DRESDEN.- The Alte Meister cafe is just steps from the Semperoper, this city’s ornate concert hall and opera house, and home to its Staatskapelle orchestra. So it wasn’t too surprising when a stranger recognized that ensemble’s chief conductor, Christian Thielemann, as he ate lunch on the cafe’s terrace on a recent Saturday.

This wasn’t just any fan: He introduced himself as David Kim, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was in town on a European tour. Apologizing for interrupting, Kim intertwined his hands, almost begging for Thielemann to return to the Philadelphia podium, where he hasn’t stood since 1997.

“I just wanted to say, please come back,” Kim said. “It would be so wonderful if you could come back.”

Grinning, Thielemann gestured at the Semperoper. “My office is right over there,” he said.

He made it seem simple, as if he were merely waiting for the call to put him on a plane to Pennsylvania. But it’s not been so easy getting him back to the United States: He hasn’t led an American ensemble since 2002.

That long drought will end Oct. 20, when Thielemann takes the stage of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the first time since 1995, leading Bruckner’s fervent Eighth Symphony.

“It will be good for him,” Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s music director, who extended the invitation, said in an interview. “And it will be good for the orchestra.”

In the 1990s, Thielemann, now 63 and one of the world’s most acclaimed maestros — as well as one of the most divisive and drama-prone — appeared regularly with American orchestras and opera companies. With Philadelphia, he recorded an album of excerpts from Wagner, whose music he conducts with a mesmerizing mix of spacious naturalness and building tension, and twice brought that orchestra to Carnegie Hall in New York. For a period he appeared almost every year with the New York Philharmonic and led Strauss, another specialty, at the Metropolitan Opera.

Around the turn of the 21st century, his schedule began filling up in Europe, where he became a cultural celebrity in the tradition of his mentor, Herbert von Karajan — and, for better and worse, a symbol of the grand Austro-German artistic lineage Karajan embodied. With that celebrity came second-guessing by critics, tumultuous departures from positions, even accusations of antisemitism.

Intercontinental travel and long periods away from home became increasingly onerous. Veteran orchestra chief Deborah Borda tried to coax Thielemann back to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Peter Gelb, of the Met, showed him the floor plan of an apartment that a company donor was willing to lend to ensure his comfort in New York. Nothing worked.

During the pandemic, though, Thielemann received the surprising and unwelcome news that his contract in Dresden, which began in 2012, would not be extended past 2024. And because of scheduling tangles he will spend, for the first time in years, multiple summers not leading Wagner’s operas at the Bayreuth Festival, which he has dominated like no other conductor in its modern history, but where the music director role he filled was dissolved in 2020.

Thielemann suddenly seems like a free agent again, raising the possibility of a more extensive return to the United States — and the possibility that he could be a long-shot candidate for a permanent American position. It has not escaped notice that Chicago, the orchestra he chose to come back to first, is searching for a replacement for Muti, who steps down at the end of this season.

But has Thielemann and his focus on a tiny circle of Central European masters — the likes of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner — remained too much the same as the classical music landscape has changed over the past 20 years? And is he even interested in such a position?

“It depends,” Thielemann said. “I’m not looking for something. Because I can also stay without. I have more freedom to do certain guest conducting, which I haven’t done before, or not for a long time.”

Not just America is in play. His week in Chicago is now unexpectedly and chaotically sandwiched between cycles of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” at the Berlin State Opera, where the ruling maestro, Daniel Barenboim, another Thielemann mentor, had to pull out from a highly anticipated new production because of illness.

Berlin is Thielemann’s hometown; he led the Deutsche Oper there from 1997 to 2004, and he has made little secret of coveting the podium of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic. Early this summer, Thielemann made a last-minute debut with the Staatskapelle Berlin — the State Opera’s orchestra — in performances of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Taking on the “Ring” has only added to the chatter that he could be a natural fit if Barenboim, who turns 80 next month, were forced to retire.

Matthias Schulz, the State Opera’s managing director, said in an interview that the Bruckner had gone “incredibly well,” but added that Thielemann might prefer to avoid the headaches that come with official affiliations: “When he’s a guest conductor, this is always for him a big party. And he could do fantastic things in the next years without institutional problems — let’s call them that. It’s a great life. But you never know.”

So Thielemann is, as usual, enmeshed in turbulence and questions. It is hardly rare for conductors to have big personalities or to be the subject of gossip, but he has been at the center of contentious debate more than most — which an observer can sense that he, with his playful charm and wicked laugh, rather relishes.

Some orchestras simply never warmed to him. Some critics insist that his symphonic conducting pales in comparison with his work in opera, and that he’s shown little desire to expand a repertory as circumscribed as any maestro’s of his stature. He was viewed as arrogant and ambitious — if blazingly talented — even in his 20s, when he rose through the provincial German opera houses of Düsseldorf and Nuremberg. In 2011, he left the Munich Philharmonic amid discord.

Thielemann is perennially rumored to be feuding with Bayreuth’s artistic director, Katharina Wagner, who said in an interview that it has been “completely good, working together. I know many people don’t believe that. If you have a different opinion about something, people think you hate each other.”




When Thielemann was at the Deutsche Oper, he complained publicly about its low level of government support compared with Barenboim’s State Opera, and he clashed with a new artistic director. Amid that mess, inflammatory accusations spread that Thielemann — by then established as an avatar of the old German traditions, with all their Nazi-era associations — had made antisemitic comments about Barenboim, who is Jewish.

