Legacy of Conducting

Celebrated conductor Leopold Stokowski, an original member of the faculty, saw Curtis as the perfect springboard for musicians to enter the Philadelphia Orchestra, taking charge of the orchestra himself to fully achieve his vision. His success was such that in time, approximately half of the Philadelphia Orchestra was composed of Curtis alumni–and still is today.

Stokowski led the Curtis Symphony Orchestra for three years before handing the reins to Artur Rodzinski, assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who began a program for conducting students that was continued by his successor Emil Młynarski. Although the tenures of these first three faculty members were short, by the time Fritz Reiner took over the program in 1931, four students had majored in conducting and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra had performed at the Academy of Music and Carnegie Hall, broadcast dozens of concerts on radio, and played for Curtis’s first opera production.

Both the orchestra and conducting program thrived under Reiner, a former conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra whose uncompromising standards were legendary. In 1939, Leonard Bernstein (’41) came to Curtis to study with Reiner on the recommendation of Dimitri Mitropopoulis, whom Bernstein later succeeded as the first American-born and American-trained music director and conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Looking back on his experience, Bernstein observed that Reiner “transmitted his own systems of knowledge, preparation, and technical competence in a way that made his students sometimes tremble, but ultimately bless him for it.” Unfortunately, Reiner was forced to leave Curtis in 1941, when financial constraints brought about by the war led to the discontinuation of the conducting program and suspension of the orchestra.

In 1945, the orchestra was reassembled, but it performed only occasionally until the appointment of Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1968. Two years later, Curtis appointed Max Rudolf to revive the conducting program. Rudolf was only at Curtis for a total of six years, but his influential book The Grammar of Conducting (1950) has been in use at Curtis and other institutions for decades.

Conducting at Curtis entered a new era in 1986 with the appointment of Otto-Werner Mueller as director of the orchestra and head of conducting studies. Mueller remained at Curtis for 26 years, serving as the principal teacher to more than half of Curtis’s conducting alumni to date. In addition to benefiting from Mueller’s guidance, during this time the Curtis Symphony Orchestra reinforced its historic ties with the Philadelphia Orchestra, performing under music directors Riccardo Muti, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Christoph Eschenbach.

Those ties were strengthened further in 2013 when Curtis appointed Yannick Nézet-Séguin, current music and artistic director of the Philadelphia Orchestra (as well as the Metropolitan Opera and Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain), as the mentor conductor for students in the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellowship program and director of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra. In recent years, Curtis has also maintained an important relationship with Osmo Vänskä, conductor laureate of the Minnesota Orchestra, who has conducted the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on several tours and on its recording of Scheherazade, the inaugural Curtis Studio release. Today, Curtis’s conducting students and orchestra have more opportunities and professional exposure than ever before, building on a vibrant history nearly a century in the making.