John Nelson, Conductor Who Got France to Cherish Berlioz, Dies at 83

New York Times

09-04-2025

John Nelson, a genial American conductor who made France love one of its own underappreciated musical sons, Hector Berlioz, died on March 31 at his home in Chicago. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos, who did not specify the cause.
Mr. Nelson made Berlioz (1803-1869), the wild man of 19th-century French music, his passion, performing and promoting his work ceaselessly during a career that stretched over 50 years on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a young conductor, he introduced Berlioz's epic five-act opera 'Les Troyens' ('The Trojans') to New York in a 1972 Carnegie Hall performance deemed 'highly successful' at the time by Raymond Ericson of The New York Times.
By the end of his career, Mr. Nelson was so closely identified with Berlioz, one of France's most extravagant musicians, that the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph wrote, 'John Nelson was clearly born with Berlioz in his genes.'
That remark came in a 2017 review of Mr. Nelson's much-praised recording of 'Les Troyens' with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast that included the American soprano Joyce DiDonato.
Those discs — 'the first great 'French' recording' of the opera, Le Monde called them — won Gramophone magazine's Recording of the Year award in 2018. (For The Sunday Times of London, it was the Recording of the Decade.)
In a 1988 interview with Le Monde, Mr. Nelson spoke of 'the care with the smallest details' in the scores of Berlioz, demanding 'articulation in the interior of the phrases.'
These qualities are evident in his celebrated recording of 'Les Troyens,' where the composer's mercurial shifts from delicacy to bombast within the same phrase are accomplished effortlessly in a recording that uses all six harps called for by Berlioz.
The son of Protestant missionaries whose household had little tolerance for theatrical excesses, Mr. Nelson exuberantly took up the composer who, until Richard Wagner, symbolized excess more than any other in the music of the 19th century. He called Berlioz 'my patron saint in music.'
The scores call for enormous forces and overpowering noise. But they also demand attention to what Berlioz called in his memoirs 'sounds independent of the principal melody, and of the accompanimental rhythm, and separated from each other at expanding or contracting distances in proportions impossible to predict.'
Here Mr. Nelson excelled. The odd, jagged inflections that often permeate a Berlioz principal melody were never minimized by him. Gramophone, in its review of 'Les Troyens,' said the conductor had set 'a thrilling new benchmark for this epic opera.'
Berlioz had always been a problem child in the pantheon of high romantic composers: too bombastic, noisy and rule breaking for his French compatriots, and too quirky and unpredictable for adherents of a more restrained classical canon. 'Berlioz was always the favorite musician of those who do not know much about music,' Claude Debussy wrote in a review in 1903.
Nearly 85 years later, when Mr. Nelson suggested that Paris inaugurate its new Opera Bastille hall with 'Les Troyens,' he was told, to his astonishment, that that was 'out of the question.'
Mr. Nelson said of Berlioz in a 2019 interview: 'In France, back in those days, he wasn't particularly well respected; he's so out of the ordinary. Berlioz is just a little too far out for them.'
He added: 'I think finally he's begun to be recognized in France as one of their greatest.'
Mr. Nelson had much to do with that.
John Wilton Nelson was born on Dec. 6, 1941, in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the son of Wilton and Thelma Nelson, who were missionaries with the Protestant Faith Mission. He returned to the United States when he was 11 to attend a private school in Orlando, Fla., where he began studying piano and organ.
He graduated from Wheaton College Conservatory of Music in Illinois in 1963 and later studied under the conductor Jean Morel at the Juilliard School in New York, where he received the Irving Berlin conducting prize and earned a master's degree in choral and orchestral conducting in 1965.
While still at Juilliard, he began conducting the Greenwich Philharmonia (now the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra) in Connecticut and the New Jersey Pro Arte Orchestra.
His agent told him that he needed to 'make a splash in New York,' he recalled, and so it was that in the spring of 1972, Mr. Nelson assembled the necessary forces to introduce the city to 'Les Troyens' at Carnegie Hall. He had listened to a pioneering recording of it made by the British conductor Colin Davis, and 'it lit something up in me,' he said in the 2019 interview. Berlioz's 'musical language is so different from anybody else's.'
The following year, 1973, the Metropolitan Opera called on him to replace the ailing Rafael Kubelik in a performance of the same work; Peter G. Davis of The New York Times said in his review that the young conductor 'exercised real authority.'
Mr. Nelson's career was launched. A profile in The Times two years later called him 'the bright new hope' of the Met staff. He would go on to conduct the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1987; the Opera Theater of St. Louis, with which he was associated from 1985 to 1991; and leading orchestras all over the world, including ones in Boston, Chicago and New York. In 1998, he became music director of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris (now the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris), where he remained for 10 years.
His notable recordings include Berlioz's 'Beatrice et Benedict' and his orchestral oeuvre; Haydn's 'The Creation'; Beethoven's 'Missa Solemnis' and symphonies; Handel's 'Messiah'; and contemporary works.
In addition to his daughter Ms. Chronopoulos, Mr. Nelson is survived by another daughter, Kirsten Nelson Hood; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Johnsen) Nelson, died in 2012.
After Mr. Nelson's death, in an interview on the French radio station France Musique, Alain Lanceron, his producer at Warner Classics, spoke of the 'humanity about him that came through in his recordings.'
Mr. Nelson himself had a humble attitude toward the works he performed. 'My God is my composer,' he told the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 2009. 'If I serve myself, or if I serve anything else other than the composer, I feel like I'm being dishonest as an artist.'