Zubin Mehta's 1962 Salzburg debut with a 26-year-old's fearlessness and the Vienna Philharmonic's full weight behind him opened a Festival relationship that ran for decades. He is among the conductors who helped make the Salzburg Festival genuinely global.
The Story
Mehta came to Salzburg in 1962 as a rising conductor who had already won the Liverpool International Conducting Competition in 1958 and been appointed Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His debut with the Vienna Philharmonic was a full orchestral programme rather than an opera, a bold choice that showed confidence in the symphonic repertoire at a Festival then still centred on opera. The audience heard a conductor of precision and warmth, and the Festival invited him back. He led the Vienna Philharmonic again in 1965 and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1968, building a presence across both of the orchestras central to Salzburg's identity.
His Salzburg appearances were built on his relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the longest in the orchestra's history. He knew the orchestra from his student years in Vienna, where he had studied under Hans Swarowsky, and the connection deepened over five decades of Salzburg appearances and touring. He was not a permanent figure at the Festival in the way of Karajan or Muti, but his repeated returns, and his position from 1998 to 2006 as Generalmusikdirektor of the Bavarian State Opera in nearby Munich, kept him embedded in the German-speaking classical world Salzburg anchors.
His wider renown rests on his tenure as Music Director of the Israel Philharmonic, which he held from 1977 until becoming emeritus in 2019, and on the Three Tenors concert in Rome in 1990 with Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras, watched by an estimated 800 million people. That concert brought classical music to audiences who had never considered entering a concert hall, which is perhaps the most accurate summary of what Mehta's career was about.
