Raymond Leppard, a conductor who resuscitated moribund 17th-century operas in helping to nurture a major revival of interest in Baroque music, and who went on to a wider career as a guest conductor of major orchestras and the longtime music director of the Indianapolis Symphony, died on Tuesday in Indianapolis. He was 92.
The symphony confirmed his death in a statement.
After making his mark with early music, the British-born Mr. Leppard chafed at being pigeonholed and sought to recast himself as a versatile conductor of concert works and operas from across the centuries.
A prolific recording artist, he made more than 200 records, many of them with the English Chamber Orchestra, which he conducted starting in the early 1960s.
Mr. Leppard (pronounced LEPP-ard) was a composer as well. He wrote the scores for the movies “Lord of the Flies” (1963) and “Alfred the Great” (1969), and he arranged and conducted the score for “The Hotel New Hampshire” (1984).
He was part of a generation of musicians who, aided by the burgeoning recording industry, helped revive Baroque music in concert halls after World War II. That group included Nikolaus Harnoncourt of Austria and Neville Marriner of Britain.
He began his work reconstructing lesser-known, and sometimes forgotten, works from the earliest years of opera in the frescoed halls of the Marciana Library in Venice.
Those 16th-century newfangled mixtures of music, drama, dance and scenery were works of emotional intensity that chronicled the loves and adventures of gods, other mythological figures and Roman emperors. But they had been written down in skeletal form, often with just vocal and bass lines. Performers of the time were expected to improvise and adapt them to whatever conditions they found themselves in.
In the 1950s, performances of these works — including those composed by the founder of Italian opera, Claudio Monteverdi, and the other early masters — were not common, and when they were mounted they were often boring.
While he was a Cambridge University don, Mr. Leppard, inspired by a suggestion made by the composer Benjamin Britten, traveled to the Marciana Library to work on the manuscript of “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” Monteverdi’s masterpiece and his last opera. He created a vibrant performing version for modern opera houses, and it soon entered the canon.
“I needed to find the life in something other people thought was dead,” he told The Washington Post in 1974.
At the library, he stumbled on manuscripts by Francesco Cavalli, a bright light of the generation after Monteverdi, in the mid-18th century, whose works were little known.
He reconstructed Cavalli’s “La Calisto” and “L’Ormindo,”and introduced, to acclaim, his versions into opera houses, especially at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. His editions of other Monteverdi operas followed.
“Through his own imaginative interpretation of how the orchestra parts should be played, he has made the score sound at once old and new,” Raymond Ericson of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Leppard’s “Ormindo” recording.
His versions were full-blooded, with lush strings and reasonably large orchestras — and, purists alleged. vulgarizing distortions. These critics included early-music enthusiasts who championed the use of period instruments and performing practices that created a leaner, more percussive sound. Their goal was to recreate performances heard by the original audiences.
Mr. Leppard expressed little but contempt for those specialists.
“The moment people aspire to the condition of the Virgin Mary, they are sunk in music!” he once said. The originalist approach, he said, was “a wretched, inadequate view of what authenticity is.” In his book “Authenticity in Music” (1988), he called it a “blinkered, faddish pursuit.”
His job, Mr. Leppard believed, was to do whatever it took to bring a work alive, theatrically and musically, by understanding the cultural world in which it was created, and to convey the composer’s intent. “No halfhearted attempt hampered by academic restraint will do: Performing these works again is like a love affair,” he wrote in the liner notes to a recording of “Calisto.”
Mr. Leppard eventually acknowledged that his approach had come to seem old-fashioned as the authenticity movement grew. “Pupils of mine were playing in the newly ‘authentic’ way, and I felt it was their turn — they should get on with it,” he told The Times of London in 1997.
He left England for the United States in 1976, motivated by his distaste for the imbroglio in Britain over performance practice, as well as a desire to broaden his repertory and build his reputation and displeasure with Britain’s political direction: He said he did not approve of the socialism and union power that were on the rise at the time. (He became an American citizen in 2003.)
He was first offered the music director’s job in Indianapolis in 1982. “Absolutely not” was his response, he said in a 1987 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “Why, I considered Indianapolis death on wheels!”
He did not think much of the orchestra’s quality, either. Even his agent objected, thinking he should wait for a more important orchestra to offer him a job.
But he was won over. The players seemed willing to work, the orchestra’s finances were healthy, and the acquisition of an old movie palace that was refurbished into an excellent concert hall did the trick. He also cited the “moderation” of the Midwestern character.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, it might work, something really might happen here,’” he said.
It did.
During Mr. Leppard’s tenure in Indianapolis, from 1987 to 2001, the orchestra’s quality rose. It became one of the few to pay musicians for a 52-week season, produced eight recordings, increased its budget and endowment, and went on two European tours.
“Leppard has steered the orchestra to new heights, both in the concert hall and on disc,” Duncan Hadfield wrote in the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. “A tight and highly professional unit, Indianapolis customarily produces an ample and rugged sound, held firmly together by a pristine ensemble.”
Mr. Leppard made numerous guest appearances with other orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony. He conducted at the major opera houses of London, Paris, Hamburg, Geneva, Stockholm and elsewhere and led a production of Britten’s “Billy Budd” at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1978-79 season. But he never went on to a more prominent music directorship.
He lived out the remaining decades with his husband, John Bloom, on an estate in Indianapolis, appearing with the symphony as its conductor laureate and with other orchestras as a guest. Mr. Bloom is his only immediate survivor.
Raymond John Leppard was born on Aug. 11, 1927, in London and grew up in Bath. His father, Albert, was an engineer, and his mother, Bertha (Beck) Leppard, was a homemaker. He took up the piano at 5 and stuck with music despite his parents’ wish for him to become a doctor.
He attended Trinity College, Cambridge University; studied harpsichord and viola; led various musical groups; and, at Trinity, discovered his fascination with early and Baroque music. After graduating in 1952, he spent time in the Royal Air Force.
He then moved to London to conduct. In 1958, he returned to Trinity as a lecturer. It was there that he began his academic interest in the roots of opera.
His breakthrough came with a 1962 production at Glyndebourne of his “Poppea.” It “woke many up to the glories of mid-17th-century Venetian opera,” Tim Carter wrote in the journal Early Music in 1990.
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Mr. Leppard served as principal guest conductor of the St. Louis Symphony from 1984 to 1990. From 1972 to 1980 he was principal conductor of the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in Manchester, a tenure that allowed him to work through large swaths of 19th-century repertory and some 20th-century works.
But by no means all.
He had little use for contemporary music (needlessly complex or dull, he said), disdained serial technique and sniffed at the 1970s revival of Gustav Mahler’s sprawling, emotionally overflowing symphonies, although he did profess at one point to have gone through his own Mahler period.
When Mr. Leppard made his United States debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1969, Donal Henahan of The New York Times noted his scholarly renown. “But,” he wrote, “the young Englishman’s first appearance here stamped him as more naturally the showman performer than the musicological drudge.”
Mr. Henahan was right. For Mr. Leppard, classical music was truly entertainment, if of a profound kind, and not to be preserved in amber. Connecting with an audience springs from the ability to compromise, he said, and “the sheer flexibility of what you’ve learned from life and what life is doing to you at that moment.”
He added, “I know of no better way to describe the business of performing.”
Daniel J. Wakin is an editor on the Obituary News Desk. He has been a reporter and editor in the Culture and Metro departments and has reported from three dozen countries. He is the author of “The Man With the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block” (Arcade, 2018). @danwakin
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