Herbert Blomstedt, who headed the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1995 and led orchestras in Scandinavia and Germany during a career spanning more than seven decades, died Wednesday. He was 99 years old.
Blomstedt died at his home in Gothenburg, Sweden, according to his management agency KünstlerSekretariat am Gasteig.
His last performance was at the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall on May 15, when he took to the stage in a wheelchair and struggled through Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, pausing for several minutes in the third movement. It was changed for concerts on the next two days and canceled concerts planned for the future this year.
Blomstedt was scheduled to perform in 2027, very close to his 100th birthday, including with the Vienna Philharmonic next June.
“Every measure, every note is shared by us, and it’s a very intense communication,” he said of his conducting in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” last year. “Like intense sex.”
Blomstedt was a Seventh-day Adventist who refused to rehearse on Friday nights and Saturdays because of the Sabbath, but led performances on those days because he considered himself a musical preacher.
He won a Grammy Award for his recordings of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” with the San Francisco Symphony in 1993 and Johannes Brahms’s “Ein Deutsches Requiem” in 1996.
“My mission is to bring good music to as many people as possible,” he said in a 2020 interview published by the DW Music YouTube channel. “It makes you think differently. It gives you a keener sense of proportion and beauty.”
Blomstedt was principal conductor of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden from 1954 to 1963, music director of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra from 1962 to 1968, principal conductor of the Danish Radio Symphony from 1967 to 1977, and principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony from 1977 to 1982, and later the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Staatskapelle Dresden in Germany. He became the principal conductor of the Semperoper. 1975-85.
“For me, it’s almost like flipping a light switch,” he added. “When I hear the voice, it transforms me. I’m in heaven.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony from 2020-25, said he asked Blomstedt in a 2021 interview with the London Philharmonic Orchestra how he was filled with the joy that orchestras responded to.
“I refuse to experience stress,” Salonen recalled Blomstedt telling him. “I only do things that I absolutely love. I only direct music that’s important to me, and I only work with people that I enjoy and in some cases love.”
After leaving San Francisco, Blomstedt was principal conductor of the Hamburg NDR Symphony Orchestra from 1996 to 1998 and music director of the Leipzig Gewanhaus Orchestra from 1998 to 2005.
He was born on July 11, 1927, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Swedish parents.
His family returned to Sweden in 1929, and he attended the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm and Uppsala University. He studied first with Igor Markevitch and then with Jean Morel at the Juilliard School. As his scholarship to Juilliard was about to expire, Leonard showed up at Bernstein’s apartment across from Carnegie Hall at The Osborne without an appointment, rang the doorbell, and left half an hour later on a scholarship to study with Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Blomstedt was impressed by Bernstein’s musicianship but disliked his enthusiastic demeanor on the podium.
Blomstedt won the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in 1953, made his professional debut with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in 1954, and won the Salzburg Conducting Competition in 1955.
She married her ex-husband, Waltraud Petersen, in 1955 and she died in 2003. He is survived by four daughters and seven grandchildren.