Among the precedents that tumbled when Kirill Petrenko was elected chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra this week, the Jewish element was the least remarked upon.
Petrenko, 43, was chosen as a compromise candidate after the orchestra's musicians, who have the privilege of voting for the man who leads them, split in the election in May, with the older Germans favouring the nationalist Christian Thielemann and the mostly foreign, younger players voting for the brilliant Latvian, Andris Nelsons.
The shy and unassuming Petrenko, a fixture at the Bayreuth Festival in recent years, offered an irresistible combination of Wagnerian immersion and Slavic passion. On Sunday, he won a large majority of the votes cast. He will succeed Sir Simon Rattle in September 2018.
The precedents? Petrenko is the first Russian-born conductor to head the Berlin Philharmonic (with the pedantic exception of Leo Borchard, imposed on the orchestra by the Soviets in May 1945 and shot dead by an American sentry three months later). Petrenko is Berlin's first bearded conductor since Arthur Nikisch, who died in January 1922. He is also, note well, the first Jew.
This should perhaps not be worth mentioning in a city that has the fastest growing Jewish population in Europe, a city with Daniel Barenboim at the Staatsoper and Ivan Fischer at the Konzerthaus - a major venue for classical music in Germany.
History, however, runs deep in Berlin and the depth of those roots makes Petrenko's election a matter of notice precisely because his antecedents were completely irrelevant.
After Nikisch's death, the rivals for succession were Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Water. The former was a willowy German intellectual with strong nationalist leanings; the other, though converted, was identified as being Jewish. So was a very considerable part of the orchestra's paying audience.
The ultimate decision on the next chief conductor lay not with the players but with Louise Wolff, known as Queen Louise, a widowed music agency owner who fed the musicians during time of severe inflation and privation. She came down firmly on Furtwängler's side, arguing that it was in no one's interest for the orchestra to appear to be too Jewish. She read the runes correctly. When the Nazis seized power, Furtwängler remained conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic while Louise Wolff was stripped of her livelihood and erased from the orchestra's history.
By the time Barenboim contested the leadership against Rattle in 1999, losing by a decisive margin, racial origins played no part in the outcome. Barenboim bore no grudges and continued to guest-conduct the Philharmonic. But there were murmurs to suggest that a small minority of players deemed Barenboim's "foreignness" somehow more alien than Rattle's.
That is no longer the case in 2015. Petrenko is known to be the son of Siberian Jews from Omsk who migrated in 1980 to Austria, where his father found a job playing violin in a provincial orchestra. He studied in Vienna and, after a very slow career start, conducted his first Ring Cycle in a small town in Thuringia with such impact that Bayreuth came offering a contract. After a spell at the Komische Oper in Berlin, he is currently music director of Bavarian Opera in Munich.
He has never, so far as I am aware, spoken about his origins, not least because he hardly ever gives an interview or appears in front of a microphone except to discuss music. Intensely shy, so private that no trace of a personal life has ever come to public attention, he applies himself to music with an almost religious dedication, and to his musicians with a loyalty that verges on tribal. He is, beyond question, one of the most gifted musicians of his generation, and one of the least renowned.
His career has been German-based. He has made few recordings and is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, or in Asia, where the Berlin Philharmonic is a brand leader for German culture. In the years ahead, Petrenko will have to shed some of his shyness and expose more of his convictions if his leadership of the orchestra is to appeal beyond the narrow confines of classical concert-goers.
