André Previn

• Born: April 6, 1929
• Place of Birth: Berlin, Germany
• Died: February 28, 2019
• Place of Death: New York, New York

German-born conductor and musician

A renowned musician and conductor, Previn made it his mission to make both traditional and contemporary classical music accessible to audiences around the world.

Area of achievement: Music

Early Life

André George Previn was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin. His was a secular Jewish family of Russian extraction that lived in Berlin, Germany, under the Weimar Republic. He was the youngest of Jacob "Jack" and Charlotte Priwin’s three children. The family was musical, and Previn was encouraged in his piano studies. His father enrolled Previn at the Berlin Conservatoire when he well under age.

Unfortunately, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany put an end to his father’s successful legal career, and in 1939 the family left Europe for the United States, where Previn’s uncle was doing well in the music department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Hollywood. Previn enrolled in Beverly Hills High School, and he attended from 1943 to 1946. At school and at the MGM studios, Previn’s musical talents were soon noticed, and he signed a contract with MGM in 1945.

Thereupon began a long apprenticeship in musicianship, performing, transposing, arranging, and orchestrating. He was beginning to be successful, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Score for the film Three Little Words (1950), when he was drafted into the US Army in 1950.

After demobilization from his San Francisco base in 1952, Previn delayed returning to MGM for a year to take conducting lessons with Pierre Monteux. Sessions of conducting MGM orchestras had convinced Previn that this was what he really wanted to do in music.

His move into classical music was forestalled by his love affair with jazz. He began working with various jazz musicians, cutting a number of albums. At the same time he was working successfully for MGM on films such as Gigi (1958), which won him his first Academy Award for Best Score. He had married Betty Bennett, a jazz singer, in 1952, with whom he had two daughters. This ended in divorce, but he quickly remarried in 1958. His second wife, Dory, wrote lyrics, and they collaborated in a number of successful jazz songs and films, including Valley of the Dolls (1967). Between 1949 and 1973 Previn worked on forty films.

Various opportunities to play as a solo classical pianist came Previn’s way, along with a chance to work with such classical composers as Leonard Bernstein. At age thirty-four, Previn was ripe for a career move. He signed a contract with Columbia Records to make an album as a solo pianist. He remained with MGM for a while, working on the film version of My Fair Lady (1964), which won him his fourth and final Academy Award.

Conducting

Previn hired as his manager Ronald Wilford, who was vice president of Columbia Artists Management, and that led to a contract with Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to make albums as a conductor. RCA sent him to England to record with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Previn was a fan of British music, and soon he became a devoted Anglophile, enjoying the London music scene. Further recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and a live performance followed in 1965. In 1967, he took his first professional post as principal conductor, following Sir John Barbirolli, at the Houston Symphony. He had made a good impression in England, but in Texas his taste for contemporary and British music was not shared by his audience. In fact, Previn’s knowledge of the traditional repertoire was lacking, and his reputation as a Hollywood and jazz man haunted him. Notoriety about his personal life enveloped him at the time: He had a failing second marriage and a much-publicized affair with actor Mia Farrow.

Meanwhile, London beckoned, first with a contract from Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) to record Ralph Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies and second with an invitation from the LSO to be principal conductor. He moved back to London in 1968, eventually marrying Farrow and buying a house in Surrey.

His time with the LSO was highly successful. In addition to regular concert series, there were recording sessions, television appearances, and tours to Russia and to two Salzburg Festivals. However, when an invitation came from Pittsburgh to lead the Pittsburgh Symphony, he accepted. Farrow and the children (three biological and three adopted) wanted to put down American roots, and Farrow was eager to take up her acting career again. In 1979, he resigned his post with the LSO as its longest-serving conductor, though he remained a guest conductor. He won two Grammy Awards with the orchestra, for recordings of choral works by William Walton and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Previn’s time with the Pittsburgh Symphony was a time of consolidation, for him as a conductor of the classical repertoire and for the orchestra. However, his marriage to Farrow ended. In 1982, he wed Heather Sneddon, a marriage that lasted twenty years. At this time, he became enraptured with the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he believed to be the greatest of all composers.

In 1985, he moved to Los Angeles to take over the Los Angeles Philharmonic. However, he resigned in 1989 after clashes with Ernest Fleischmann, an old friend from London days, who was the orchestra’s general manager. This led to an appointment back in England with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and to a number of collaborative efforts with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. He also worked with the Vienna Philharmonic of Austria and the Emerson String Quartet.

Based in New York, Previn found new creativity in composing. His first full-length opera was A Streetcar Named Desire (1998), which went on to win a Grand Prix du Disque. Various other works followed, some written for the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who became his sixth wife in 2002. Even after their divorce in 2006, the pair still worked together.

In 2007 Previn composed the music for a second opera adaptation, this time from the screenplay Brief Encounter. It had its world premiere in May 2009 at the Houston Opera House.

The first part of his career had won Previn awards in Hollywood. At the other end of his career, he was honored in Europe and the United States. In England, he was made a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) in 1996 for his services to British music. In 1998, he received the Kennedy Center Honors. In 2005, he won the prestigious trienniel Glenn Gould Prize for excellence in music. He received ten Grammy Awards, culminating in the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. He also wrote a number of books on conducting and the orchestra.

Previn died on February 28, 2019, at his home in Manhattan. He was eighty-nine years old.

Significance

Previn is one of the few American orchestral conductors of the last century to receive recognition across Europe and to have had the opportunity to conduct some of the best European orchestras regularly. What makes this particularly remarkable is that the genesis of his career was in films and musicals rather than in classical music. Previn’s versatility and genius allowed him to escape the label of Hollywood musician and win worldwide recognition in several musical fields.

Specifically, he introduced British and contemporary European music into the American orchestral repertoire, especially championing the works of Walton, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich. His work on restoring the original scores to several Rachmaninoff works is also important. Above all, he exploited the medium of television to bring classical music to a wide audience, and he made it a point to tour with his orchestras to places often bypassed by classical musicians.

Bibliography

Bookspan, Martin, and Ross Yockey. André Previn: A Biography. Hamish Hamilton, 1981.

James, Barron. “André Previn, Whose Music Knew No Boundaries, Dies at 89.” The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/obituaries/andre-previn-dead.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.‌

Friedland, Michael. André Previn: The Authorized Biography. Ebury Press, 1991.

Previn, André. No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood. Doubleday, 1991.

Smith, Steve. “André Previn Leads Debut of His Concerto for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra.” The New York Times, April 27, 2009.