John Nelson, an American conductor known for championing the work of romantic composer Hector Berlioz, including through a prizewinning recording he made of “Les Troyens” - an epic five-act opera, adapted from Virgil’s “Aeneid,” that many critics rank near the top of the canon - died March 31 at his home in Chicago. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by Alexandra Knight, the head of the music agency Knight Classical, which represented him. She did not cite a cause.
Across a six-decade career in music, Mr. Nelson split his time between the concert hall and the opera house, gaining a reputation as a formidable interpreter of French opera, sacred music, and the baroque masterworks of Bach and Handel.
He served for more than a decade as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, a group he helped elevate through national tours that stopped at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. He later worked for years in France, recording a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies while leading the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris.
Mr. Nelson was a prolific guest conductor, directing major orchestras worldwide. He also won a Grammy Award for directing the English Chamber Orchestra and star soprano Kathleen Battle in a recording of Handel’s “Semele,” released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1993.
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But he remained best known as an interpreter of Berlioz, whom he described as “my patron saint in music.” He traced his interest in the French composer back to a conversation he had with his manager, Matthew Epstein, at age 28, when Mr. Nelson was a young Juilliard grad leading New Jersey’s Pro Arte Chorale.
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“John,” he recalled Epstein saying, “you need to do something to haul yourself out of your choral doldrums - something spicy and interesting that’ll make a splash in New York. Why don’t you do ‘The Trojans?‘”
Commonly known by its French name, “Les Troyens,” the opera was Berlioz’s most ambitious work, retelling the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas in a run time that regularly exceeds four hours. (The composer, who died in 1869, didn’t live to see it performed in full.)
Mr. Nelson told Gramophone magazine that he studied the work by picking up conductor Colin Davis’s recently released 1970 recording of the opera - a listening experience he likened to “being struck by a thunderbolt.”
Deciding “to go for broke,” as he put it, he and Epstein arranged for the Pro Arte Chorale to perform the opera in 1972, in concert at Carnegie Hall. It was one of the work’s first full performances in the United States.
“It started around 7 P.M., ended around midnight, and at the end a mighty roar went up,” wrote New York Times classical music critic Harold C. Schonberg, praising the “extraordinary vitality and understanding” that Mr. Nelson brought to the music.
“Carnegie Hall,” he continued, “has heard nothing like that yell of approval since the ‘Götterdämmerung’ performance two seasons ago by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.”
Decades later, Mr. Nelson dryly noted that in some ways the performance was a disaster for his choral group: “It cost $50,000, which it took the board 10 years to pay off - and they lost their music director in the process.”
Mr. Nelson left the company after directing high-profile concerts, including in 1973 when he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting “Les Troyens” as a last-minute substitute for the group’s ailing director, Rafael Kubelík.
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Nearly 45 years later, in 2017, he made an acclaimed four-CD recording of the opera for the classical label Erato. Mr. Nelson said he spent about a year and a half planning the project and assembling the musicians, settling on a lineup that included France’s Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, three choirs, and a 16-person cast led by Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux.
The album was named Gramophone’s record of the year. It won top prizes at the International Opera Awards and France’s Victoires de la Musique Classique.
“Nelson never allows the dramatic pace to slacken, which is no mean achievement in itself in a work that even its greatest admirers would admit has occasional longueurs,” music critic Andrew Clements wrote in the Guardian. The record, he added, was “now unquestionably the version of Berlioz’s masterpiece to have at home.”
John Wilton Nelson was born in San José, Costa Rica, on Dec. 6, 1941. His parents were Protestant American missionaries, his mother a nurse and his father a minister. Mr. Nelson said he spent much of his childhood traveling the countryside with his family, at times playing the accordion in a trio with his dad, who played the saxophone, and his brother, who played guitar.
He was 6 when his family bought a Steinway piano for $50 and enrolled him in lessons. Mr. Nelson was later sent to the United States to study at a private school in Orlando. He continued at the piano, although he moved away from the instrument - eventually turning to conducting - after losing the tip of his right pinkie in a childhood accident, according to the magazine Christianity Today.
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Mr. Nelson studied music at Wheaton College in Illinois, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1963. He went on to train in conducting at Juilliard, where he studied under Jean Morel, and received a master’s degree in 1965. He taught at the school for a few years while launching his career, directing the Greenwich Philharmonia in Connecticut in addition to the Pro Arte Chorale.
“It was clear that I could not have a music directorship in a major city, so I went to the boondocks to settle down, work on repertoire and get my feet wet as a music director,” he told The Boston Globe in 1991, explaining his decision to join the Indianapolis Symphony.
Mr. Nelson toured and recorded with the group while taking on additional responsibilities as director of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Caramoor music center in Katonah, N.Y.
But by 1987, he was tired and burned out and decided to leave his main job in Indianapolis. “I said goodbye to the orchestra at the last stop of our first European tour, in Nuremberg,” he said in a Los Angeles Times interview. “My wife and I got into the car and drove off into the sunset - to Paris.”
Mr. Nelson and his wife, the former Anita Johnsen, married in 1964. She died in 2012. The John and Anita Nelson Center for Sacred Music at Wheaton, where she was also an alum, was later dedicated in their honor.
Mr. Nelson leaves two daughters, Kirsten Nelson Hood and Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos; four grandsons; and three great-grandchildren.
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After the success of his “Les Troyens” recording, Mr. Nelson continued to record major works by Berlioz, reuniting with Erato and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg for well-received versions of “La Damnation de Faust” (2019), “Les Nuits d’Eté” and “Harold en Italie” (both in 2022), and “Roméo et Juliette” (2023). He also led a 2019 live recording of Berlioz’s “Requiem,” at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death.
His final recording, with the English Concert & Choir, was of Handel’s “Messiah” (2023), an oratorio he had first conducted as a college sophomore, in a Baptist church with organ accompaniment. This time he led the performance at England’s Coventry Cathedral, in a concert that was shaped “with intelligence and flair,” Lindsay Kemp wrote in Gramophone.
“Just listen,” Kemp added, “to the way he builds towards the ‘Wonderful, Counsellor’ outbursts in ‘For unto us,’ with the cellos at one point contributing joyful spread chords. Or how ‘and of his Christ’ stands out in the ‘Hallelujah,’ and the final ‘amen’ is so carefully unfolded. Nelson gets these kinds of things right time and again.”