Antonio de Almeida

Born in Paris to an American mother and a Portuguese aristocrat father, Antonio de Almeida retained French citizenship throughout his life and identified most closely with French culture. As a musicologist, he was the twentieth century's leading expert on the music of <a href="spotify:artist:4OihBPCQzR4GfbzqOY69Xm">Jacques Offenbach</a>. As a conductor, he applied himself to a wide range of repertory, notably opera, but he worked especially hard to gain attention for neglected French music. His final project was to record all the symphonies of <a href="spotify:artist:1EKhJjacXmWNA8zJaBF7Cm">Henri Sauguet</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:3UqtCBph9hKSPMpVIemoGo">Charles Tournemire</a>; he died of cancer just one disc short of his goal. (The engineer for these last discs, incidentally, was Almeida's son, Tony Jr.) Almeida's godfather was pianist <a href="spotify:artist:5N1GUHhFMRFFgMTjSOJDb9">Artur Rubinstein</a> and it was <a href="spotify:artist:5N1GUHhFMRFFgMTjSOJDb9">Rubinstein</a> who persuaded him to give up a scholarship to study nuclear chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and switch to music. Almeida had already studied musicology in Argentina with <a href="spotify:artist:08yq6CRUV0KSOn1J3t3vZk">Alberto Ginastera</a>, and he quickly took <a href="spotify:artist:5N1GUHhFMRFFgMTjSOJDb9">Rubinstein</a>'s advice and transferred to Yale, where he studied music theory with <a href="spotify:artist:3u1fWmwpwPOmMelTAo0Gb8">Paul Hindemith</a> and conducting with Serge Koussevitsky and <a href="spotify:artist:2CFaOiHKik5FgNGzZJ08sx">George Szell</a>. Almeida began conducting on Portuguese radio in 1949, and soon was appointed music director of the Oporto Symphony Orchestra. There, he met guest conductor <a href="spotify:artist:04kScQiBaLpLuCR1rh20Dd">Thomas Beecham</a> and within a year, <a href="spotify:artist:04kScQiBaLpLuCR1rh20Dd">Beecham</a> invited Almeida to London to conduct his <a href="spotify:artist:0MvSBMGRQJY3mRwIbJsqF1">Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a>. A busy guest-conducting schedule developed, as did a series of appointments as chief conductor and music director: Portuguese radio from 1957 to 1960, the <a href="spotify:artist:2G3SGwAd7uOTVm1y4IijBg">Stuttgart Philharmonic</a> from 1962 to 1964, the Opéra de Paris from 1965 to 1967, and the <a href="spotify:artist:0udLXDzunp4xQRWhMNQPci">Moscow Symphony Orchestra</a> from 1993 until his death. For his efforts to promote French music around the world, Almeida was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1976, later rising within that organization to the rank of commander. He was also elected a Commander of Arts and Letters in France in 1996. While devoting much time to conducting and recording, Almeida also steadily worked as a musicologist. He became co-artistic director of the Haydn Foundation with H.C. Robbins Landon in 1968. Almeida prepared performing editions of all the <a href="spotify:artist:2l4vGfFV7e46yO8lxfxR76">Boccherini</a> symphonies and compiled a thematic catalog of the works of <a href="spotify:artist:4OihBPCQzR4GfbzqOY69Xm">Offenbach</a>, which was not published until shortly after his death.