Juilliard Commencement Address

May 20, 2022

Hello Juilliard Class of 2022! You did it! Bravo!

Chairman Kovner, President Woetzel, Provost Meyer, distinguished honorees, the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, and families, thank you for inviting me – it’s great to be here.

Most of all, I salute you graduates. Congratulations! We’re so proud of you and your achievement. You may not realize how important, how moving it is, for us veteran artists to experience your dedication and accomplishment. There are moments in life when everyone questions what it was all for. Were our life choices right? Were they worth it? Your commitment and dedication makes us feel that our choices have been valid.

For I believe there are two key times in an artist’s life. The first is inventing yourself. The second is going the distance. Your years here at Juilliard have been a part of that inventing yourself time. And now you are going on to the second, perhaps the harder part, going the distance – how do you sustain the vision, make it grow, and share it? Both the invention of yourself and going the distance can take many forms. To be an artist means to have the courage for rebirth and growth. And it’s never over.

For I believe there are two key times in an artist’s life. The first is inventing yourself. The second is going the distance.

As I think over my own years of learning, which are still very much going on, I think of some essential moments and of the essential people who helped me on my way. I was an only child growing up in Los Angeles in a show business family. Everyone in my family was musical, but they were not trained musicians. They could all play by ear and improvise and come up with a fresh new song to go into a show whose curtain was going up in a couple of hours. I believe that my most important music teacher was my father. He had an incredible ear for music, for understanding its essential meaning, even though he was significantly hard of hearing.

MTT with his dad Ted Thomas

My parents made sure that I had musical experiences as a kid. They sent me to a very creative Lefty pre-school where music was an essential part of our weekly activities. A woman came in and played music for us, and we would dance around, banging out the rhythms of the music on sticks or whatever was available. She played medleys of different kinds of songs, starting with a polka or a march and suddenly changing to a waltz or a jig. I remember that I instantly knew when she had changed from one meter to another, and that not all of my classmates did so. I made it my responsibility to run around the classroom offering advice and demonstrating just what meter we were really in. I think this was the beginning of my conducting career!

So why did I correct my fellow students? I wanted them to experience the joy and surprise I felt at the exact moment when the meters changed.

Meanwhile, at home, I was playing everything by ear, following in my father’s footsteps. At around age ten, my parents decided that unless I learned to read music right away, I would never be comfortable with it. I auditioned for the USC Preparatory Music School, which in later years became the Colburn School. By some miracle, Dorothy Bishop, the visionary head of the department, accepted me.

What was my first audition like? I played Gershwin the way my dad played it, the way he had heard Gershwin play it. I played some Bach with improvisatory “improvements” whenever I couldn’t remember exactly how it was supposed to go.

Over the next couple of years, Miss Bishop brought some order and discipline into my life – without breaking my spirit. I remember we improvised a lot and played musical games based around the Bach and Mozart that I was practicing. She enrolled me in a keyboard harmony class. Once a week, a group of kids gathered in an old army barracks on campus to play on broken down old upright pianos arranged in a circle. I remember the remarkable diversity of students in that class. Many of them had one kind of prowess or comfort zone in one musical style or another according to their family backgrounds. A very few had real insight and were original. Who these original people were had nothing to do with their age, race, gender or economic group. They were simply original. That was obvious and inspiring.

A year or two after this, I took up oboe, which allowed me to play in an orchestra and make music with other young musicians who were at or beyond my own level of accomplishment. I remember the thrill of being in an orchestra that was good enough to sight-read a piece and have it be recognizable. It was magical. I took great delight in hearing my young colleagues playing something wonderfully and memorably. It was transporting. I’ve tried to keep hold of that enthusiasm for my work and for my colleagues’ work.

Through the preparatory school little by little I began to make contact with senior faculty at USC. Much of the faculty were, as were many Los Angeles musicians at that time, refugees who had fled from Europe, especially from Russia and Austria; people like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifitz and Piatigorsky. Many of my teachers came from the circles that surrounded these iconic masters. Thanks to them I had opportunities to attend and participate in their Master Classes. This was the period I like to call “The Parade of Accents.” I won’t go off course for you now by doing all these accents, as much as I love to do them. I’ll share just one of them with you. It’s the voice of one of my piano teachers and baroque music advisors. Her name was Alice Ehlers.

