French-born conductor Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) premiered many masterworks of the last century, including Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Claude Debussy's Jeux, and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Monteux enjoyed a long life, spanning a remarkable period in history. Originally trained as a violist, he performed for both Edvard Grieg and Johannes Brahms as a member of the Quatuor Geloso. Over the course of his conducting career, he held directorships of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the Metropolitan Opera, the Boston Symphony, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (which he formed), the London Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony, among others.

After WW I, he went to America to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in New York and also the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After this he returned to Europe, and the invitation from the Concertgebouw was followed by the decade in Amsterdam. Meanwhile he conducted the Paris Symphony Orchestra, finally leaving for America again to assume command of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for seventeen years. During his tenure with the Symphony, a number of recordings were made. Click on the images below to see a larger version.

Monteux became an American citizen in 1942 and made his permanent residence in Hancock, Maine, the childhood home of his wife Doris Hodgkins Monteux (1894-1984). In 1943, Pierre and Doris Monteux founded a summer school for conductors and orchestra musicians in Hancock, inspired in part by Monteux's earlier conducting classes in France. Musicians came from all over the world to Hancock to study with their beloved "Maître."