'I shield myself always', said Bernard Haitink in reply to my very first question. He hardly needed to tell me that. I had pointed out that the Phonogram biography given to me in preparation for the interview presented the most impressive list of appointments, achievements and honours over the years, an ideal list for Who's Who, but told me little or nothing about him as a person. Here were the outlines of a conducting career that must be the envy of all others, for he leapt to success in his twenties. Yet in no way could he be regarded as a flamboyant figure either as a public personality or as a musician. How was this? 

Usually, as he said, Bernard Haitink may try and shield himself, but on this occasion no musician in the world could have been more conscientious, more directly honest at attempting to answer these basic contradictions which he himself recognized as clearly as I did. 'In a way I'm a non-conductor', he said at one point, and at once modified what we both saw could be seriously misquoted. But the point was there. He positively dislikes the flamboyant conductor, though he respects many. 

Haitink's attitude is nothing to do with false modesty, he insists. 'I'm not modest. Otherwise I wouldn't be a conductor. But I'm a s trong believer in growing, particularly in this profession. In that way we are very lucky because our technique isn't as sensitive as that of a pianist or violinist. As long as the ear and brain work and you can lift your arms, you can develop your abilities as you grow older and deepen your views of the repertory. At least I'm trying'. He does not regard his 50th birthday this month as anything like a watershed. I don't believe in birthdays – I believe you grow older every day'. But as he has reached middle age, he does recognize that he has more natural authority. 'I don't have to fight for it any more'. 

He was reminded of another recent conversation with an orchestral player, this time a member of his own Concertgebouw Orchestra. They were talking about a brilliant young conductor who had just visited Amsterdam, and the player was – as Haitink tactfully put it – very tentative about him. 'Well what about me when I started?' asked Haitink of the player, a member of the orchestra for many years. 'When you started, we all knew that here was a conductor' came the reply very firmly. Haitink asked why, and there was no special explanation. 'It's strange, and still I don't know myself', said Haitink. But some clues on the personal electricity he undoubtedly has come from his specifying exactly what he enjoys in his work. For example before an important concert it can be sheer agony for him 'because I haven't the biggest ego in the world', but the moment he walks on stage everything is all right and he can enjoy himself. And whereas he dislikes the conductor breed, he feels completely at home with orches­tral musicians. 'I like the whole feel of an orchestra tuning. It sends my adrenalin rushing'.

He enjoys rehearsals, obviously understands the temperament of players in different countries, and works on that with an acuteness for understanding the other man's point of view which to put it mildly is not a common quality in conductors. He remembers going to the Cleveland Orchestra for the first time while George Szell was still alive. The first work to be rehearsed was Strauss's Don Juan, and he asked himself what could he possibly tell these musicians who had repeatedly played it under Szell. As they played it through, he did not stop them at all. He just let them play because 'it was marvellous'. At once he suggested that they should go on to the Bizet Symphony. 'Happily they didn't know it that well, and we could rehearse!'. With his own players in either Amsterdam or London, he knows he might bore them with his repeated demands for warmth from the strings, more expression in the left hand, no chopping in the right ('No wood-chopping, gentlemen!' is one of his favourite commands) but always he feels at home with them. In any rehearsal he always tries to leave some thing for the actual concert, and he endorses the general view of London players that there are no sightreaders to match their ability to learn everything very quickly. 'In Amsterdam it takes more time, but when it's right, it can be very right'. 

One explanation for this rapport with his players is that Haitink first and last is the complete professional, something which he himself insisted on most firmly at the very point when he made his deliberately enigmatic remark about being 'a non-conductor'. But all the evidence points to qualities in addition which are much more electric than that, and it seems to have been so from the start. His major breakthrough came in 1956 when he was 27. He received a phone-call from Eduard van Beinum at the Concertgebouw to come at once. He did so and was told that at the last minute Giulini had cancelled for a concert involving the Cherubini Requiem. The young Haitink had directed that work as assistant conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, was the only conductor in Holland to know the piece, and the choir from the Radio had been the same as in the projected Giulini performance.

At first Haitink blankly refused van Beinum's proposal that he should take over. 'Why not?' van Beinum persisted. 'Because I am just starting and just surviving at the Radio Orchestra, and I'm terrified. I don't want to expose myself to the Concertgebouw Orchestra'. That did not satisfy the older man at all. He had great personal charm, Haitink explained, and he talked him out of resistance. 'It's what you've got to do, he said, and I did'. 

That Haitink made a deep impression in the performance not just on the audience but on the orchestra too is now a matter of Concertgebouw legend. For his father, very soon to die, there was an added joy. Hardly able to walk any longer, he had arrived in the hall early, and was sitting waiting, when one of the stewards, not knowing who he was, came up eagerly. 'Sir, watch out tonight', said the steward. 'There is a very talented young boy conducting'. For Haitink senior that was a triumph even greater than the concert itself. 

