Herbert Blomstedt near the lake in Bengtsdorp

“I hate the idea of ​​eating animals”

By Elmar Krekeler

Features Editor

Die Welt, September 10, 2025

Herbert Blomstedt is the world’s longest-serving conductor. At home by the lake in Sweden, he’s already planning his 100th birthday concert. When you’re on the road with him, as he guides you through his vast book collection and talks about life, the fear of growing old is lost.

Herbert Blomstedt is a little bored out here by the lake. It’s afternoon in Bengtstorp, a village gently nestled into the hilly landscape a few kilometers from Örebro. The sky is high. The mosquitoes aren’t flying so low yet. We’re sitting in a porch swing. Blomstedt’s youngest daughter, Kristina, lives in the oxblood-colored house further down the road.

The Blomstedts have always been here in the summer. For more than half a century. The world’s longest-serving conductor moved into the white house with the sweeping view because he wanted to return to Sweden from Lucerne, where he lived for decades. He now lives in Bengtstorp. And in Gothenburg, when he’s not busy traveling for Bruckner and Beethoven at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, in Japan, and at the Berlin Philharmonic. On his way to the forty or fifty concerts he still conducts a year. At his peak, there were once around a hundred.

He absolutely wanted the apartment in Gothenburg. A chance discovery in a house he always passed by as a child on his way to music lessons. So things come full circle. Five minutes from Gothenburg’s acoustically legendary concert hall, ten minutes from Gothenburg’s University Library, where Blomstedt’s books are. Or at least most of the thirty or forty thousand volumes he has collected in his life. But he’s not going there until the next day.

This summer, he says, there aren’t as many concerts as usual. So he has time to study. He’s slow in learning. He always has been. And a precisionist. He always wants to be prepared. He’s planning to perform Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony this summer. He hasn’t performed it in a long time. “A complicated thing.” He reads the score. Sings it in his head. Looks for details he’s never found before. Sings it aloud. This bassoon solo, for example. Herbert Blomstedt likes to sing.

Herbert Blomstedt’s study is in the background.

And he’s thinking about what he should conduct in two years. Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony, perhaps. But many consider it rather undercomplex. He thinks differently. He explains, he sings. His next milestone birthday is in 2027, when Herbert Blomstedt will turn 100.

He now needs a walker. A watch that measures his blood sugar and reports it. Among others, with Cecilia, the daughter who brought us here to the lake. Cecilia is a doctor in Örebro. He has overcome an ear infection he caught in Boston. He can hear again. A little difficult, but it’s working.

He wants to live to 120, Cecilia said on the way to Bengtstorp. And if you live to be 120 like Herbert Blomstedt, light as a feather and fragile, cheerful and alert, open-hearted and looking forward to the future, maybe you want to be that too.

A grand piano stands there. A large table. A photograph of Edvard Grieg hangs above the fireplace. Books lie around. He shows us a facsimile of a Gutenberg Bible. He says he has seventy Bibles. The Bible accompanies the son of an Adventist pastor and a pianist through his life. The study, where his computer is, where he studies, is the smallest in the house. Next to his bedroom. Both are crammed with books. It’s a bit like a monastery cell. The apartment in Gothenburg is similar. Perhaps he needs the confines for the expansiveness of his mind.

Kristina, Blomstedt’s youngest daughter, cooked. She runs a brewery with her husband in the neighboring town. Which is a bit of a shame, since Cecilia and Herbert can’t say what the brew tastes like. The Blomstedts don’t drink alcohol. And they’re vegetarians, too. “I hate the idea of ​​eating animals,” says Blomstedt.

But proselytizing others is far from his mind. Herbert Blomstedt is no dictator. Not at the podium, not in life. An enabler. Actually, though he would reject that as pathetic, a liberator. Of scores and musicians. “Musicians are angels,” he says, “conveyors of something great that I can only guess at.” He is a servant. He considers humility a virtue.

Cecilia and Herbert sing William Byrd’s canon “Non nobis domine” instead of grace. And then we sit in a leather corner, from which we aren’t sure if we’ll ever get up again. Blomstedt talks about his books, which are his family. They share his loneliness, which corresponds to his nature, which is essential to the life of a conductor. That he started reading at the age of six. And everything he could get his hands on. And his teachers were almost a little worried. Everywhere he went, later as a conductor, to Oslo, to Copenhagen, to Dresden, Leipzig, San Francisco, he tried to absorb all the literature and culture that his musicians had grown up with. In Copenhagen, for example, he bought a 25-volume Kierkegaard edition. He began collecting books almost manically, adding cards to the volumes. It always says when and where he bought the volume, the volumes, and how much they cost, what they contain, and what’s special about them.

