The score of my life By Zubin Mehta, Roli, Rs 395

Told to Renate Gräfin Matuschka, published from Munich in 2006 and translated from the German by Anu Pande, this is an instant- coffee version of a very grand life. Great conductors are always male, and are always forgiven their unabashed grandeur, especially when they are tall, dark and Wagnerian. Zubin Mehta is all these things, and with a copybook magnificence perhaps unconsciously imbibed from Herbert von Karajan. He is conscious of being priggishly criticized for his “Hollywood attitude”, and it doesn’t help to have been associated with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. Imagine Bruckner in LA.

Yet the Mehta appeal is also solidly linked with two of the world’s oldest orchestras: the Vienna and the New York Phils. He was born on April 29, 1936, the day Toscanini conducted his last concert with the latter. Musically, Mehta can be positioned between the First and Second Viennese Schools, being equally adept with Mozart, Mahler and Schoenberg, and capable of recreating that unique Viennese sound with orchestras as far apart as the Israel Philharmonic and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. But he has never shied away from ‘lollipop’ concerts, playing Woody Allen’s film music at the Central Park, performing Turandot in the Forbidden City, and conducting the Three Tenors for the World Cup Finals in Rome. He has protested against Vietnam and Bosnia with his music, professes a complex allegiance to Israel, where he has insisted on performing Wagner in spite of the “musical hooliganism” with which the Tristan Prelude was greeted at its first performance there. Being a close friend of the pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim, he also supported the attempt by Barenboim and the late Edward Said to bring together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians in the West-Östlicher Divan project. Hence, Mehta’s ‘tellings’ roughly fall into two groups in this book — grand deeds and good deeds; and there are embarrassing sentences like this one: “For me it is natural to help other people if I have the means to do so.”

Unlike purists like Stravinsky and Boulez, some great musicians can inhabit the Hello! magazine world as effortlessly as the High Classical one. Mehta is among the latter, and one must take the chattiness of this book in the right spirit. There are fairly profound, but unelaborated, pearls of wisdom casually cast at the reader from time to time that afford fleeting glimpses of the formidable reserves of musical experience and knowledge Mehta embodies. Conductors of his stature are part of several universes at once: the complex musical memory of an old symphony orchestra, the lives and minds of such colossi as Beethoven, Mahler and Wagner, and the stupendous melodic, harmonic and rhythmic structures they had created, which must be recreated over and over again with diverse human, technical and acoustic resources. With Mehta, in this book, one sometimes gets to see only the tip of the iceberg one expects such a merging of oceans to produce — but never more than the tip.

There are some lovely stories though. My favourite was Mehta’s meeting with Alma Mahler-Werfel in New York, her home crammed with memorabilia of her various husbands and lovers (she had married, befriended or slept with everybody who was anybody in fin de siècle Vienna). She was 80 then, holding Mehta’s hand throughout the visit, and casting her spell so completely that he missed his flight out of New York. “I remarked quite in passing that I found her granddaughter in Los Angeles very beautiful,” Mehta recalls, “I received the succinct but slightly jealous answer that she thought the young lady had too large a bottom.”