Of his boyhood, as Haitink said, he rarely talks ('I always shield myself') but this time he made an exception. His parents were hardly musical at all, he explained, though sympathetic. It was 'a fairly well-to-do family' in that they didn't talk about money. His father was the director of the Electricity and Gas Board in Amsterdam, the top administrator, not a technical man. And his parents hired the best teacher possible, a member of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, when at the age of nine the young Bernard suddenly asked to learn the violin. As he says the family story has it that he simply envied a friend for having a violin case to carry and wanted one himself. He started his lessons, and as he lived only 500 yards from the Concertgebouw Hall (his mother still lives there, aged 82) it was not long before he attended a concert. Amazingly his first visit was to hear Bach's St Matthew Passion, and even more amazing, the small boy went on his own. He was terrified and in a way did not want to go, but his teacher was enthusiastic for him to hear the great Willem Mengelberg in this music. What remains in his memory are two detached impressions – the violin solo in 'Erbarme dich mein Gott' and a woman next to him who cried. 'I was not excited', he says today, 'but I was impressed'. 

It was when he went to his first orchestral concert a short while after that the boy found his revelation. It was a Thursday subscription concert, he remembers, and Mengelberg was conducting Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony. More than the actual interpretation he remembers the small, compact figure of the conductor, and from that moment he became an addict of music, seeking to enjoy everything he could hear, not it seems specializing in the sort of favourite composers who for most youngsters provide the early landmarks.

When the war came to Holland and the Germans occupied the country in 1940 Haitink was only 11, and though his parents were as disturbed as anyone else by the treatment of the Jews in the orchestra (and elsewhere), and at a later stage in the war when the audiences were made up far too much of German officers, his parents still let him go to concerts. He always went on his own, encouraged by his violin teacher. He had become a great Mengelberg admirer, but after the Occupation Mengelberg had made pronouncements about the primacy of German culture as well as collaborating with the Nazis, and that effectively prevented him from conducting in Amsterdam except on rare occasions. Haitink remembers them all including the time when at the end of a Brahms concert some people in the front rows refrained from applauding. Mengelberg made a speech, saying that he understood why they did not applaud but that at least the orchestra had played beautifully and deserved appreciation.

The very last time that Mengelberg conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra was in 1944, Haitink remembers. when the programme – very short because of wartime austerity – consisted of Franck's Psyche and Mozart's Symphony No 29. But before that in 1943 as a special dispensation Mengelberg had again conducted the Pathetique. Dispensation was needed because the Nazis had banned Russian music along with that by Jewish and British composers, but Frau Seyss-Inquart, wife of the military governor, pleaded for the Pathetique, and an exception was made. 

Haitink also remembers his teacher urging him specially to attend when Eugen Jochum was conducting Brahms's Fourth and Mozart's No 33 , with Gaspar Cassado playing the Schumann Cello Concerto. He remembers Jochum also in Schubert's Great C major Symphony, but above all the time when Eduard van Beinum in a half-empty hall (people were becoming afraid of attending concerts) conducted Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. He was fortunate himself in living so close, and fortunate too that by far the greater part of his musical experience was in live performances. His record collection was minimal. He had a very old record player and bought the set of Toscanini conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (12/37) as well as Mengelberg conducting Brahms's Academic Festival Overture (11/30). Later he added more Toscanini records – Haydn's Clock Symphony (9/29), Mozart's Haffner (7/30) and Beethoven's Seventh (12/36), and not surprisingly he was struck forcibly by the sharp contrast between these readings and those of Mengelberg. He listened to the radio as well. sometimes to the BBC although that was forbidden, and he remembers hearing the last Prom which Sir Henry Wood conducted in the summer of 1944. The venue for these concerts had been moved from the Royal Albert Hall in London to the Corn Exchange in Bedford because of the flying bombs, and, as I reminded him, it included Mozart's A major Piano Concerto, K488, with Clifford Curzon (now Sir Clifford) as soloist and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. 

During this time he was receiving no training in music at school. In any case lessons were often interrupted by air-raid warnings and for a whole year there was no school at all. It was not even safe for any man between the age of 16 and 60 to walk openly on the street in case he was suddenly picked up by the Germans, and at the time of Holland's liberation Haitink was just edging into the age group at peril. His father, much earlier in the Occupation, had been one of the first to be taken as hostage to a concentration camp. He was allowed to return three months later and the boy did not recognize his own father. Haitink senior returned to his post, but as well as being dogged by ill-health he had a very difficult time bargaining, one day with the Germans, the next with the Resistance. Bernard remembers one day when a warning came that his father was due to be picked up again. It was a common message and his father thought at first he would ignore it and stay at home. But instead he went to the hospital for a check-up and afterwards when father and son turned into their street two Nazi officers were just leaving their house. If they had been really determined, they could have returned, but that uncertainty was typical of the period, and left its mark on the boy.

