Jesús López Cobos: My favorites have always been the painters, maybe because, as a Spaniard, we are always very impressed with light, with color. Especially like me, I was living in the south of Spain, with lots of color, of sun. And then I was always very very impressed. So you have one idea, my favorite painter was always El Greco. And I think that there is a combination of color and of spirituality which is fantastic.
Veery: And Goya, and his political work, The Third of May, 1808? Jesús López Cobos: Oh yes. I think that is the two parts of Goya: I am more interested in Goya not for the painter of the king or sort to say the reporter of life in the parlors but the Goya who was the popular painter, painting about life like El Dos de Mayo, or the black series, las pinturas negras; this is the most genial Goya, I like very much this one.
Veery: And Zurbarán?
Jesús López Cobos: Zurbarán, and in all these painters of this part and time of Spain, there is a very real expression of the character of Spain of this time, especially of the Counter Reformation and the Inquisition, and I think it tells very well of the character of Spain at this time through this painting, especially with Zurbarán, with this dark aspect of our life and the connection between religion and the power that comes through very very well in these paintings.
Veery: There is a very striking painting by Zurbarán in the Art Institute of Chicago, with a very black background, stark and empty, and then there is just the body of Christ on the Cross (Christ on the Cross), the contrast very dramatic. Jesús López Cobos: Yes, yes, I know the painting, it’s in Chicago at the Institute. Yes, yes I looked at it once more when I was in Chicago, and I looked at all the wonderful Spanish painting you have there, and I remember this one there. Yes, this Zurbarán, I admire it very much.
Veery: Who are your favorite writers, poets, novelists, and why? Jesús López Cobos: In poetry, I have to reduce myself to Spanish poetry because while I like very much to read Italian or German which are languages where I feel very much at home, and I read a lot of German literature, at the same time, I cannot really appreciate the literature so much as in my own language. In the Spanish, I like a poet who I think is the best, is one of the best, in our literature, Juan Ramon Jiménez, this at the beginning of the century, a little before Garcia Lorca.
Veery: Jiménez wrote Platero and I.
Jesús López Cobos: Yes, Platero y Yo.
Veery: About the man and his donkey.
Jesús López Cobos: Yes, and this is a wonderful poet with such a wonderful feeling for words, but at the same time, so pure and all of the imagination, and really a wonderful, wonderful poet. I like very much also Garcia Lorca, of course, and Machado also. I think there are wonderful poets at the beginning of the century in Spain; these are the poets that I admire most.
For Lorca, his feelings for light, for light in his words. For the Spanish, South, I was living for fourteen years in the south of Spain, the light of this country, this wonderful contrast between shadow and sun is so fantastic, in his works, in his poetry, in his dramatic works too, this very, very extreme contrast that I think is wonderful.
Veery: You talk of your tie to the land. You get much strength from that? Jesús López Cobos: Yes.
Veery: Before you got into music, what was on your mind as music is on your mind today?
Jesús López Cobos: I was interested always in the history of art, and philosophy as a history of art in my time in Spain was a part of philosophy, of the study of philosophy at the university. But at the same time, I had this love to music, and I came through choral singing to music, so I had both my loves come together; but I was living in a country where traditions from big music were not so great, especially in the orchestral field, so I was very realistic about them, about the risk to become a musician. So I pursued for a long time both; I studied philosophy and music. And I really decided very late, when I was twenty-seven, really to dedicate my time to the study of music.
Veery: When you were twenty-one, what did you think you wanted to be when you were forty? Jesús López Cobos: Probably a professor of the history of art. That was what I was studying at the university and then music was for me, in this moment, a hobby only.
Veery: You went so far in philosophy in school, a doctorate, and then you went in to music. Was there a turning point, a certain moment?
Jesús López Cobos: It was one certain moment: the first time I came out from Spain, we are talking about the Sixties, so in this time we are still under the dictatorship of Franco, and so it wasn’t sort of normal to go out of the country and to travel, and my first time was in 1964. I was twenty-four years old, and I wanted to spend the summers in Italy because of the same reason, the study of art; I wanted to know Venice and Florence and Rome, and so I applied for a conductor’s school that did summer courses in Venice, and I came there, and I was accepted (I was already conducting choruses - that was my hobby, I was singing and conducting choruses in Spain). So I came there and that was my first real meeting with an orchestra; and I was really very very enthusiastic about the idea maybe to try, and the teacher who was a very famous teacher at this moment in Italy, Franco Ferrara, he encouraged me, he told me, “I think you are talented, you should try’; and I had the curiosity to say, “Why not to try?”; and then in this moment in Spain, you couldn’t start conducting school because there was no school for conductors so I knew that I had to go out of the country, and that was in those years not so easy, and also financially for me, so I had to make a decision, and it was not easy, and then a little later, when I was twenty-six, I decided then to try, and then I went to Vienna. And that’s why I stayed out of the country.
