Comes back and im able to work again and my colleagues tell me and i can hear from the audience that theyre not relating it to the way i was before i had to stop because of the fall but to years before when i really had the vitality and i wasnt in any pain rose youll feel it . Theres no doubt about it. I just dont pain. I get a twinge here or there and its gone but i dont have anything nothing like a chronic pain anywhere. Rose did you doubt you might not ever stand there or be there again . When youre lying in a hospital bed and look down at your legs and cant move them, you think, yeah, you could conduct with my upper body but i wouldnt have been able to conduct without feeling some kind of flow through the whole because you conduct with your body on some level or the other even though it is possible to conduct just fine sitting down. Many people do. But luckily the returns started to come and the surgery held and the nerves began to come back, nerves do it on their own time but i worked hard on the muscles so i id have a possibility for the nerves to hook up again. And the therapists have got me now walking in a walker carefully and recently i started to climb up stairs. Which is you know, was unthinkable when i was lying there and i couldnt move them. Rose did you learn something with this experience . Well, you learn millions of things. First of all, i didnt know that i could work again and i thought to myself i always thought i was the luckiest guy in the world and i had 40 years at the met and 50 years of musical professional musical activity and i thought, well, if im supposed to stop now i will. And what can you do . And i would have pursued other aspects of music, there are many things that interest me, of course. But i suppose as ive found that my dodd body began to respond and i was encouraged to work harder and harder at the rehab, the feeling that i wouldnt be able to do it just disappeared. Rose it is a triumph of the human spirit. No doubt about it. And theres one other thing that is really important in this case. For the entire time i got i got letters and phone calls and vibrations not just from my loved ones and friends and company but from the public, people i dont even know and i go in the park and need my wheelchair and people would just on their bikes go by and say words of encouragement and i felt more a part of the community than i had before. Rose you know its a great feeling because you realize you touch peoples lives but you dont really know you know the music, you know the audience in the hall and you know the critics who say good things but you realize when you fire a place where you are that what you do connects to their life and brings something special. Rose i never realized it to that extent. I was moved so much by their they all said the same thing come back, we need you whatever it takes. Rose you have said that you found yourself psychologically in a state from before you were injured. Not at your best when you were young but even a better place. It was better because id been through that and i had this experience which stopped me cold and two years of not conducting when i conducted all my life so it was i think i mean, its a misfortune to have a spinal cord injury but i learned so much from the doctors and therapists and the whole teams of people who were working with spinal cord patients, a world i might never have known at all and when i went back to working i started off in the second year of my rehab, i wasnt ready to conduct yet but i went back working with the Young Artists in our Young Artists program and this is was so thrilling, i think, as i get older i feel its a more important more and more important part of our work to pass on our experience to the next generation. And i got sort of back into it that way and i really still feel like im living in a dream and that ive got out of that nightmare i was in. Rose 70 is not old for a conductor. No. Rose subpoena that because music just makes you young . Well, largely. I think it these do with something in apparently the way conductors work. Rose the movement of hands and yes, the way you move and it makes you tired so you sleep and i think most conductors who died before living to a ripe old age either had some congenital ailment or they smoked continuously so they got smokerelated things. Rose when you went i think Carnegie Hall was may, 2013. Tell me about that. You mean the first concert that rose yes. Oh, this was unbelievable. This was like you dream something positive and then it happens even more in reality than you could believe. And, charlie, i dont go through life sentimental all the time. I really dont. But there was no way i could be in that experience and not feel touched and moved. It was right where i lived. It was there it was my met orchestra, music we never played before but music that id done often and wanted to play with them and there was that and that was audience giving us every bit of concentration and support and love and excitement and so now we had to put things back together that we had to stop or diffuse over the past two years and we had plenty of things moving forward at the time when i had to suddenly stop. Rose you found music when you were very young. Yes, i did. Rose or music found you. Music found me. I apparently could sing before i could talk properly. Rose tell that story its amazing my dad used to sing songs to me and i apparently could remember the tunes and carry them, im told, long before i could speak coherently. Which some people would say i still cant speak coherently but at least it got better. Rose but it was i thought perhaps they thought you had a speech impediment. I did have. And that was interesting because the doctor when my parents called a very remarkable pediatrician who had been my doctor since i was born. I was born prematurely and the my parents were very worried and the doctor said theres nothing wrong with that baby. Hes just little and i dont want to hear one word from you until hes three years old about how hes not keeping pace with the other kids. And, of course, we saw what happened. In fact, it didnt matter. But people didnt know that then. But this doctor was very percent perceptive and when i was three i used to walk by the piano and reach up and bang on it and when my mother complained to the doctor about my speech impediment the doctor said whats he interested