Like a comet blazing across the sky, the conductor Marcello Viotti brought great excitement to our musical life, and now, much too soon, he is gone, dying on February 15, 2005 aged 50, suffering a massive stroke after conducting a rehearsal of Massenet’s opera Manon with his Munich Radio Orchestra. When a conductor comes to this country for the first time, great is the curiosity, both about his musicianship and his personality. Hanging on the phone in Sydney for news of his first concerts in Brisbane, I well remember the first reports. At the post concert get-together, Marcello was being mobbed by women. Somewhere nearby, his wife Marie-Laurence had her own circle of admirers: ‘You should see her! She’s more like a racing car driver’s wife than a conductor’s!’. Marcello’s driving exploits in his Ferrari, we were to learn, made this truer than we suspected. The glamorous Marie-Laurence was a match for her dashing husband. The more we got to know this couple, the deeper and richer they made the acquaintance seem. Several times they brought the whole family to Australia – four children, the eldest in her late teens at the time of her father’s death. They liked Australia- indeed Marcello and Marie-Laurence seriously considered coming to live here, a good place, they thought, for children to go to school. Marie-Laurence, a violinist, was a true partner to Marcello in his musical activities, as many of which as possible she tried to attend.

Marcello seemed to like us, too. He forged a very quick bond with each of the orchestras with which he worked in Australia, and that was soon all of them.

Queensland was a relationship that soon went further – the first orchestra here of which Marcello Viotti became Principal Guest Conductor. One performance which stands out in the memory, with them, was of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, because Marcello was so proud of the way they played it, and told anyone who would listen. He was like that: with charm and persuasiveness went a vast enthusiasm. As we explored repertoire with him, more and more of the background he brought to it came to the surface. The German Requiem of Brahms, for example, which he conducted with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. When he was music director in Bremen, as a parting gift they gave him a facsimile of Brahms’ own score – it was in Bremen that Brahms had conducted the very first performance. That facsimile score is gone now, destroyed in the fire which burnt Marcello’s home along with his library, at Petite Rosselle near Metz in northern France. Not too far from where Marcello came from: he was born in Vallorbe, in the Jura mountains in Switzerland, which is where his body was taken back for burial. His parents were Italian, from the Piedmont. This background made him multilingual, fluent in French, Italian, German, and increasingly English. To those who got close enough to find out, Marcello revealed himself as a devout Catholic, with a twist, which was that on his mother’s side of the family the background was Waldensian, what the French call the ‘Vaudois des Alpes’, which seemed to destined him to keep his emotional homeland in the Swiss Pays de Vaud, and in Turin, in Piedmont/Savoy, where he had his first orchestra.

Performing choral works with Marcello Viotti soon brought out something else: his training as a professional choral singer. Along with cello and piano, which he studied in Lausanne, the voice was his instrument. At the time when he was singing in the choirs which performed with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, he formed a wind ensemble, which that orchestra’s chief conductor of the time, Wolfgang Sawallisch, heard and suggested Marcello should make a career as a conductor. Which he did, at a sometimes alarming rate. In Australia, we sensed how well his career was going, from the increasing difficulty of getting time from him. But we never saw the main part of it, which was in opera. To experience that, you had to travel, and whenever I did, I made a point of trying to catch up with Marcello, seeing his Hérodiade of Massenet at the Vienna State Opera (with Placido Domingo, Agnes Baltsa and Marcello’s great friend the bass Ferrucccio Furlanetto). Bellini’s I Puritani in Munich (with Edita Gruberova), and Bizet’s Carmen in San Francisco, the last time I saw Marcello, fortunately and typically with the whole family around him, his lively and musical children mocking the French accents of the cast, much to his annoyance! Marcello could afford to be choosy about his engagements, turning down the Metropolitan Opera in New York until he was offered a new production, which turned out to be Halévy’s La Juive, again with Domingo. It was with a heavy heart but pleasure for him that we recognised that his major appointment as music director of the restored La Fenice Opera in Venice would make regular visits to Australia almost impossible (what was it about Marcello and fire?).

Because my involvement with him was as a programmer, as well as a friend, my memories are of his sense of adventure, and his versatility. Making programs with him was fun, though he once let me down. We chuckled over the Swiss connection he and I had in common when we programmed Honegger’s Fourth Symphony with TSO, subtitled ‘Deliciae Basilienses’, the Latin for a gingerbread treat from Basle. He promised to bring some with him, but he forgot… Marcello premiered some Australian music, too. When he was rehearsing a new piece with WASO, a power drill started up backstage, and one of the players said ‘I think the soloist has arrived’. Marcello said later ‘I knew I must not laugh, but it was VERY hard not to’. Another story illustrates why he was the maestro, we the backroom boys. When the Brahms Requiem in Brisbane needed an interval, I suggested adding Haydn’s short Lamentation Symphony, in the right mood. Marcello, explaining the change to the audience, declared ‘Whenever I perform Brahms’ Requiem, I always precede it with this symphony’. You couldn’t help liking him.

Liszt’s Faust Symphony in the Melbourne Festival, a Brisbane Festival program which fascinatingly combined the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov, Stravinsky’s Firebird, Wagner’s Good Friday music from Parsifal, and Bruckner’s Te Deum. Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes with TSO… Marcello could always come up with something appropriate to each orchestra, and often new to the audience as well. Often there were choirs, which meant a lot to him, and loved working with him. His easy musical authority was that of a colleague whose direction was accepted with joy. He was proud of what was achieved, together. And he leapt into the breach, as when he had to sing the bass soloist’s part, to get him back on track, in a Melbourne Festival performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. And since he died in Munich, struck down at a rehearsal of the orchestra whose imaginative programs were his doing, I record witnessing his debut as an actor, in the Prinzregenten Theater, where he turned on the podium towards the audience and declaimed the part of the King in a play with music by Gounod, Les deux reines de France. It was in Munich, too, that he left after a performance, at 11pm, saying ‘I’m driving home, now – to France – it’s the best time: 200 kph all the way’. He didn’t like being away from his family, yet he was in demand all the time for things he wouldn’t refuse. A terrible health crisis forced him to cancel one visit to Australia, and we were worried for him, with good reason. He was a musician of rare all-round gifts, of leadership and direction as well as sheer performing ability. Everybody wanted some of him. It was exciting to have a part of that, for all too short a time.