The two men never broke over the situation, and have spoken and met regularly over the years. “When it became clear that I would have to give up conducting the ‘Ring’ for health reasons,” Barenboim said in an email, “I immediately thought of Christian and called him.” Checking in with Barenboim by phone while at lunch in Dresden, Thielemann spoke to his old mentor in the informal, solicitous tone of a doting grandson.

But a whiff of conservatism has attached itself to Thielemann. Even the fact that he has conducted little Mahler has been scrutinized as a sign of antisemitism. A new round of criticism followed an essay he wrote in 2015 about the far-right protests then roiling Dresden. Today, the piece reads fairly innocuously, a call for the political mainstream to take the right’s grievances seriously as a means of countering them, but in the heat of the moment it was interpreted as a kind of apology for neo-fascism.

The decision not to extend his contract here, announced in May 2021, remains shrouded in mystery. Chief conductors officially serve at the pleasure of Dresden’s government, but the politicians usually take their cues from the Staatskapelle musicians; that was not the case here.

“We still don’t know why,” Holger Grohs, a violinist in the orchestra, said in an interview. “They say they want to change our approach, get a younger audience, and to do things differently.”

(Although how different things will be under his replacement, Daniele Gatti, whose age and repertory are close to Thielemann’s and who was fired by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2018 after being accused of sexual misconduct, remains to be seen.)

Thielemann was once pegged as an autocrat, but his relaxed ease with the players was evident as they rehearsed Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. Or, rather, didn’t rehearse: The entire process consisted of an uninterrupted run-through on a Friday morning and another on Saturday, before a Sunday morning concert. Other than 10 minutes or so of spot checks after the run on Friday, that was it for this sprawling, complex work. Thielemann didn’t even bring a score.

“I know them so well that sometimes a look is enough,” he said. “If the first time in the Scherzo is not together, the second time will be together; so leave it. I’m not somebody who over-rehearses, because there must be something open. That’s a bit risky, but I like that.”

The results sounded risky, in a good way. The 80-minute symphony unfolded as a series of hard-won yet inevitable victories of perseverance through vulnerability. Some slight uncertainties in the earthy brasses were more than made up for by the mysterious tang of the Dresden winds, the glinting energy and veiled fragility of the strings, the urgency — at 11 a.m. — of the performance, which surged with grandeur without ever feeling pressured.

Grohs recalled playing Wagner’s very long “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” under Thielemann: “After finishing with these six hours, I was like, come on, let’s do it again from the beginning. Because it’s so natural, the way he conducts. It’s floating. You never feel forced, and you never feel stiff.”

As Schulz said, “He finds the Mendelssohn moments in Wagner.” This summer at Bayreuth — where Thielemann has led all of Wagner’s mature operas, the first conductor to do so there since Felix Mottl, who died in 1911 — he certainly found the Mendelssohn moments in “Lohengrin,” leading a majestic yet light-textured performance that was the musical talk of the festival.

Yuval Sharon, who directed the production, said: “There is the expectation that since he is part of this lineage, the German ‘Meister,’ you might be led to believe he has this iron grip on the music and performance. But it’s quite the opposite, the way that ‘Lohengrin’ could just breathe.”

In March, Thielemann will travel with the Vienna Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall and Berkeley, California. In the coming seasons, he will maintain his close relationships with that orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic; tour in honor of the Staatskapelle Dresden’s 475th anniversary next year; and possibly return to Bayreuth in 2025 for a revival of “Parsifal.”

If a new appointment were to come in the midst of that, the Staatskapelle Berlin seems likeliest, not least because of its union of symphonic and operatic responsibilities, like Thielemann’s Dresden job. While American ensembles might look to him as a guest authority in the works he knows best, the limits on his core repertory, and intensifying calls for more diversity in appointments, work against him becoming a music director. Even the directions in which he said he wanted to expand hew to the standards: more Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Rachmaninoff.

But Schulz cautioned that, while “people always identify him with just two or three composers, it’s much more than that.” And the Chicago Symphony, even more than other top American ensembles, has long had a taste for magisterial maestros of the old school. (Jeff Alexander, that orchestra’s president, said in an email, “I cannot comment in detail about the music director search while the process is ongoing.”)

For his part, Muti, who has held positions on both sides of the Atlantic, spelled a note of warning for Thielemann: “To be a music director in the U.S. is different. The Generalmusikdirector in Germany, it has much more power in an institution. In America, there are presidents, vice presidents, the committees, the board. A music director who is used to having a lot of freedom in his decisions has to adjust.”

Borda, who now leads the New York Philharmonic, said, “We would be very interested in his returning to the Philharmonic for a guest week, and he knows that.” Gelb said he has made it clear that Thielemann would be treated “like operatic royalty” at the Met. But, he added, he texted Thielemann earlier this year, proposing a production for 2025, and never got a reply.

Matías Tarnopolsky, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s chief executive, said, “Since he’s back conducting in the U.S., we hope to be in touch soon to make arrangements.”

But first comes Chicago, once renowned as a Bruckner orchestra under Georg Solti and Barenboim. “It’s interesting to meet an orchestra again with more experience,” Thielemann said. “It’s Bruckner Eight; I know the piece so well that I can pay more attention to the orchestra. I’ve done it so much that I’m concentrating more on what you offer. I want to see how is the sound, how the famous Chicago sound is in Bruckner.”

“It’s a total adventure,” he added of his suddenly jam-packed, globe-trotting October. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Life is interesting sometimes.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.