The Death of the Prince, the Birth of the Missionary: How Simon Rattle rewrote the job description of the music director
There is one image we keep of Simon Rattle: the mane of curls, the smile, the supple gesture, the air of a man who explains as much as he conducts. And there is another, quieter one, that may say more: a concert hall rising from the ground in Birmingham in 1991, Symphony Hall, because a conductor of thirty-six had decided that his orchestra deserved a home worthy of it. The whole man lies between these two images. For what Rattle built across forty years is not, first and foremost, a body of interpretations. It is a function. He redefined what a music director is — and, in doing so, killed off one idea of the profession to install another.
The Prince
To measure the break, we must recall what Rattle inherited. The music director, as the twentieth century had sanctified him, was a prince. From Toscanini to Furtwängler, from Karajan to Solti, the office came down to two sovereign gestures: to embody a sound and to reign over a repertoire. The conductor was a demigod, a verticality, a signature. Radio, then the record, then the image had forged that myth and raised it to incandescence — Karajan, stage-manager of his own legend, its culmination as much as its caricature. The prince answered to no one; his sole mission was to be great.
It was this figure that Rattle would render obsolete — not through polemic (he never theorised any act of killing) but through a simple shift of the centre of gravity.
The Birmingham Laboratory
We are inclined to locate the Rattle revolution in Berlin. That is a trick of perspective. It happened in the provinces, at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he stayed eighteen years, from 1980 to 1998 — very nearly a lifetime. And what he built there looks, at first, like the most classical of models. He takes a respectable regional orchestra and, over time, makes it a world-class ensemble — the very gesture of an Ormandy in Philadelphia or a Mravinsky in Leningrad. He secures, in 1991, the building of Symphony Hall, one of the finest halls in Europe. And he forges his artistic identity across a long discographic series on EMI, the way reputations were once built — record after record, patiently: his Sibelius and Mahler cycles, his Szymanowski, his Nielsen, that Turangalîla of Messiaen set down as early as 1987 with Peter Donohoe and still a benchmark. At first glance, a faithful heir to the Karajan model — one more prince, simply younger and more smiling.
But look more closely at that repertoire, and the reversal already shows through. What Rattle builds in Birmingham is also a laboratory of the twentieth century: where the prince maintained a canon, he manufactures a new one. New music is no ornamental afterthought, no short curtain-raiser slipped in before the serious business — it is the very substance of his project. He even endows the city with a purpose-built instrument, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, of which he is the founding patron in 1987 — an ensemble devoted solely to new work, on the model of Boulez's Ensemble intercontemporain. He turns Messiaen into a great-repertoire composer, records Henze, installs Mark-Anthony Turnage as the orchestra's first composer in association (1989-1993), and in 1997 premieres Asyla by a twenty-six-year-old Thomas Adès — the very score he would choose, five years later, to open his first concert as music director in Berlin, before Mahler's Fifth. The provincial discovery carried to the summit, like a manifesto.
For Asyla is no isolated case: Rattle championed a whole constellation of British composers, of opposing generations and aesthetics — the sprawling romantic fresco of Nicholas Maw, whose immense Odyssey he recorded in 1991; the fine craftsmanship of an Oliver Knussen; the music of Colin Matthews, whose …through the glass he premiered in 1994; and, at the far end of the temperamental spectrum, Turnage's jazz-inflected urban irony and the young Adès's feverish virtuosity. The parallel with the visual arts is irresistible: this is the very moment when creative England recovers its confidence, the moment of the Young British Artists, that insolent wave which, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin, reinvents English art and restores it to world centrality. Rattle is to the British music of those years what that movement was to the visual arts — not the creator, but the enabler: the one who gives a stage, a commission, an orchestra and a legitimacy to voices that were only waiting for them.
The project culminates in Towards the Millennium, a traversal of the century decade by decade throughout the 1990s: not one more festival, but a way of telling modernity as a continuous story, of turning the listener into an explorer rather than a worshipper. Rattle does not merely programme the new; he orders it, gives it a narrative, makes it necessary. And he constantly sets it against the great repertoire — a Henze against a Brahms, an Adès against a Mahler — that friction of the contemporary and the canonical that would become his signature. At the BBC Proms, that national tribune where musical England takes its own measure each summer, the rise of the CBSO finds its public vindication: the provincial orchestra becomes a national affair, and the young conductor, a figure.
