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The Tempest. To keep in touch with distant friends, Mehta runs up telephone bills of $1,500 a month, thinks nothing of playing recordings by the great German Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler over a transcontinental wire to Barenboim. Sleepless in New York City at 5 a.m. one day just before New Year's, he suddenly realized that in Vienna, where it was 11 a.m., the Vienna Philharmonic would be playing one of its traditional New Year's Johann Strauss concerts. He put in a call to the concert hall, had the manager hold the phone up to a backstage loudspeaker for a while, then dozed off contentedly.
Mehta's attachment to Israel and all things Jewish is even closer than his bond with Vienna. "I would convert to Judaism," he often quips, "if the operation didn't hurt so much"—but he claims that he follows his own faith devoutly. When Barenboim married Jacqueline Du Pre in Israel last summer, Mehta flew over, donned a skullcap and prayer shawl, and joined the Orthodox Jewish ceremony as "Moishe Cohen." The officiating rabbi became suspicious because Mehta did not speak Hebrew. "I'm a Persian Jew," Mehta explained to him, "and we don't speak Hebrew." After the other guests had chanted Hasidic songs for the couple, Mehta sang themes from Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Beethoven's Hamrnerklavier sonata with Hebrew inflections. Later he told the rabbi they were old Persian Jewish hymns.
Such chutzpah sometimes gets Mehta into trouble, or the glare of publicity, or both. In Israel, he created a tempest in a tea glass when he tried—unsuccessfully—to get the Israel Philharmonic to do a piece by Richard Wagner, whose music was so enthusiastically embraced by the Nazis that it still disturbs many Jews. In Italy, he flustered musical circles by picketing La Scala with musicians who were protesting a cut in state subsidies for opera. A few weeks ago, he outraged the New York musical establishment by vehemently rejecting any possibility that he might become Leonard Bernstein's successor as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. "Artistically it would not be a step up for me," he said. "My orchestra is better than the New York Philharmonic." To compound the offense, he added that New York's musicians "step over conductors"—thus expressing publicly what many young conductors feel privately: that the New Yorkers, while gifted, are also notorious for their supreme self-confidence and antagonism toward almost anybody who takes over their podium.
So it was understandable that officials of the musicians' union should "request" his presence for an explanation. Mehta disarmingly assured both the union and a committee of Philharmonic musicians that he never meant to insult or degrade the musicians—who, after all, are his colleagues—and he promised to say as much in a letter for the Philharmonic bulletin board.
Headlong & Footloose. Even allowing for his impulsiveness and his pride in his own musicians, Mehta's outburst about Bernstein's job acutely highlighted a common attitude among the new young conductors. They are quite rightly dubious about some of the prestigious podiums that may soon be offered to them. Chary