NEW YORK (AP) — William Christie, a conductor renowned for Baroque performances, thought back to a 2014 phone call from Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a year before the German director’s death.
“‘I think a ‘Tristan’ with Christie would be really a great thing,’” Christie recalled Lehnhoff referencing Wagner’s opera. “I said: `That’s a bad joke.′ I said: `I’d be coming into an arena as a puny little boxer who doesn’t know sort of how to sort of box, someone who has no idea what all this is about. I’d be sliced to ribbons.′”
In a season celebrating his 80th birthday this past Dec. 14, Christie has no Wagner plans. He is as busy as ever as a leader of the period-instrument movement, conducting, playing the harpsichord, administering his Les Arts Florissants ensemble and teaching at The Juilliard School.
“He’s always brought his flair and say-so,” director Peter Sellars said. “He was the chef de cuisine at a certain moment in history. You look at the personnel on all of his early recordings, and anybody who’s done anything came through the apprentissage in his kitchen.”
Christie’s 2024-25 season included a striking Robert Carsen staging of Rameau’s “Les Fêtes d’Hébé (The Festivities of Hebe)” at Paris’ Opéra-Comique. It moved the action from 1739 to the contemporary Élysée Palace and featured the French national soccer team celebrating during a ballet, followed by a closing scene on a Seine tourist boat passing a sparkling Eiffel Tower.
“I like mixing epochs visually and musically,” Christie said. “I can remain I think true and faithful to the things that I think make my music eloquent: old instruments and being faithful I think to performance practice.”
Teaching the next generation
Christie has become an elder statesman of the movement highlighting 17th and 18th century performance practice. Since 2007, he’s offered to Juilliard students his knowledge of Baroque articulation, subdued vibrato and lower pitch.
“They eat through maybe eight to 15 different conductors a year and some of them I admire, and some of them I think are on the merry-go-round just because it’s fashionable and I wouldn’t have hired them,” he said. “Some of them have, well, sort of very perverse ideas about French music, for example. And so I try to say to them, first of all, I’m here because for certain repertory I have at least better ideas than you individually, and I think I can sell them to you.”
He founded Les Arts Florissants in 1979 to impart knowledge he felt was getting ignored. He used his own orchestra when he led Charpentier’s “Médée” at the Palais Garnier last spring.
“I worked with orchestras that have made me feel so awful and so low and so mean and miserable,” he said. “Baroque orchestras are not (Sergei) Prokofiev or (Dmitri) Shostakovich orchestras. They’re not Ravel orchestras. They’re not Korngold orchestras. But then modern orchestras playing Mozart sometimes are hideous.” He adds that one “dug holes 6 feet under and buried Mozart.”
Emmanuel Resche-Caserta, Les Arts Florissants’ concertmaster since 2017, was uncertain whether to stay with music, pursue political science or switch to art history before he encountered Christie at Juilliard.
“If I can do music with this intensity that he is asking for, I can dedicate my life to it,” he said. “I was very impressed by his natural charisma. He enters the concert hall or the rehearsal room. and we play differently because we want to please him.”
Christie founded Le Jardin des Voix (Garden of Voices) in 2002. Lea Desandre joined the academy in 2015 and has blossomed into a star mezzo-soprano.
“He is a wonderful teacher because he knows so much, he reads so much,” she said. “I feel like I have someone who’s going to put me in a very comfortable place, even if maybe was not a comfortable role for me.”
First encounter as child
Christie grew up in Williamsville, near Buffalo, New York, and then South Wales. His mom, Ida, arranged piano lessons when he was 5 and conducted the choir at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.
“And so when I was 7 or 8 years old, I heard Bach and I heard Handel and I heard Purcell and I heard Orlando Gibbons, and we sang 19th century hymns,” he said. “It was a curious kind of childhood because I was playing sports, and summer vacations were down at the lake. But I already had this extraordinary idea of a different world.”
Christie first heard the harpsichord when he was 9 or 10 and his mom and her mother, Julia, took him to Handel’s “Messiah” at the Buffalo Philharmonic’s Kleinhans Music Hall with conductor Josef Krips and Squire Haskin at the keyboard.
“He (Haskin) was part of this funny groupings of cultural people in cultural boondocks like rural New York, upstate New York,” Christie said. “That was a great moment for me to hear this instrument that was going to be the center of my life.”
Christie took piano lessons from age 12 with Laura Kelsey. His mom worked at the music store Denton, Cottier & Daniels, and in 1952, he became fascinated by an Erato recording with French harpsichordist Laurence Boulay and soprano Nadine Sautereau of music by François Couperin.
“It sort of changed my life,” he said.
Moving to Europe
Christie received a Harvard undergraduate degree in 1966 and a Yale master’s in 1969, then taught at Dartmouth. He moved to Europe in the fall of 1970 to avoid the U.S. military draft, and in 1985 bought a house in the Loire village of Thiré — where he has created a grand garden and launched a vocal academy. He gained French citizenship in 1995.
Christie does like music he isn’t known for. He calls “my secret life” playing Liszt’s “Transcendental Études” or Schubert. But those are not for public listening.
“I think myself what I would do differently,” he reflected, “but I’m not courageous enough to say, all right, in the 2028 season William Christie is going to recycle and is going to start with Haydn and finish off with, I don’t know, how about Dvorak? How about Bruckner motets?”
