first Oscar, which was followed by Oscars for his work on Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma La Douce (1963), and My Fair Lady (1964).

 Despite the admitted gimcrackery that went into creating movie music, as training ground for practical musicianship, the MGM music department was equivalent to an extension of the Conservatoire. Indeed, it was better," says Previn, "because I learned by immediate hands-on experience how to write and score music with a definite purpose. Regardless of whether the music is first-rate or tenth-rate, no classroom can match the experience of writing and arranging a piece, and hearing it played by an orchestra three days later. I would sit at the rehearsals with my scores and make notes about the instrumentation, which combinations were effective and which were awful. And once I started conducting that stuff, with orchestra players who were among the best in the world, I quickly learned a rehearsal technique that has proven invaluable."

Though many serious composers from Korngold and Alex North to John Corigliano went to Hollywood over the years, Previn is possibly the only serious composer and conductor to emerge from the tinsel machine. Admittedly, his podium route hasn't always been easy. In 1969, during his rocky tenure as music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra (1967-70), he was appointed music director of the London Symphony (1969-79), which named him Conductor Laureate in 1993. While there, he also accepted the music directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony (1976-84), from which he went to the Royal Philharmonic as music director (1985-88) and later principal conductor (1988-91). Amidst these activities, Previn made regular guest appearances with other major orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic in Vienna and at the Salzburg Festival.

The invitation to succeed Carlo Maria Giulini at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic brought him back to the West Coast in 1985. He has mixed feelings about the ensuing four years there. "The orchestra itself is wonderful," he says, "but in Los Angeles absolutely nothing takes precedence over the movie business- no matter how many museums they build. When I first arrived as music director, I was going through the schedule of my coming season with the orchestra's general manager, Ernest Fleischmann. He pointed out one week during which we would not get into the music center because the Academy would be taking over. In surprise I exclaimed, `We can't play here because Neville [Marriner] is bringing over the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields?'

"Ernest laughed and said, `You have been gone a long time. I mean the Academy Awards!'

"I suddenly realized how things were done out there. And I didn't like it."

Previn observes that like his conducting, his jazz career had an offbeat start. "Just as I would have had a more `respectable' conducting background if I had put in some years as a répétiteur in the opera house in Baden-Baden, I would have had more credibility as a jazz artist if I had begun by hanging out at 4 in the morning in some joint in Kansas City. But when I was a kid in the mid-1940s, I had no idea about jazz.

"I'm the only Vienna Philharmonic conductor who ever worked the Apollo Theatre," Previn laughs. Even so, for a while he says he labored under "the misapprehension that my jazz work stigmatized my classical work. But I'm cured of that."

"Then I heard Art Tatum's record, `Sweet Lorraine,' and was bowled over by his transformation of a fairly puerile 32-bar tune into an amazing structure. So I did something utterly crazy-I wrote the damned thing down from the record, playing every florid bar 100 times. Talk about a waste of time for someone who wants to learn an essentially improvisational art. But I learned that piece and never forgot it."

Previn never wrote jazz down again. But he did learn by following "the time-honored method of slavishly imitating Tatum and Teddy Wilson and other people whose records I liked. I finally developed into a bad jazz pianist. But it improved." By 1958 he had improved sufficiently to receive Downbeat magazine's "Musician of the Year" award, and his album of songs from My Fair Lady with Shelly Manne and Leroy Vinegar was the first gold jazz recording in history. Previn has always played with the top jazz names-Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday. "I'm the only Vienna Philharmonic conductor who ever worked the Apollo Theatre," he laughs. Even so, for a while he says he labored under "the misapprehension that my jazz work stigmatized my classical work. But I'm cured of that. And I now make one jazz record a year."

Turning to his own music, Previn says that until now he has always characterized himself as a conductor who likes to compose. "I've hidden behind that notion to some degree." And his Hollywood experience of writing music for a definite purpose and deadline has influenced his approach to original creativity. "To me, a commission doesn't mean money, it means the promise of a performance. When I wrote the cello sonata for Yo-Yo Ma and the song cycle for Barbara Bonney, I needed the certainty of a specific artist and performance date. It's a mania of sorts. Maybe it's a character flaw."

Among his current commissions is one from the Vienna Philharmonic for an orchestral work they have scheduled for their Mozart Week in 2000 and their subsequent tour. His docket also includes a work for the Emerson Quartet and possibly some songs for soprano Renée Fleming.

Previn has written a lot of vocal music in the course of his career, songs for Dame Janet Baker and Elisabeth Söderstrom during his London days, and more recently for Kathleen Battle, Sylvia McNair, and Barbara Bonney. And, of course, there are his musicals, Coco (with Alan Jay Lerner), The Good Companions (with Johnny Mercer), and Rough Crossing (with Tom Stoppard). "I'd rather write vocal music than perhaps anything else. But I never had the temerity to consider an opera."

Several years ago an opera company in France approached Previn with a scenario. "It was a sort of Idomeneo revisited," he says, "and after careful consideration, I had to decline, because I just can't write
an evening's worth of music for characters in sandals and togas."

Then Lotfi Mansouri asked if Previn would consider writing an opera based on A Streetcar Named Desire. "In fact, I had always regarded it as an opera with missing music, because the situations are so emotionally potent they quite naturally beg to be expressed in song."

Uncut, however, the play is nearly four hours long. "Add music and it would be endless," he says, complimenting Philip Littell (librettist of Conrad Susa's Dangerous Liaisons) for his "superb ability to trim Williams' original down to a workable length without removing anything important." From a dramatic viewpoint, Previn observes that people remember the play for Marlon Brando's Stanley. "But if you re-read it, Blanche is the central figure. It is Blanche who provokes the other characters, who are there to give her character substance. So I have tried to write an opera all about her."

Stylistically, the one thing Previn says he has avoided for the opera is the clichéd perception of New Orleans jazz. "For a while I considered having a jazz group onstage or offstage. But I thought it would be too predictable." Instead, he says, he has written certain turns of phrase into the orchestra parts that "are not unlike jazz phrases, if the players give them the right inflection."

Previn's Streetcar could well prove an opera for our time, especially now that there are more than a few available singers like Renée Fleming, Elizabeth Futral, and Rodney Gilfrey with the appropriate physiques des rôles. "The singers are wonderful," says Previn, with characteristic generosity, "and you can bet on the librettist, the producer, and the play itself. In fact the only one who can really sink this thing is me. If the music isn't up to it . . ." His voice trails off. His recording company, Deutsche Grammophon, seems to have no doubts: Streetcar was recorded and rushed out before the end of the year.

 Previn says that he harbors "no delusions about writing for posterity. First, I don't have that kind of absolute confidence that what I write will be of interest to anybody after I'm gone. More important, I want to hear it now, so that I can determine whether what I put on paper matches what I had in mind."

That, to him, is a trustworthy yardstick of success.

And with his first opera under his belt, he has agreed to write another. For San Francisco in 2000, he says, if he can get the rights to the story he wants and secure the right librettist. "Call me," he smiles, "a late bloomer."

Barrymore Laurence Scherer, a music critic for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Bravo!: A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed, recently published by Dutton. A regular contributor to Gramophone, Opera News, and BBC Music Magazine, he is also a commentator for National Public Radio.