Zubin Mehta in Mumbai: “The power of music can never be underestimated”

Earlier this year, noted conductor Zubin Mehta, 87, spent a considerable amount of time in Israel for eight concerts with Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he remains music director for life, amid the continued instability and geo-political crisis of the Gaza-Israel conflict. While four of these concerts were held at Tel Aviv’s Charles Bronfman Cultural Hall, the rest were at Haifa Auditorium in Jerusalem. It’s reassuring that Mehta continues to believe in the power that music can exert to bring the world together.

“I was in there during the dreadful war that’s going on. People came to my concerts and then on Friday and Saturday night, they demonstrated against their own government. The music was beautiful… I had a wonderful soloist, Pinchas Zukerman (Grammy-winning Israeli-American violinist) there playing with us,” said Zubin Mehta during a conversation at Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts, where he will pick up the baton this month to conduct four concerts with the Symphony Orchestra of India, and present music by German conductor Richard Strauss, remembered for his tone poems and operas. 

In a steller career that spans over half a century, Mehta has almost always found appreciation and admiration for his earnest, straight-arrow music presentations in the melodically magnificent Viennese style, while recreating the music of the Romantic epoch’s greatest names, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and one of his absolute favourites, Gustav Mahler. 

But with his art in tow, Mehta has also, more often than not – been vocal and upfront about his perspective on the politics of Western Asia. Probably a result of his association with Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and spending a considerable amount of time in the country he considers his second home because it has reminded him of “home back in India”. “I am going back there (to Israel) in a couple of months,” says Mehta, who now calls Los Angeles as home, where he lives with his wife Nancy. 

Born in Mumbai in a Gujarati-speaking Parsi family, Mehta’s Cuff Parade home resobated with western classical music, as his father Mehli Mehta founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. At 18, Mehta left and trained at the Academy of Music in Vienna and conducted his first orchestra at a refugee camp outside Vienna with seven students soon after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In a world where most musicians refuse to be drawn into political conversations, Mehta has often spoken up and expressed what he’s often called a ‘musician’s opinion’. He’s not supported Israel’s occupation of Palestine in the past, and stood up for Argentina-born Israeli conductor and his friend Daniel Barenboim, disapproving the decision of Israeli lawmakers who banned performances by Barenboim. They were unhappy about him performing compositions by German composer Richard Wagner, whose perception has been blemished due to his connections with Nazism and because he was Hitler’s favourite composer. He’s also often visited Ramallah in Palestine and has worked with many Arabic musicians, in the hope that the orchestra, one day, will have artistes from both communities. 

Mehta also performed at the Israel-Gaza border in 2010 to protest against the capturing of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by Hamas.

But this was not the first time Mehta chose to perform in a complex region while making a political statement. In 1971, post a performance of Mahler’s Titan in Berlin, he conducted Israel’s national anthem, barely half a kilometre away from the Reichstag, once the National Parliament of Nazi Germany. The musician had found a way to shift the goalposts, finding a greater purpose than just pleasing an audience. 

On another occasion when Israel was at war with Lebanon in 1982, Mehta, with the help of Israeli police, took the Orchestra to a tobacco field, just across the border in Lebanon and performed on a makeshift stage under a tent. Mehta has often spoken of Arabs and Jews hugging each other after the concert. And it’s been hard to forget the free concerts he did in Israel during the Gulf War in the mornings, as evenings were lights-out to stave off missiles by Saddam Hussain-run Iraq or the iconic performance at Sarajevo in 1994, where he performed at the bombed site after the Bosnian war.

In 2013, he performed in Kashmir’s Shalimar Gardens in the hope for a concert for peace, and where he wanted “the Hindus and Muslims to sit and listen to music together”. “It was symbolically important,” says Mehta. It’s here that Mehta chose Beethoven’s emotional Fifth Symphony that, since its inception, has been considered the triumph of light over darkness. The concert had run into controversy after separatists and human rights activists questioned its relevance amid suffering people of the Valley.

“Don’t ever underestimate the power of music… I have done it before. I continue to do the same,” says Mehta. 

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