Goodbye, Claudio Abbado. You helped us glimpse eternity

Fellini’s credo ‘the visionary is the only true realist’ could also be applied to the life of Claudio Abbado, who died earlier this week in Bologna at the age of 80. It would be wrong to think of Abbado as a dreamer, for conducting at the angelic heights to which he ascended is a matter of serious thought, but he had the gift, rarer than is commonly supposed, of liberating musicians. Being liberated, they gave performances of such beauty and emotional power that those who heard them will consider their lives enriched; in many cases transformed. Milan-born, Abbado grew up musically in Vienna, where he studied with Hans Swarowsky, and where, three decades later, he became music director of the State Opera before his appointment as the city’s director of music, a kind of honorary knighthood. By then he had also held principal posts at La Scala, the celebrated opera house in his native city, and the London Symphony Orchestra. His accession to Herbert von Karajan’s throne in Berlin came in October 1989, a month before the Wall came down, when members of the Philharmonic chose him to be that mighty orchestra’s first non-German leader. If Milan and Vienna caught the best of him, that wasn’t necessarily Abbado’s fault. The Karajan succession was always going to be a problem, particularly to a conductor whose approach to music-making was markedly different from Karajan’s, and he endured serious illness towards the end of his 13-year stewardship in Potsdamer Platz. He was not expected to survive the cancer that led to the loss of his stomach but, aided by the experience of conducting Tristan und Isolde with the Berliners in Japan, which he told friends had saved his life, he enjoyed a glowing final decade as conductor emeritus to the world. In England he will be best remembered for the year-long Mahler, Vienna and the Twentieth Century festival with the LSO in 1985.