in she said, well he bangs on the piano and he said piano lessons. So i banged on the piano and my speech impediment went away. Rose you were on stage when you were 10, werent you . Yes, i made my debut as a pianist with my hometown symphony, the cincinnati symphony when i was 10 and id already played piano recitals in the studio of my teacher before that. Rose but it is true music found you. I mean you were there this thing that should shape your life and bring you so much joy. Im just one of those people who was able to do exactly what i was best cut out to the do. And i mean who had the chance to do it. And i was lucky in every way, charlie. The teachers i needed there are at the right time. The opportunitys were there at the right time. I couldnt have had more good fortune. As a result, of course, i worked very, very hard. Because i felt i had to come up to the gift and and i think spinal cord injury was as close as i folt a real problem that has to be solved and now two years later were looking like the doctors and therapists think i can still improve quite a bit because apparently the nerve regeneration is very, very slow but it is clearly happening. Rose so how do you approach your year now . We weve just begun a new season here. How do you approach it . Do you say my god, im going to choose those things that im so passionate about, that i so much want to do, so i so much want to share. Well, it would be nice if you could do that and you do that to some degree but i think basically what i have to do is i have to move slowly and steadily increasing balancing styles of repertoire, things that the company needs, things that i need which are usually the same and just keeping us stimulated along the tracks we were on before i fell. And its tricky because planning is done several years in advance and so many people asked me how i chose these three opportunities and it wasnt really like that. It was one by one the ones i was supposed to conduct i didnt because it wasnt i wasnt ready for conducting yet. And when i did when we projected that we thought it would work then the best choice and the best layout for me would be these three pieces and thats how were doing it. Rose currently among your favorite or oh, always. Rose thats what i thought. I never agree to conduct something that im not so close to that i could say it was my favorite while it was going on. Its theyre just theres so much great music and there is no need to conduct something you dont feel the deepest affinity for. Rose are you finding new things . Always. Rose from mozart are you finding things or whoever it might be for you, are you finding new answers that from both. From new composers that but i do one thing that is a little bit different for some of my colleagues. There are a lot of my colleagues who are in situations where the quantity of new music they can do is greater because if they are ahead of a Symphony Orchestra the turnover is one new Program Every week whereas at the met i do three programs with my orchestra in a season because of all the operas and opera rehearsals and that makes sense to me. Thats good. But its always been a kind of there was always much more great music that i felt close to than there would have been time with three lifetimes to do and so im interested in doing some things i havent done before and im interested in repeating things that i havent done before that i need to do better and there begins to be a small group of things that i think must be a ill leave alone because i dont think i can do them btter or theyre not a high enough priority. Rose theres nothing i cant imagine this but im going ask it anyway. Theres nothing you havent wanted to do where you said to yourself im not quite ready for that . Ive done that often. Rose have you really . Its funny because i did some big projects when i was young but they were things i thought i learned something from one of my i told you my Great Teachers fell in my lap from the heavens like magic and george zell said to me you should conduct certain pieces it was the mozart g minor symphony. Huh said you wont do it well until youre 40 but do it now. I understand what he meant. He meant dont try to crack it for yourself new later on down the road. And i was that way with some pieces and i was always a person charlie, who i know what i know but what i dont know is a closed book to me. I never was happy with superficial knowledge and i could never go and hear a performance and feel i was close to the piece at all without really looking at the score, really hearing the performances, really living the within it. Rose are you deep into interpretation in terms of where the composer was at that moment, at that time and what was in his head . Yes, im into all the things that it takes to try to get as close to what the composer would want were he alive today. Rose take a look at. This this is we have several things to show but this is a pbs documentary, james levine american maestro in which a young levine is being instructed as you mentioned, by your mentor george zell. Here it is. Every piece of music should start inside the player before he plays the first note. He is a oneman orchestra which, of course, makes things a little less complicated. Out of long experiences i tell you the shorter your down beat will be the more precise the attack. Your upbeat can be a little bigger than the down beat if you do one, this i mean if your key starts to turn at the moment you do this. Very good many f my cheeks start to tremble laughs he was something else. Rose tell me what he meant to you. What he gave to you. He was a remarkable conductor particularly of classic repertoire and he built i mean, he became music director of the Cleveland Orchestra in the middle 40s. And he was always conducting at the met. He conducted several seasons at the met. I think in cleveland he had the opportunity to build a european style classical european orchestra in america with americans. And he was when i was a student we used to go and hear all the visiting orchestras that came to Carnegie Hall but one orchestra my friends and i always had to go to was cleveland because it was interpretively penetrating and more and more marvelously played. And when i finished with juilliard i was taken in ha competition to go to baltimore for some weeks to do a repertoire project with the baltimore symphony with visiting