Madame Ehlers, as we called her, had fled from Austria, just before the Nazi takeover. She had been a super talented, smart and vivacious young Jewish Viennese girl. She had been trained by the most sophisticated musicians in Vienna and mingled in groups with people like Richard Strauss and Alban Berg. Her main instrument was the harpsichord, an instrument I had always wanted to play. She generously agreed to teach me for a summer course of six weeks. When we first met, I was about 14, and she was in her 80s. At our first meeting, she said something like,

MTT at the harpischord in the 1960s

“So young man. I hear you want to play the harpsichord. And I hear you love Bach. That’s very good. For the moment, let’s forget about the harpsichord, which is a very quirky and unruly instrument. Let’s just concentrate on Bach and on music. Please at your next lesson play for me, Bach’s C minor Partita.”

Trust me, I am not in any way exaggerating her accent.

Then she said,
“Dear, perhaps you can help me. I am old. Modern life confuses me. Tell me, when you put the needle on the record, do you put it on the outside or the inside?”

That she couldn’t remember. But she could remember every twist and turn of “The Well Tempered Clavier” – no problem.

Imagining myself to be some kind of hotshot, I came into my next lesson prepared to play three movements of the Bach partita. It didn’t turn out that way. In that first lesson, we perhaps made it to bar 17. She had something very specific to say about each moment and was totally focused and very critical of everything that I was doing. After a few lessons, we had made it to about a third of the way through the first movement. One day, as I was playing, she reached over, and with her octogenarian vice-like grip, pulled my right hand off of the keyboard, held it, looked into my eyes and said,

“Dear, dear. Why do you always do such stupid things?’
I said,
“But madame. At the last lesson, you told me to do this.”
She replied,
“I tell you to do something? Nonsense. I would never tell you anything to do. In fact, it doesn’t interest me in any way what you do or what you do not do. I only point out to you that in the music, there are designs. And concerning these designs, you must make decisions…there are consequences for your decisions!”

That was a revelatory moment for me. It was my first real experience of “tough love.” In general, the greater the talent, the tougher the love needs to be.

In general, the greater the talent, the tougher the love needs to be.

I eventually attended the USC school of music, where in the middle of my second year of graduate school I was hired by the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, William Steinberg, to be the Assistant Conductor and pianist of the orchestra. Steinberg was an important conductor of the old German/Austrian tradition. He followed in the footsteps of Mahler and Klemperer. Steinberg, like Madame Ehlers, had a sometimes gruff, tough-love demeanor. He actually couldn’t have been more devoted and charming. He once assigned me to play a florid continuo part in an early piece by Haydn. The day before the first orchestra rehearsal, he said,

MTT conducts the BSO, 1969

“So, young sir. You will come to my dressing room later today, and you will play me your continuo part, and we will see how it’s going.”
I later came to his dressing room and played. He said,
“Well, young sir. Very pretty. Very charming. So, at tomorrow morning’s orchestra rehearsal, we will see how it goes on ‘the field.’ And let us hope it will be the ‘playing field’ and not the ‘battlefield.’”

Three months into my first season, during a concert in what was then called Philharmonic Hall here in Lincoln Center, Steinberg walked off stage after the first half, pointed to me and said

“Young man. Put on your suit. You’re conducting the rest of the concert”
I froze. He said:
“What, you’re still here. Didn’t you understand me? Get dressed. You’re conducting in 20 minutes.”

Because of Steinberg’s continued illness, I conducted 40 concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that first season. I was 24. I relied a great deal on what I had learned from my teachers, and I also took chances. It was my devotion to my craft, my enthusiasm and the belief in me from the veteran members of the orchestra that allowed me to jump into the unknown and set me off to go the distance.