One obvious result was his hatred of uniforms, he explains. Another was his fear of loud noise, for though Amsterdam was never seriously bombed, the noise of Flying Fortresses on daytime raids , low over the city, along with violent gunfire from the ground, is something he has never forgotten. All that and a love-hate feeling for things German. He loves German literature (it was his best subject at school ) as well as German music and he was delighted to find when visiting Germany, and particularly on his recent visit to Berlin to conduct the Philharmonic, that his impressions were so agreeable not just because of the beautiful playing of the orchestra but because of the German players' model behaviour, dignified without being pompous. 

When after the war was over young Haitink announced to his parents that he wanted to become a musician, they were naturally worried, but did not 'make a drama out of it'. He was not a very brilliant violinist, he will tell you nowadays, but the adviser who was called in pronounced that young Bernard was good enough to go on. By this time he had conceived the ambition of becoming a conductor. He remembers a visit of Sir Adrian Boult to Holland, and the Anglo-Dutch Society who had organized the visit put the boy of 16 next to the British conductor. 'And what are your plans?' asked Sir Adrian, to the boy's confusion and amusement. 

The real breakthrough came several years later, when towards the end of his training at the Music Academy he applied to join a conducting seminar held one summer by Netherlands Radio. Officially he was ineligible, for he had not finished his exams, but somehow he persuaded the two judges to hear him, and at last he had the chance to conduct a real orchestra. One of the judges pronounced that this tyro was 'a total loss', but Ferdinand Leitner, the other judge, felt that he might be 'a bit mad' but he wanted to try him out. They created an extra 13th place for the course, and that was how over two summer seminars Bernard Haitink first established a conducting technique with Leitner. After the first seminar he advised his pupil to get experience in an orchestra, and that year he played in a back desk of the Radio Orchestra, obeying Leitner's instruction to 'watch conductors'. After the second summer Leitner suggested that either Haitink came to him in Stuttgart to study or if possible try to become an assistant conductor with the Radio Orchestra. Fortunately for Haitink that second option opened up for him, and with it the tremendous breakthrough when he deputised for Giulini in the Cherubini Requiem. 

It was not long before he became principal conductor of the Radio Orchestra, and he remained with it for nearly five years. He now feels it was a dangerous experience. Though it meant he covered a wide range of repertory, it was a question of playing everything just once with the obvious threat of superficiality. But at least he learned to deal with an orchestra. After the first honeymoon period he found it difficult, because he discovered his own tensions being picked up by the players. But then he found his feet, and it was at this time that Eduard van Beinum became ill and suddenly died. Since the Cherubini concert Haitink had conducted the Concertgebouw many times, but he still did not feel himself ready to succeed van Beinum. 'I was terribly young' he says. 'I was nearly 30 but I was younger than that in mentality. As one Dutch critic put it, "The terrible thing about Haitink is that he is growing old so slowly" and that was true!'. 

All the same, once he had succeeded to the Concertgebouw throne his career began to follow the lines suggested in the Who's Who-like list given me by Phonogram. Already in the 1950s van Beinum had engineered Haitink's first international engagement, getting him to deputize in a concert he had had to cancel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Because his visits have been less regular than those of van Beinum it wasn't until his last brilliantly successful tour of the United States conducting the Concertgebouw in Beethoven symphony and concerto cycles (with Ashkenazy as soloist) that Haitink enjoyed playing to American audiences so much. British audiences were different, and his career with the LPO has followed in the same sort of slow satisfying crescendo that has marked his career in Amsterdam. Now he leaves the LPO as Principal Conductor, conscious that he cannot combine it with the musical directorship of Glyndebourne, which he assumed last summer. Glyndebourne has been an inspiration to him. He loves it and its great figures, congratulating himself that here is an opera house where he can enjoy working without the 'unavoidable hysterics' of a big opera house. There are now plans for him to record opera, but he is wary about revealing them. On recording he is very clear in mind: 'I have a very cool head listening to playbacks and I choose the right takes'. He also feels himself lucky to be working with a producer as sympathetic as Volker Straus of Phonogram. 'As long as I work with a producer who gets the sound I hear in the studio, then I'm fine'. It is just so with Straus, and though his Decca collaborators have worked with a very different approach, he has enjoyed his excursions there too. 

What the future holds for H aitink, now that he is 50, is anyone's guess. As he said when commenting on the extra ease of middle-age in exerting authority, 'I'm a slow grower'. Looking at his career as a whole, one can see that there in that self-judgement he is just as clear-headed as he is in his music-making. But, in that expression 'slow grower', the operative word for Bernard Haitink both in the past and for the future is the second. 

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