conductors leading us, is helping us. There were four of us. And zell came to the audition and he liked what he saw well enough to tell me he had a position open on the conducting half . Cleveland and he would love to audition me thoroughly and take me for it if it worked the way he thought it would. And for me this was exactly what i needed, as i say, always the right thing at the right moment. It was just what i didnt know anything about. I didnt know how to deal with a single Symphony Orchestra as an entity the way i really did more know about operatic structure. And i went there and i was with him from 1964 till he died in 1971 and i think it was 1971, it may have been 1970. I lose it now. But i think during that time i observed him, i asked him many questions, we spent many sessions together going over music that was related to music that he was doing but not always the same music. And he recommended me for some of the first professional for work that i got. In fact, i date my professional conducting to 50 years next year in 2014 because it was 1964 when i started in cleveland. Rose were there moments you knew you wanted to conduct . Oh, yes, there was. It was in 1956 i spent a summer at the marlborough festival and my general music teacher not piano teache but music theory walter levine, he called and asked mr. Certain if he would take me and certain was only skeptical because i was 13 but he took me. And in marlborough there was not yet the concert hall there is now. We used to have concerts in the hall that was the hall that they converted into a concert hall after lunch. And i learned so much there about ensemble and making music with other people that are from then on the idea of just developing as a solo pianist went away from me and i had to make music with other people, all kinds of chamber pieces, songs and little by little i got the bug about doing some phonic and orator yall and operatic repertoire. There was only one person there who was a kuch conductor to assist on cosi fan tutte believe it or not. That was the opera they were doing that summer and they asked me if i would put the pianists together and make a backstage chorus and i did. There wasnt anybody else there to do it and i got bitten by the opera conducting bug then. Rose and what a lifetime its given you. Hasnt it . Rose falstaff this year, how are you going to do that . Were going do a new production and ive done a good number of the revivals of that production that was the only one there my time you have described it as the creme de la creme. Rose yes. Rose why is that . What is it about it . Lets put it this way. If you take all of the great operatic comedies, the really great one. If you take figaro and the bard and bride and don pasqual and im sure im leaving some out and you take all the human comedies with them or the best of them is falstaff. Its a mir miracle of libretto, story line, music cal inspiration, mastery of every detail of composition. Its in a class with figaro and meister sing cher are perhaps the other two that that will almost perfect. I dont need them to be perfect, i love a lot of pieces that arent perfect but those are the creme de la creme of operatic comedy which is striking because 80 of operatic repertoire is grandiose, tragic, melodramatic, somebody dies. In these pieces the human beings get wiser and through a lot of circumstances which they play seriously but we find very funny rose who else has been instrumental in terms of helping you appreciate, a, the music and b, being mentored to you or in opening distance to you. Who are the men and women who have been there that have helped you understand all the limitless potential of music. Its a long list, charlie. Its a long list of official teachers like george zell who was my mentor there. Wolfgang mcconnell who broke open the idea of having an assistant in the opera workshop in aspen and had me conduct the last performance of whatever opera we were doing starting in 1962 i did that when i was 19. From the time i was 10 or 11 i had walter levine, the first violinist, for all the musical for everything, for theory, for harmony, for repertoire, for style. He even coached me on the instrument playing Chamber Music with his students. It was an unbelievable education starting i mean of the kind that one goes to college for but i was 11 when i started it. Then i went, for example, to marlborough and there was claude frank and a whole community of brilliant teaching musicians and then i went to aspen to study levine because she was the most dynamic teacher of the instrument at the time and she was very well known for working on technique but she took me knowing full well that i was trying to use the piano as a tool for conducting mostly and i didnt know how much i wanted to perform on the piano. Turned out i did want to and did do quite a lot more than i pictured when i started. But she was willing to start with me when i was 14 and in aspen every year were first of all well, darr east coast mio, the great mio the head of the composition faculty, he brought contemporary composers with him every summer so once had a chance to talk with him and hear their music and work on their music. Just, for example, i conducted Albert Herring in front of it composer benjamin briton while i was there. I think of that now because were doing a beautiful revival of midsummer nights dream and its britons hundredth year if he was still alive. But i think one after the other just perhaps it can be seen better if i say whatever i conduct a french piece or play a french piece behind me are jean morrell, my teacher at juilliard, a very french and brilliant conductor. Jenny turelle, who i studied with and played concerts with for yearsegine crespa like wise. Pierre boules who started conducting in cleveland when i was starting and he worked with me on his music and second vie newcenter 5 i can that i needed to learn and Manuel Rosenthal came to the met and conducted our french triple bill and he was literally connected i mean, he was a ravel protege. The point is all of this flow through which i always try very hard to get because i i just felt we were getting further and further away from composers and when the pieces were so written and dwlapt to happen to me. Rose wh when you stand there or sit there you sit or stand on the shoulders of giants. Thats right. Rose who helped you understand