The Thomashefskys legacy

Finding your unique path involves treasuring and sharing your roots. You have a lifetime to explore and to share your heritage with all of us. It’s important. I’m a second generation American. My roots are Jewish Ukrainian. My family fled Ukraine in the 1880s. They settled in New York. My father’s parents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, invented themselves as actors. They were founders of the Yiddish Theater in America, which was a very big deal in New York 100 years ago. They became superstars. They owned theaters and publishing companies. Lots of young people, who later became Broadway and film legends, got their start in and around my grandparents’ theaters. George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin hung around their theaters and at my grandparents’ house. George Gershwin gave my eight-year-old father his first pointers on piano playing. So I grew up in a family of self-taught actors and musicians.

Finding your unique path involves treasuring and sharing your roots. You have a lifetime to explore and to share your heritage with all of us.

MTT with his grandmother, Bessie Thomashefsky

My grandfather, Boris, passed away before I was born. But I was close to my very theatrical Grandmother, Bessie, who lived near us in Los Angeles. She was definitely one of my teachers. I learned so much from her about timing, projection, humor, and being a producer. Celebrating my family’s theatrical heritage was a significant part of my childhood.

I think my theatrical background was one of the reasons Leonard Bernstein and I got along so well. Of course, we could talk endlessly about classical music. But we also relished our arcane knowledge of forgotten songs of Broadway, recalling great actors, dancers and directors from the past and present, and exploring jazz and blues. We enjoyed comparing performances of classic songs like “Careless Love” by Bessie Smith, Joe Turner, Big Mama Thorton or Ray Charles. Our verbal rambles were tinged with show biz snappy patter in English and Yiddish. We both realized how much we loved artists in all genres. He was thrilled, no less than I was, when I started performing with Sarah Vaughan. I learned so much from her. What a revelation.

MTT and Leonard Bernstein, 1988

I have a special place in my heart for dancers and have treasured my collaboration with artists like Pina Bausch or Misha Baryshnikov. I have huge admiration and respect for Jacques D’Amboise. We lost him this past year, at age 86. What a force. He joined the New York City Ballet in 1949, was named a principal dancer in 1953, and he danced 24 roles for George Balanchine. He was also in films and choreographed 17 ballets for the New York City Ballet. D’Amboise founded the National Dance Institute in 1976 to promote dance for children. After retiring from performing in 1984 he devoted himself to the NDI, making it grow in the inner cities and establishing a lasting institution. At first, the group only had 30 students. As of 2021 the program had reached 2 million children. As they say on their website, National Dance Institute programs are “joyful, rigorous, and intellectually challenging.” What a great legacy by an artist who went the distance. He really changed so many lives.

It was clear that what D’Amboise did was borne of his sincere desire to create a community of shared understanding. That’s something I’ve always believed. For me, the most profound question is what is left when the music stops, when the curtain falls and the lights go off. What do people take away with them? What did we, as artists, do to make the souls of our audience richer, fuller and more compassionate.

For me, the most profound question is what is left when the music stops, when the curtain falls and the lights go off. What do people take away with them? What did we, as artists, do to make the souls of our audience richer, fuller and more compassionate.

I believe very much in the power of the arts to unify people and to transform them – and even save people’s souls. There are many lost souls in our society now – people who are husks surrounding emptiness and anger. These thoughts have sadly been much on my mind since the news last week of the hate/race driven murders of Black churchgoers in Buffalo. As I’ve looked into the eyes of the eighteen-year-old who is said to have committed them, I see such suspicion, such a chilling vacancy. How did this troubled young man get so far off on the wrong track? The question I ask myself, and I ask you, was there a moment when the arts could have assuaged his anger and changed the course of his life.

I hope so. I’ve always believed so, but I’ve had a very privileged life. My generation, my community, grew up in a time of peace and great prosperity. It was a time of the decades-long victory party the United States and its allies threw for themselves after the Second World War. My anxieties came from realizing, and only very gradually accepting, that I was gay. This was such a central issue in my life, but I felt I couldn’t say anything about it. So it continued to be a confusing issue. Just when I thought I was getting past the issue, it surfaced in a new and painful ways. But there were also kind moments along the way. Interestingly, members of orchestras, even between members of the orchestra, could be very kind. A veteran section leader of the Chicago Symphony once asked me.

