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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.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos, who did not specify the cause.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
As a young conductor, he introduced Berlioz\u2019s epic five-act opera \u201cLes Troyens\u201d (\u201cThe Trojans\u201d) to New York in a 1972 Carnegie Hall performance deemed \u201chighly successful\u201d at the time<\/a> by Raymond Ericson of The New York Times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the end of his career, Mr. Nelson was so closely identified with Berlioz, one of France\u2019s most extravagant musicians, that the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph wrote, \u201cJohn Nelson was clearly born with Berlioz in his genes.\u201d<\/p>\n That remark came in a 2017 review of Mr. Nelson\u2019s much-praised recording of \u201cLes Troyens\u201d<\/a> with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and a cast that included the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those discs \u2014 \u201cthe first great \u2018French\u2019 recording\u201d of the opera, Le Monde called<\/a> them \u2014 won Gramophone magazine\u2019s Recording of the Year award in 2018. (For The Sunday Times of London, it was the Recording of the Decade.)<\/p>\n In a 1988 interview<\/a> with Le Monde, Mr. Nelson spoke of \u201cthe care with the smallest details\u201d in the scores of Berlioz, demanding \u201carticulation in the interior of the phrases.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n These qualities are evident in his celebrated recording of \u201cLes Troyens,\u201d where the composer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmy patron saint in music.\u201d<\/p>\n The scores call for enormous forces and overpowering noise. But they also demand attention to what Berlioz called in his memoirs \u201csounds 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cLes Troyens,\u201d said the conductor had set \u201ca thrilling new benchmark for this epic opera.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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. \u201cBerlioz was always the favorite musician of those who do not know much about music,\u201d Claude Debussy wrote<\/a> in a review in 1903.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nearly 85 years later, when Mr. Nelson suggested that Paris inaugurate its new Opera Bastille hall with \u201cLes Troyens,\u201d he was told<\/a>, to his astonishment, that that was \u201cout of the question.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Nelson said of Berlioz in a 2019 interview<\/a>: \u201cIn France, back in those days, he wasn\u2019t particularly well respected; he\u2019s so out of the ordinary. Berlioz is just a little too far out for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He added: \u201cI think finally he\u2019s begun to be recognized in France as one of their greatest.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Nelson had much to do with that.<\/p>\n John Wilton Nelson was born on Dec. 6, 1941, in San Jos\u00e9, 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s degree in choral and orchestral conducting in 1965.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While still at Juilliard, he began conducting the Greenwich Philharmonia (now the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra) in Connecticut and the New Jersey Pro Arte Chorale and Orchestra.<\/p>\n His agent told him that he needed to \u201cmake a splash in New York,\u201d he recalled<\/a>, and so it was that in the spring of 1972, Mr. Nelson assembled the necessary forces to introduce the city to \u201cLes Troyens\u201d at Carnegie Hall. He had listened to a pioneering recording of it made by the British conductor Colin Davis<\/a>, and \u201cit lit something up in me,\u201d he said in the 2019 interview. Berlioz\u2019s \u201cmusical language is so different from anybody else\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n The following year, 1973, the Metropolitan Opera called on him to replace the ailing Rafael Kubelik<\/a> in a performance of the same work; Peter G. Davis<\/a> of The New York Times said in his review<\/a> that the young conductor \u201cexercised real authority.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Nelson\u2019s career was launched. A profile in The Times two years later called him \u201cthe bright new hope\u201d 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.<\/p>\n His notable recordings include Berlioz\u2019s \u201cBeatrice et Benedict\u201d and his orchestral oeuvre; Haydn\u2019s \u201cThe Creation\u201d; Beethoven\u2019s \u201cMissa Solemnis\u201d and symphonies; Handel\u2019s \u201cMessiah\u201d; and contemporary works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n After Mr. Nelson\u2019s death, in an interview on the French radio station France Musique, Alain Lanceron, his producer at Warner Classics, spoke<\/a> of the \u201chumanity about him that came through in his recordings.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Nelson himself had a humble attitude toward the works he performed. \u201cMy God is my composer,\u201d he told<\/a> the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 2009. \u201cIf I serve myself, or if I serve anything else other than the composer, I feel like I\u2019m being dishonest as an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n