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Half in the Eyes. Mehta's beat is, by his own description, "at times as clear as possible, and at times as unclear as possible—sometimes I conduct so my orchestra will listen to each other." Clear or unclear, it somehow communicates. Philadelphia Orchestra Bassoonist Bernard Garfield credits Mehta with "the ability to put himself into the music in a very, very intense way and to tell the musicians a great deal about how he wants it played." Says the Israel Philharmonic's chief concertmaster, Zvi Haftel: "He is more than just a gifted conductor. To change from Bruckner, which he conducts like a saint or an Indian priest, to Webern and then to Stravinsky with a burning fire and conviction—and transmit it to the orchestra—that is genius."
Like many of his contemporaries on the podium, Mehta nearly always conducts without a score ("Half of our trade is in the eyes"), relying on a fantastic capacity to ingest compositions in a few readings and hold them in his well-stocked memory. During his years with the Montreal orchestra he had to memorize practically an entire new program every week, often while en route between engagements. One of the solutions he worked out was to conduct staging rehearsals of an operatic score while studying an orchestral score that was placed on the floor next to him. This learn-as-you-go method inevitably involves some lapses—singers, particularly, complain that Mehta occasionally drops cues—and it tends to make for slightly ragged first performances, which are smoothed out with repetition.
Untamed Animal. But in music as in life, Mehta does not let occasional ragged spots bother him as long as his general progress remains as continuous and soaring as a Richard Strauss melody. The analogy is his own: he responds with special keenness to Strauss's music.
Recently he sat at his dressing room piano after a rehearsal at the Met and sketched a bravado musical self-portrait with his favorite Strauss works. He struck a theme from Don Juan: an image for the dark, liquid eyes, flaring nostrils and smoldering visage that prompted one of his many female admirers to compare him to "an untamed animal—sensual and earthy." Then Don Quixote: a reflection of his penchant for tilting in public at sacred cultural institutions. Then Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: the insouciant wink-and-nudge of a joker who likes to imitate other people over the telephone, and who once threw an entire hotel into chaos during a concert tour by sneaking around the corridors early in the morning and changing all the breakfast orders.
Finally, Mehta crashed into the broad, exuberant themes of Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life). Looking up with a smile that radiated at once pride, self-mockery and unabashed immodesty, he proclaimed: "I'm quite a lot of a hero too."
Brahms & Dogfish. Indeed, he seems to have been destined for ein Heldenleben. He was born into the Parsi sect, whose members he calls "the Jews of India"; they are descended from a group that fled Persia 1,300 years ago so that they could continue to practice their Zoroastrian faith. The Parsis, 150,000 strong, are business, commercial and social leaders of Bombay, noted for their receptivity to Western culture.