Welcome to Canada Files. I'm Valerie Pringle. My guest today is Yannick Nézet-Séguin who is the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and only the third person to hold that position in the history of the Met. He is also music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain in his hometown of Montreal for life and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has won three Grammys and coached Bradley Cooper for his movie Maestro. His career has been a stunning rise since he decided to become a conductor at the age of 10. I spoke with him at the Met. Maestro, hello. Hello. You've been music director here at the Met since 2018. Does it feel like your house now?
It does in many ways. Even though I should say in the same breath that it's such a huge organization as well. It's the biggest arts organization in the world. And I feel more like at the moment I'm the real custodian of this house. It's not mine, but I have the responsibility to make it into those times into the future. And it's beautiful to be in classical music because usually these institutions are so old and storied and famous, and we're reminded not only the institutions but the pieces we do that we're reminded every day that we're just passing these masterpieces through time. It's very humbling, but I do feel that yes, at the moment it's my house.
But it was terrifying at first, was it not? I mean understandably.
So the part, yes, I can't say it was not terrifying, but I also had this little voice in me that knew from many years before that this might happen in my career.
Well, speaking of meteoric rises, I mean you're 50 now but it's been like that in your career. Do you still feel like the boy wonder, the prodigy?
Oh, well, I never felt like a prodigy. Prod, for me, are really insanely gifted kids that are six years old and they play Rachmaninoff concerto, for me it's something. And I think I'm a hard worker and I knew what I wanted to do at a very young age. Well, you dreamed this life. Yes. And so I feel like a very lucky boy, that's for sure. And I also want to paraphrase my dear colleague Simon Rattle who said once, 'I wish to stay a young conductor all my life.' So that's what I want too, because a young conductor meaning being new, not being jaded, being always curious to meet new people, to meet new scores, to do better every day, whether it's Tosca or Bohème or Fire Shut Up in My Bones. I don't feel old, that's for sure. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what I want to be as an artist. And I think it's probably not only me or even only conductors. I think musicians in general are very lucky because it's built in our profession to every day go back to practice, to study, and try to be a better version of ourselves. And this means that at 50, I'm sure I'm better than at 20, but I hope that I'm also not as good as how I'm going to be at 70 or 80 or 90 because we never retire. So I'm at the middle of my career now.
What do you think makes a great conductor?
I used to say communication. Communication is very important. That's basically what we do as a conductor. We communicate through our gestures, through the stick, the baton, through the shoulders, but also through the eyes, through every part of the body, it is an expression at the service of the music. So that the musicians of the orchestra, singing, everyone knows and can get inspired by the message we want to give. But more and more I would say that the primary quality of us as communicators is authenticity. Because what's the best quality of a conductor? You ask a musician randomly, they say we want the conductor to be clear. Of course, you want to be clear, then we're going to say inspiring and funny and knowledgeable and everything, but clear because if you're not clear nobody knows what to do. But the key to being clear is to be authentic. If you are doing really what you believe in with the pieces and you're not afraid of showing it to the musicians around you, that's authenticity and that's clarity. And that takes a lifetime to really develop. But that's what I'm teaching my young fellow conductors more and more, being authentic.
From your childhood, music was everything. Your mom says you were uncommon and you even knew at 10 you wanted to conduct. How was that possible?
Well, I was blessed to be raised in a family where a lot of interests were there. The presence of a piano in the house, my sisters learning piano, my parents playing piano after dinner a little bit, they were not trained to a real professional degree, but still music was part of having a good time and part of life. And I guess it's because newspapers in Montreal and television and media in general, and that's why I mention it because it's so important. It's the responsibility I feel of the media to keep showing not only what people know what it's about, but showing when it's a little bit more mysterious, like a conductor in an orchestra. The media at that time were covering a lot the Montreal Symphony because they were going on tour to Europe and they were making recordings. So in the papers, what I would see first was OSM or Symphony. So it just caught my attention and I asked my parents, I want to see what this is about. And once I saw it for the first time, the rest is history. You know, you said I that's my destiny. Yes. Give me a baton. I remember that. I've got a bow tie and a baton. Watch me go. I was learning the pieces which was basically putting a record on and on several times, making a choreography on it and basically thinking that okay I'm learning the piece and then going to my parents and saying I know this Mozart symphony now I can conduct it.
Yeah. So to be fair, you were also trained as a classical pianist. So you really knew your music even though it never felt like it was going to be your destiny.
In order, what happened is that I started to learn piano at age five, and I liked it. I enjoyed it without feeling that this was my destiny at all. And it's when I started singing in a choir and seeing an orchestra that everything made sense together, because for me music is about sharing in a group. I admire very much the great pianists of our time and the great violinists, but for me there was something too lonely about it. I wanted to be with a group. I wanted to share music with a hundred people, whether it's singing or playing an instrument. And I still don't know exactly why I saw myself really on the podium. What was this instinct that this was my place? But I remember liking the fact that I could be with people and still being a leader, which I guess I showed signs of being a leader even in my little elementary classroom. But I loved school too. I loved so many things and that's why I also wanted to become an architect at some point, a journalist, an economist. But never seriously enough to detract me from becoming a conductor.
You know, I'm wondering what you hear in your head before your arms move. I mean, as you say, the score and everyone's part, it's so complex and you hear it before you conduct it.
Of course. It's like anything in life. It's a skill to be able first to read music and be able to imagine when it's one line. Then when it's piano, it's two lines and it's already more complex because you have chords. Then when it's an orchestra, it's all the instruments superposed on a page and you have to learn. It's not unlike speed reading. You read a script or a book and your eye and your brain are able, without reading every word, to go to the most important part. It's not unlike that as a skill, but that's the beginning. That skill afterwards is to be an artist about it. So, what does that score say to me? What is the emotion? And therefore know how to convey that to the orchestra with a gesture. And that's why we need to hear it before because the upbeat, which is just the beat before it starts, has to be charged with whatever emotion you want to convey. If it's intimate, if it's forceful, if it's angry, if it's grand. It's a little bit like theater in a way, but we never think about how it looks. We have to think only about how we feel and trust that this is how it's going to be perceived.
But you say you've got to have a cold head and a warm heart. How does that work?
Well, because if we get too wrapped up in our music, then we're not safe anymore. We're not clear anymore. It has happened to me, especially in my youth. You get so enthusiastic and then it becomes like... I don't drive. I don't have a driver's license. Never learned. I'm not against it, it just never happened. But I drive orchestras. And a lot of my metaphors are what I imagine driving is. When you drive, you need to always be focused. But the warm heart, this is what makes music what it is. It cannot be just something analytical. And that's dangerous for a conductor because we have so many things to think about, especially in an opera because you have a long pit with all the musicians in a big distance from each other. They can't hear each other. We have to guide also who's on the stage, sometimes backstage, offstage, people behind. There's a lot of traffic to do, and yet it has to be all done with the right emotion in the music. There's no shortcut. I can't stress enough how it takes time to study, not only in life, but any new score or even any score, even if it's not new to me, I have to study so many hours in order to arrive at the right level of freedom to express what I want to express.