“Hey kid. What’s your story? We think we got it; Jewish, Russian, and we think we got all the rest of it too. Just letting you know it’s all OK. Let’s make more music.”

Michael and Joshua in the 1970s

That was a pretty great moment. I had the opportunity to get to know this man and to collaborate with him through music.

By the time I was appointed Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, the whole city accepted me and my husband Joshua as perhaps the first out gay couple in a leadership role in an American orchestra. Everyone should have the opportunity to express themselves openly and with confidence. I call on you to cherish, protect, and grow all aspects of inclusion. The quest for equality is never ending.

Everyone should have the opportunity to express themselves openly and with confidence. I call on you to cherish, protect, and grow all aspects of inclusion. The quest for equality is never ending.

It’s sensational that you’ve completed your studies and that you are graduating. Now is the time for you to commit to a lifetime of questioning your personal relationship to your art and your dedication to society. Your generation is going to be called upon, as perhaps no other generation has since those who graduated from the school in the 1930s, to examine and question the role and purpose of the arts in a society undergoing the kinds of change, we are now experiencing. This question was asked by many people you know, like Martha Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Langston Hughes and Aaron Copland. When they were your age, they sat up all night trying to come up with answers that might work for them and their generation. The question they came back to again and again was what, in such a challenged society, is the responsibility of an artist. My generation dived into it in the 1960s. Now you are going to have to find answers to that same question that work for you. I really hope you can. I really do. The arts are under attack by those who want to merchandise it, to chain it to technology and take it as far away as possible from the heart-to-heart origins that make it both personal and universal. The issue with the arts has always been, and I hope always will be, content. Not production, not distribution, not schmooze, not glitz.

These days, I’m looking anew at what it means for me to go the distance. I was recently diagnosed with glioblastoma, a fatal brain tumor. I am considering how best to get back to what I love and to communicate my most sincere thoughts in whatever time I have left. I returned to the stage with the New York Philharmonic in November. It was a joyous experience. The musicians greeted me so warmly and all at once we were together, back in the space of making music. Even old Beethoven came alive again in some new ways. Our purpose was clear.

Even though I was feeling physically uncertain, my years of training had created a vast reserve that, in that moment, completely supported me. Since then, performing with wonderful musicians in orchestras around the world, I have been reconstructing my creative life, playing the piano, writing music and teaching. I know my life still has a purpose. I have trouble with some chores of everyday life, and perhaps my critical sense is hyperactive. As the English say, I have trouble “suffering fools gladly.” But maybe I was always like that, and it’s just that my filters are a bit foggy. Compassion must be my companion. I hope it is also yours.

Compassion must be my companion. I hope it is also yours.

These days, I find I’m assigning myself the same questions about life that I ask my students about each new piece we take up. The questions are:

What is happening?
Why is it happening?
What does this really mean to you?
What are you going to do about it?

As you go forward, keep exploring your roots, celebrating your heritage, and absorbing the awareness of the many other traditions you have learned about here. I want to encourage you to fiercely keep hold of your sense of wonder, your commitment to excellence, your sense of humor and your enthusiasm for your work and for other people’s work. That’s what will keep you on track. Whoever can keep hold of these over a lifelong career is the big winner. What’s at stake is a humanitarian tradition existing for over a thousand years. It has sustained people, given them comfort and courage, and led them back to a way to celebrate and rejoice.

Keep hold of your sense of wonder, your commitment to excellence, your sense of humor and your enthusiasm for your work and for other people’s work.

When I look at you brilliant and caring people, I believe again in the ideals I learned from my teachers, that I still hold dear. I know that these ideals will, in you, find worthy champions. Treasure your teachers! Become teachers yourselves! Seeing you, seeing the light in your eyes, I know there is hope. I know there is a future. Your sincerity, your devotion, your authenticity will make it so.

Go the distance. The world needs you.