Igor Markevitch, conductor and composer

The Svengali of conductors, whose piercing eyes and total control over every detail (and every member of an orchestra) produced performances of electrifying power and precision.  In life, a quiet, refined and exquisitely polite man.  Rehearsing an orchestra, he was an utter perfectionist -- obsessively polishing details like a watchmaker until everything was razor-sharp.  At the performance, watch out!  He had the concentrated intensity of a laser beam. 

 

This photograph is inscribed to my husband Mark Starr -- who studied with Markevitch.

I was present at his rehearsals for Le Sacre du Printemps with the Orchestre national in Paris, after which I had the pleasure of meeting him and talking with him for a while.  Le Sacre du Printemps was Markevitch's signature piece.  He conducted it more times with more orchestras around the world than anyone else.  In the green room, Markevitch recounted: Before Stravinsky died, the composer gave Markevitch a list of corrections in the orchestral parts.  On his death bed, Stravinsky told Markevitch, "You have to promise to correct these mistakes in the materials of all the orchestras you conduct.  You are the only person who can get rid of those damn wrong notes in the parts of all these orchestras."  But then Markevitch added: "I didn't have the courage to tell poor Stravinsky that I had corrected all those wrong notes in the materials of many orchestras in the past.  But whenever I returned years later to conduct Le Sacre again with those same orchestras, I discovered that the librarians had erased my corrections!"

It is curious that the long biography of Markevitch in the latest Grove Dictionary deals almost entirely with his early career as an avant-garde composer, in which he is ranked among the seminal figures in 20th Century music.  His five-decades long conducting career is virtually ignored.

After Markevitch's death in 1983, he became the target of a bizarre and utterly unfounded attack on his personal reputation.  In 1978, Italy's premier Aldo Moro was assassinated in Florence, in a street in front of the palace of the Princess Gaetani -- who decades earlier had been Igor Markevitch's first wife.  In the late 1990s, in the still on-going investigation into the crime, one of the suspects said he had been recruited by a man named Igor.  That was sufficient evidence for an investigating judge to charge that Igor Markevitch had been the terror mastermind behind the assassination of Aldo Moro.  Italy's press -- not only the sensational papers -- jumped on this absurd and totally unsubstantiated assertion.  In an ugly example of anti-Semitism, Italy's leading newspaper, Il corriere della sera, announced in its lead sentence that Igor Markevitch, a conductor of Jewish heritage, was responsible for the assassination of Aldo Moro.  Suffice to say, never once in the decade since that outrageous charge was made in public has a scintilla of evidence ever emerged to incriminate Markevitch.  Nor, as it turns out, was Markevitch a Jew.  He was a non-religious Russian, with no Jewish heritage in his background, who traced his ancestry back to Czar Ivan Susnanin (Markevitch often conducted the opera by Glinka of the same name for just that reason.)  That Markevitch was mistaken for a Jew may have occurred from his close association to the Israel Philharmonic -- an orchestra that he guest-conducted on many occasions.