Maurice Abravanel

Abravanel's ancestors settled in Salonika in 1517, and his parents were both born there.

Maurice Abravanel (January 6, 1903 – September 22, 1993) was an American classical music conductor.

He is remembered as the conductor of the Utah Symphony for over 30 years.

Abravanel was born in Salonika, Rumelia Eyalet, Ottoman Empire (modern Thessaloniki, Greece).

He came from an illustrious Sephardic Jewish family, which was expelled from Spain in 1492 (see Isaac Abrabanel).

In 1909, the Abravanel family moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, where his father, Edouard de Abravanel, was a successful pharmacist.

For several years, the Abravanels lived in the same house as Ernest Ansermet, the conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

The young Abravanel played four-hand piano arrangements with Ansermet, began to compose, and met composers such as Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky.

He was passionate about music and knew he wanted a career as a musician.

He became the pianist for the municipal theatre and music critic for the city's daily newspaper.

Maurice's father, however, insisted on a career in medicine and sent him to the University of Zürich, where he was miserable at having to dissect corpses.

He wrote to his father that he would rather be second percussionist in an orchestra than a doctor, and his father finally relented.

Abravanel lived in Germany from 1922 to 1933, heavily involving himself in the music scene there.

In 1922, during the depression of the Weimar Republic, Abravanel, then age 19, moved to Berlin.

Despite the difficult economic situation, Berlin supported three opera houses, which staged performances every night of the year.

Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss and Otto Klemperer were all conducting opera in Berlin at that time.

Abravanel became a student of the composer Kurt Weill (three years his senior), who had to accept up to 46 students to make ends meet.

Abravanel later commented that Weill was "a lousy teacher", but became his close friend and enthusiastic supporter.

After a year of study, Abravanel landed a job as an accompanist at the opera in Neustrelitz, just north of Berlin.

At the time, this was a good career path towards becoming a conductor because the accompanist rehearsed and coached the singers and would sometimes be called on to substitute when the conductor was unable to conduct at short notice.

In 1924, the theatre in Neustrelitz burned down, and the four conductors found work elsewhere.

The members of the orchestra asked Abravanel if he would conduct performances at the castle.

He conducted orchestra concerts twice a week at the castle with no rehearsal.

He even received some pay.

In 1925, Abravanel received a position as choral director in Zwickau, in Saxony.

He spent two years there, conducting the operetta repertoire.

Because of his success in Zwickau, he was given a position as regular conductor at a better theatre in Altenburg.

After two years in Altenburg, Abravanel was appointed conductor at his first major opera house in Kassel.

In 1931, the director of the Berlin State Opera saw him conduct a performance of Verdi's La forza del destino.

He asked him to come to Berlin and conduct a performance at the Berlin State Opera.

He lived in Paris from 1933 to 1936, serving as music director of Balanchine's Paris Ballet, then conducting for two years in Australia.

He married singer Friedel Schako in 1933 and the couple moved to Paris that year when the Nazis came to power.

In 1936 Abravanel accepted a post at New York's Metropolitan Opera, becoming at age 33 the youngest conductor the Met had ever hired.

Abravanel was known as Maurice de Abravanel until 1938.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1940, after Schako eloped with the conductor Otto Klemperer: the pair "went careering around the country...leaving a trail of unpaid bills."

He became a U.S. citizen in 1943.

In 1947 he was hired as music director of the Utah Symphony, and over the next 30 years raised the ensemble to international prominence, leading the symphony in live radio broadcasts and releasing more than 100 commercial recordings.

In 1947, Abravanel married Lucy Menasse Carasso; they remained married until her death.

He married his third wife, Carolyn Firmage, in 1987.

He died in 1993 in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of 90.