Books are his friends. He doesn’t want to be separated from them. You walk past them with him, at the handset in his bedroom, for example. And he tells their stories. It’s like an audio guide tour through the spiritual world. Growing old loses much of its terror along the way. It’s worth mentioning—keep your eyes peeled when choosing a career!—that conductors have a 35 percent higher life expectancy than the rest of the population anyway.

Cecilia drives us to Gothenburg the next morning. Three and a half hours along Lake Vänern. Blomstedt’s old Picard bag with the scores is with him. Blomstedt has a dentist appointment in Gothenburg. And we’re meeting Anders Larsson, a librarian at the university, who reminds us a bit of Kafka’s The Hunger Artist.

Herbert Blomstedt with Anders Larsson in the Gothenburg University Library

He brought Herbert Blomstedt’s books from Lucerne to Sweden. Perhaps 35,000 volumes. They arrived in a truck from Switzerland. Larsson cataloged them. They are on the sixth floor of his library, on shelves sorted by subject. Cookbooks, music books, philosophy, politics – Blomstedt’s collection is one of the largest that Larsson manages. And the most diverse.

At the entrance, Blomstedt’s bookplate is displayed – an ornate letter modeled on the logo of the Dresden Staatskapelle, the orchestra whose chief conductor he was from 1975 to 1985.

There are no crime novels. “That doesn’t interest me at all,” says Blomstedt. He has Schiller, he has Poe, the forerunners of the genre in which Sweden achieved world fame like in perhaps no other.

Larsson is a bibliophile, a book lover. It’s heartwarming to hear Blomstedt and him discuss bookbinding and book design. The particularly valuable Blomstedt volumes are housed two floors below, at a constant 18 degrees. For example, his unique collection of the almost complete edition from the Californian Arion Press – high-quality printing, on exquisite paper, in an extremely limited edition, three books per year.

Blomstedt – chief conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra – was a subscriber from 1984 until recently. Or the Bible illustrated by Barry Moser. And there’s this book from the 17th century with the five-meter-long copperplate engraving of the funeral procession of the Swedish King Charles X Gustav – all the names of the mourners are listed. He’d still like to have the Epic of Gilgamesh from Arion Press, even though he doesn’t really buy anything anymore and has stopped collecting. We’ll see.

We’re in his apartment. A renovated old building above a square where Gothenburg’s young people meet. Irresistible. An ancient elevator drags us up to a lavish suite of rooms. 5,000 books are still here. Blomstedt’s family could fit in here. A clavichord stands there. Pictures of his household saints on it: Furtwängler, Toscanini, Bruno Walter. Illustrated complete works of Shakespeare. A wall of French classics – Rousseau, Diderot.

Thirteen volumes by Emerson, David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, and Kierkegaard. Signed. Quite expensive. Each book a story. Blomstedt tells them all. The thirteen-volume Emerson edition, including the manuscript of an original letter. Richard Burton’s travelogue to Mecca and Medina in a mid-19th-century edition.

Blomstedt skims the spines. He recounts visits to rehearsals with Toscanini, Furtwängler, and Bruno Walter. He also tells of how the conducting tradition can be divided into Wagner’s successors and Mendelssohn’s, and how glad he is that he has a different approach to Beethoven and Bruckner than most of his colleagues do through Richard Wagner.

We fly through times and musical histories, through colleagues and musicians. He still remembers everything. Have we ever mentioned that in the presence of Herbert Blomstedt, growing old loses its terror?

After dinner, he has to go to the dentist. You have to do that even at almost 100. Cecilia accompanies him. We’re afraid of dentists. Blomstedt isn’t. Maybe we should read more books.

https://www.welt.de/kultur/klassik/article68b9781846b61b4dcb0b9b12/Dirigentenlegende-Herbert-Blomstedt-Ich-hasse-die-Vorstellung-Tiere-zu-essen.html

Danish National Symphony Orchestra – Herbert Blomstedt conducts Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Live broadcast on Danish Radio [dr.dk].