Georg Tintner conducting members of the Auckland Choral Society, ca 1947 Photo: courtesy Tanya Tintner
Georg Tintner was a Viennese-born conductor and composer, who had an ongoing association with New Zealand throughout his career.
The ultimate itinerant conductor – he had no agent, preferring to go where he was invited even if this meant having to accept work with musical groups of modest abilities. He didn’t mind. “The only thing that annoys me is to conduct people who don’t care and don’t try,” he said.
Georg Tintner’s was a displaced life. He was born in Vienna on 22 May 1917, living there until 1938 when the Anschluss turned Austria into a new, Nazi-ruled country called Ostmark. As a man with Jewish ancestry Tintner immediately realised that he had no place in such a country. In 1940 he began his second life in Auckland, New Zealand. He lived and worked here for 14 years until 1954 when lack of conducting opportunities forced him to move to Australia. Thereafter he lived in South Africa and England eventually settling in Nova Scotia but always returning when work was offered in Australia and New Zealand. He worked in this country as a pioneer conductor and always came back. But he was a wanderer. “I feel marked and essentially insecure because of what happened to me before” he told the Christchurch Press in 1980.
Tintner died in 1999.
In his last few years he recorded a remarkable and much acclaimed cycle of Bruckner Symphonies for Naxos. Richard Osborne wrote in Gramophone Magazine about the recording of Symphony No 3, "It is Tintner at his greatest. Coming near the end of a cycle which he knew would be the end of both his career and his life, it is a worthy memorial."
Georg Tintner conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Photo: Tanya Tintner
This programme by Peter Shaw was produced and first broadcast in 2010, but we make it available again now in recognition of the centenary of Tintner's birth.
Shaw, backed with examples from Tintner's recordings, outlines the essentials of his artistry: "careful but warm phrasing, rhythmical acuteness, firmness of attack even in the gentlest music, unforced pacing and, above all, an unassuming, even selfless, approach to performance. There can rarely have been a conductor who was less of a star of the rostrum.
"It was a view of the art of conducting that comes to seem more and more anachronistic as time passes. His work has been aptly described as 'transparent' rather than colourless - which is what it might have seemed to those who demand that conductors be strongly individualistic figures who put a strong interpretative stamp on everything they touch."
Georg Tintner with cast members of "The Bartered Bride", Auckland 1952. The woman behind Tintner’s left shoulder is the New Zealand mezzo, Heather Begg. Photo: courtesy Tanya Tintner
