Oh! to Be 30 at Last

Rapidly emerging as the most brilliant young conductor now before U.S. audiences is the Metropolitan Opera's Kalamazoo-born Thomas Schippers, 29. At the season's first Forza del Destino last week, Schippers showed what he could do with an orchestra that only the week before, at the opening of Fidelia (TIME, Feb. 8), had sounded ragged and disorganized. "Tommy" Schippers had never conducted Verdi's Forza before, but he led orchestra and singers (Soprano Leonie Rysanek, Tenor Richard Tucker, both in top form) with a muscular authority that injected grand drama into every twist and turn of the tortuous plot. For Schippers, the essence of a good performance is spontaneity, and to achieve it when a performance becomes dull, he has been known to "make a deliberate mistake-like jumping a soprano" i.e., pulling the orchestra ahead of the singer, or retarding it to put her on guard.

Pickup Jobs. One day next month, tall, handsome Conductor Schippers (6 ft. 3 in., 175 Ibs.) will celebrate two milestones: his 30th birthday ("at last") and the tenth anniversary of his debut as a conductor (in Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul). Although he has moved farther and faster than any other U.S. conductor in the last decade, Schippers shows little of the hungry will to succeed that has always characterized that earlier Wunderkind, Leonard Bernstein. Nor does Schippers have Composer-Conductor-Pianist Bernstein's determination to be a Renaissance man-about-music. When he decided to become a conductor (at 20), he abandoned promising careers as a pianist and composer, and he no longer yearns for those early loves.

Born into a nonmusical family (his father is a Westinghouse distributor) of mixed German-Dutch ancestry, Schippers at eight shocked his parents, staunch members of the Bethany (Dutch) Reformed Church, by joining St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Kalamazoo--because it had a good boys' choir. Schippers managed to finish high school when he was 13, moved to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. After graduation he got a series of pickup jobs that led to Consul (he caught Composer Menotti's attention while coaching singers for the show) and to the Met, which signed him as the third U.S.-born regular conductor in its 77-year history.*

Settling Down. Next year Schippers will open the Met season with a new production of Verdi's early opera Nabucco. On his schedule for spring and summer: recording his first album for Columbia and running Italy's international Spoleto Festival. In perhaps three years' time he admits that he would like to settle down with an orchestra of his own, and he knows just the kind he wants: "One-third Italian musicians for their line, one-third Jewish for their sound, a sprinkling of Germans for solidity." But, adds Schippers, he must live in a city "that moves me." What cities move him? Only San Francisco, Boston and Rome.

*The others: New Orleans' Nahan Franko (off and on from 1899 to 1913), Detroit's Max Bendix (1909-10).

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