Herbert Blomstedt, the Swedish conductor regarded as the world’s oldest working conductor, died at his home in Gothenburg, Sweden, on November 4 (local time) at the age of 99. His management company announced the death.
According to Kyunghyang Shinmun and US public radio NPR, Blomstedt died at home in Gothenburg on the 4th. His management firm, KünstlerSekretariat am Gasteig, announced the death. NPR described him as the world’s oldest active conductor.
광고 문의 · 300×250He was born on July 11, 1927, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Swedish missionary parents and was taken back to Sweden at the age of two. He entered the Swedish Royal College of Music in 1945 to study conducting and also studied with Leonard Bernstein among others. He won the Koussevitzky conducting prize at Tanglewood in 1953 and made his formal debut with the Stockholm Philharmonic in 1954.
Seven orchestras, seven decades
His first professional post was with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. He went on to lead the Oslo Philharmonic, the Danish Radio Symphony and the Swedish Radio Symphony, and from 1975 for ten years the Staatskapelle Dresden. He was music director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1985 to 1995 and led the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1998 to 2005, NPR and Classical Music magazine reported. Outlets differ on the San Francisco dates, so this paper uses 1985 to 1995, on which both agree.
He recorded the Beethoven symphonies with both the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Gewandhaus, and was best known for his Mahler, Brahms and Bruckner. He kept performing in his nineties, recording Brahms’s Second Symphony with the Gewandhaus in 2021 and Schubert’s Eighth and Ninth in 2022. The Guardian called his 2024 Mahler Ninth with the Philharmonia ‘one of the finest Mahler Ninths one is likely to hear’.
A devout Seventh-day Adventist, he avoided alcohol, coffee, tobacco and meat and declined to rehearse on the Saturday Sabbath, which NPR said cost him some jobs. Falls and illness forced cancellations, yet he kept conducting almost to the end. Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that on May 15, 2026, he conducted Mahler’s Ninth with the San Francisco Symphony from a wheelchair, that the performance paused during the third movement for health reasons, and that his remaining engagements this year were cancelled. A June 2027 concert with the Vienna Philharmonic to mark his 100th birthday had been scheduled.
Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, called him a ‘truly special role model’. Any connection between Blomstedt and Korea, or Korean concerts, does not appear in the reports this paper reviewed and could not be confirmed. Funeral arrangements and any official statement from his family could not be confirmed either.