Veery: Do you interest yourself in another field to bring your music an added dimension?
Jesús López Cobos: Well I was, because of my early studies in philosophy, always very interested in the field of philosophy; so, as I was a young man, and later, whenever I had time, I’d learn and very much read philosophy, especially German philosophy too, but also Ortega y Gasset, and I think that it added for me a good perspective of the music of the time of the composer and the mentality and the atmosphere in which the composer’s music was written.
Veery: What musicians do you respect and why?
Jesús López Cobos: Composers? Well, I have maybe one god, and this is Mozart because I think he was a genius in every department, in opera, in concerto, in symphony, in chamber music, in everything. But I wouldn’t love to be constricted to one composer, I love so many. Mainly, I have to say the Viennese Austrian group like Bruckner and Schubert, that is my world, that is what I like the most.
Maybe because it is something very clear about this music which is not so sentimental, at the same time very intelligent but very profound, very deep, and at the same time not too complicated with philosophies, like it can be more the north German music; that attracted me from coming from the South and looking for light, clarity, and that’s what attracts me.
Veery: You like Mozart, whose music is said to be very finished, perfected; and you also like Goya - whose painting could not be like Velázquez (so often technically adept) - who could be a little rough. You look for different things in different fields, not to apply one to another field?
Jesús López Cobos: Oh yes, but what I thought it was in Goya was exactly because of this: he was a genius because he could do both extremes of the scale, to be a painter of the court and at the same time to be an almost, rough, as you say, painter; that’s what I think is interesting about his personality.
Veery: Did you have any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige?
Jesús López Cobos: At the beginning, yes, but much more than prestige or money was a little to be able to do the repertoire I wanted to do. I came to north Europe, to Germany, to Berlin, when I was very young, when I was starting, and as you can imagine, I came from the South, from Spain, so I thought mainly from the South, from Italy, from Italian repertoire, from French repertoire; they didn’t think that I could do so well there in the German repertoire, but that was the repertoire that I was mainly interested in, and the one which I started in Vienna, when I was in the academy, that was the repertoire I was interested in too. So it was in the beginning, in the first five, six years difficult for me, and then slowly and slowly I came in to this repertoire, and when I started to do Wagner and to do Mozart and to do Beethoven, and the people, they said, “Why not?”; and so finally I was able to do the repertoire I wanted to do. So it was hard, it was hard, difficult time, it was a time I had to work hard, and finally I do the repertoire that I love.
Veery: Do you picture yourself as part of any tradition?
Jesús López Cobos: I think it is a Western European tradition in general. There is of course a big difference between Spanish music and German music, but we are all a part of the Western tradition, of European music, and we are a part of it. Somehow we are all in this big picture.
Veery: Do you picture yourself from any tradition of conducting? Jesús López Cobos: Not really, I think there is not only one tradition: there there was always the German tradition of conducting and there was the French and the English, and I think there are very different schools there. I was always interested in the German tradition because I went to Vienna to study and that was the repertoire I was used to, to listen to when I was young, and later that I was conducting. But of course, coming from the South, from the south of Spain, you bring all your own feelings and your own sensitivity to this music, and you can never do a Brahms symphony like a conductor from north Germany because he sees his music with a completely different optic, different colors, different sounds, than we coming from the South, so it is not really a question of tradition of feeling, it’s a question of feeling, of “how do you feel this music?”
Veery: Do you prefer to watch sunrise or sunset?
Jesús López Cobos: Sunset.
I think because it brings a little bit the end of the day, and I am more nostalgic than the other way. It is for me always more interesting the night than the day, so the end of the day is more interesting for me than the morning because I am a little pessimistic too. Like good Spaniards, we are in all our history of painting and of philosophy with death; it was always there, from the very beginning of our literature, perpetuum mobile, always there, always comes again and again in our literature, in our view of life. So I think that’s why maybe I’m more interested in this part of the day, rather than the sun.
1996 - 1997 Interview 2020 First Published In Veery
