Jeffrey Tate

Unfinished symphony

Conductor Jeffrey Tate spent a good deal of his childhood in hospitals and wheelchairs. To repay modern medicine for teaching him to walk, he became a doctor. But his greatest contribution to society has been through his music.

Jeffrey Tate is a man of many passions. A doctor by training, Tate abandoned medicine soon after completing his studies and turned instead to music.

Three decades later, Tate has performed in major opera houses around the world and has earned a reputation for his stirring interpretations of French opera and the operatic works of Mozart, Wagner and Strauss.

“I’ve always been so astonished that I’m actually doing it that I’ve never had a chance to sort of feel grand about it,” Tate said about conducting in an interview published by the British newspaper "The Independent".

Tate was born in 1944 in Salisbury, England, and was in and out of hospitals throughout much of his childhood for surgeries related to spinal bifida, a failure in the completion of the spinal structure, and kypho-scoliosis, a twisting of the spine. Prolonged hospital stays and treatments kept Tate out of a wheelchair, but even today he walks with a cane and sits while conducting.

This childhood experience was formative for Tate, influencing both his love of music and of medicine. During a hospital stay when he was eight years old, Tate recalled, he was asked to play the piano on the hospital radio station. For his broadcast debut, he played "Galway Boy."

For a while, medicine won out as Tate’s career choice. He felt he owed a debt to the profession for all it had done for him as a child. And his parents urged him to choose medicine because they felt it would offer him financial security.

But throughout his medical studies at Cambridge and later at London’s St. Thomas’s Hospital, music continued to inform Tate’s life. He even organized a hospital music society and a madrigal group while studying to become an eye surgeon.

Tate became a doctor in 1969, but he still had questions lurking in the back of his mind. Would music have been a better choice? He applied to the London Opera Center to study coaching, and entered thinking he would try it for a year.

An unexpected career path

But upon completion, Tate was offered a job as principal assistant at Covent Garden, where he ended up working until 1977. There he came into contact with musical greats such as Sir Georg Solti and Sir Colin Davis. And he worked as an assistant to Herbert von Karajan at Salzburg, James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and John Pritchard in Cologne's Gürzenich Orchestra.

In 1978, while working as assistant director of the Cologne Opera, he heard the Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was looking for someone to conduct “Carmen.” Tate applied and got the job, which turned out to be his big moment: a public debut as a conductor, at the age of 35.

“As the music moved under my hands, I suddenly felt that I was doing something I had been waiting to do all my life,” he told "The Independent."

A year later Tate made his North American debut, replacing Levine on just three hours notice in a performance of Berg’s "Lulu" at the Metropolitan Opera. He earned a standing ovation – not just from the audience, but from the orchestra as well – and his career was well on its way.

International Success

Tate became increasingly involved with important productions, such as "Don Giovanni" by Mozart at the Met in 1983, "Parsifal" by Wagner in Nice, "Ariadne auf Naxos" by Strauss in Paris in 1984, and the first performance of "Ulysses’ Homecoming" by Monteverdi/Henze at the 1985 Salzburg Festival.

He became principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra in 1985, and a year later he was named senior director of music at London's Covent Garden. In 1989, he became music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and principal guest conductor at the Orchestre National de France in Paris. In 1991, he returned to opera with a job as principal guest conductor at the Royal Opera House. His symphonic appearances include the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Working for so many orchestras is challenging in its own way, forcing Tate to constantly adjust to new people and locations. To deal with the overwhelming demands of his international schedule, Tate told the Seattle Times newspaper in 2000, he has "learned to cope by trusting my hands and my face more than I used to, to explain to the musicians what I want and need to say."

"The past 10 years have made quite a difference in my conducting," he told the paper. "I've learned to do what I’m best at doing, in bringing a certain expression and color to the music, and not to interfere in matters which the musicians really can -- and should -- settle on their own."