Born in Upper Austria as Franz Leopold Maria Möst — the stage name came later, with “Welser” taken from his hometown, Wels — he got his start in music by learning violin from a nun named Sister Gerburga, who liberally slapped her students’ hands with a ruler. When a new secondary school for music opened nearby in Linz, he auditioned, was accepted and began studying with an eye toward a career at the Vienna Philharmonic.
But in 1978, on the way back from a performance of Schubert’s Mass in G, he was in a car accident that left him with three broken vertebrae and severe nerve damage in two of his fingers. Welser-Möst is not one for superstition, but he wrote in his memoir, “From Silence,” that the day of the accident was full of eerie coincidences: The car had swerved off the icy road at the exact time of Schubert’s death, 150 years to the day; and he, an 18-year-old, had just played a piece that Schubert wrote when he, too, was 18. The first thing Welser-Möst heard when he awoke in the hospital? That Mass. Regardless of what it all meant, he wrote, “That Sunday was a fateful day for me, to which I owe much of what I am today.”
Already interested in conducting and unable to continue on violin because of the damage to his hand, Welser-Möst shifted his focus to the podium. After a post in Sweden, he was appointed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an unhappy tenure from the start. The British press called him “Frankly Worse Than Most,” something he laughs off today but certainly didn’t at the time. Even after he left, to take on the musical leadership of the Zurich Opera House, he was described in Switzerland as the “loser from London.”
The story was different in the United States, where his manager Edna Landau, whom he considers his “Jewish mom,” carefully plotted his rollout. She had seen him conduct in Zurich in the mid-1980s, and was “impressed by his confidence, his naturalness, his incredible musicianship,” she said. Still, she added, “I took my time with him.”
His American debut, in 1989, was with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Cleveland followed in 1993. The requests for him to return came swiftly, and when talks began for the job in Cleveland, Landau and Welser-Möst weighed the decision with care. Welser-Möst wanted to cultivate an environment like the one he grew up in, with music embedded in education and the everyday life of a community.
It’s a lofty goal but one common among American orchestras, and Welser-Möst has taken it seriously over the past two decades in Cleveland. He lives there for a substantial period of the year (instead of flying in for brief engagements), involving himself in community programs and collaborations, engaging with politics and befriending local luminaries like the rock music presenter Jules Belkin.
