Sir Jeffrey Tate obituary

Defying seemingly impossible odds over physical incapacity, the conductor Sir Jeffrey Tate, who has died aged 74, maintained an active and distinguished international career, centred latterly on what he referred to as his “spiritual home”, Germany.

As well as congenital spina bifida, he suffered from the complication of kyphosis (forward rounding of the back), breathing problems and compressed internal organs. Confined to hospitals for extended periods as a child, he was given a life expectancy of no more than 50. Not only did he survive for nearly a quarter of a century longer than that, but more recently suffered from legionnaires’ disease and a life-threatening bacterial infection, followed by a fatal heart attack. He once said that he often found he had more breath, and could walk and climb stairs better, after taking a rehearsal. “It’s as if I’ve expanded my lungs doing it. Basically speaking, conducting is quite a healthy profession.”

Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, he was the son of Cyril Tate and his wife, Ivy (nee Evans). The family moved to Surrey, where he attended Farnham grammar school. Initially, however, he was unsure of his ability to pursue a musical career, and feeling indebted to the medical profession for enabling him to walk, he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study medicine (1961-67), and trained as an eye specialist at St Thomas’ hospital, London.

Then he studied as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre (1970-71), and went to Covent Garden, where he worked with Georg Solti, Colin Davis, Josef Krips and others. At this time he met by chance Pierre Boulez, who was looking for an assistant to work with him on the centennial production of Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth (1976) – a person, as Tate describes it, “unconnected with the Bayreuth establishment who spoke French as well as German and would be likely to co-operate well with the producer, Patrice Chéreau”. Boulez invited him to Bayreuth and Covent Garden gave him three months’ leave.

It was an appointment that was to prove auspicious both for Bayreuth – Tate’s meticulous drilling of the singers was acknowledged to be a crucial element in the success of the production – and for Tate himself, who went on to conduct many Ring cycles of his own, twice turning down the opportunity, including at Bayreuth, until he felt the conditions were right to make his own mark.

The immediate consequence of the Bayreuth experience was the offer of jobs from Hamburg and Cologne. Tate chose the latter, where he worked with John Pritchard, the newly appointed musical director. In a post-rehearsal conversation one day with the Norwegian tenor Ragnar Ulfung, then director of the Göteborg Opera, and the bass-baritone Donald McIntyre, Tate was asked if he knew of a conductor who might like to do Carmen in Sweden. “Why not Jeff?” interjected McIntyre. Tate himself was unsure whether he would have the physical stamina to conduct a whole opera, but Ulfung encouraged him to try and the result was a success.

Tate was invited to return two years later to conduct a new production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). He also took over the baton for some performances of Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffman) in Cologne in 1980 and made his debut at the Metropolitan, New York, in Berg’s Lulu the same year. He was then invited by Covent Garden to conduct a revival of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito in 1982 and was subsequently named as the company’s first principal conductor (1986–91).

Alongside this burgeoning career as an operatic conductor, Tate was appointed principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra in 1985, recording well-received cycles of late Haydn symphonies, Mozart symphonies and piano concertos, the latter with Mitsuko Uchida as soloist. The playing he secured from the members of the ECO was first-rate, and while the performances of the concertos are generally neat and elegant, some are particularly outstanding, for example the coupling of K482 in E flat and K488 in A major.

The period following the ECO years was one in which Tate was generally neglected by British promoters – a point noted, without bitterness, by Tate, who increasingly felt himself drawn to mainland Europe anyway. He was principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra (1991-95), music director of the San Carlo theatre, Naples (2005-10) and chief conductor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra from 2009 onwards.

He had always been inclined towards Germanic repertoire – Mozart, Wagner and Strauss were his specialities – and appreciated what he perceived as the centrality of culture in that country, castigating what he described as the “narrow-minded parochialism” of the media in the UK. It was in Germany that he settled with Klaus Kuhlemann, a German geomorphologist, whom he met in Cologne in 1977; they subsequently married, and Klaus survives him.

Opera was always central to Tate’s life and his recordings included Hänsel und Gretel, Lulu, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Arabella, Elektra and Rolf Liebermann’s La Forêt. He conducted the Ring cycle many times, first at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris (1994) and subsequently in Adelaide (1998) and elsewhere. His early experience as a repetiteur ensured that he always had the best interests of singers at heart, insisting that the orchestral contribution be subordinate, enabling the voice to speak naturally and freely.

He was appointed CBE in 1990 and knighted this year.