MONTREAL GAZETTE

By Arthur Kaptainis, Classical Music Critic

Two weeks after Georg Tintner took his own life, the tributes, and facts, have started to emerge. The facts, inevitably, are somewhat at odds with the rumours, although some elements of the tragedy will likely always remain mysterious.

Authorities have accepted that the 82-year-old conductor, who led the Symphony Nova Scotia from 1987 to 1994, did not fall but jumped from the balcony of his 11th-storey apartment in Halifax on the afternoon of Oct. 2.  His widow, Tanya Tintner, who was in the apartment, says she learned of his action only when the police came to her door.

Mrs. Tintner conjectures that her husband jumped when he did because she was on the telephone in another room. Mr. Tintner survived the impact but died later in hospital.

Shocking as it was, the suicide was not completely unexpected.  Mrs. Tintner had heard Mr. Tintner talk about ending it all about two weeks before he did so.

Could she have intervened more aggressively to stop him?  She says she cannot imagine how. Some people - I am not one - might even question the propriety of intervention.

In some respects, Mr. Tintner in his last weeks did have the profile of a classic Dr. Kevorkian patient.  He learned he had melanoma six years ago and had undergone several operations to remove tumours.

A strict vegetarian - he did not wear leather shoes - Mr. Tintner was also opposed to drug use. Naturally, he was disinclined to use painkillers, and accepted them, according to his widow, only in the later stage of his disease.

In the end, Mr. Tintner's mind seems to have been addled by the combinations of frustration, morphine and pain. In his last two weeks, according to his widow, he was having trouble speaking and reading scores. It is hard to imagine a sadder lot for a man who was both eloquent (he often spoke from the stage) and deeply in love with music.

On the day of his death, Mr. Tintner felt compelled to cancel a future engagement in Prince George, B.C., because he believed he could not learn a new piece on the program. Yet on Sept. 27, five days earlier, he led the volunteer Nova Symphonia chamber orchestra in what Tanya Tintner describes as a successful concert of Wiren, Arriaga, Wagner and Grieg.

Even in light of the facts, his final weeks require interpretation. Mrs. Tintner maintains that her husband became disoriented only after he lost his will to live.

"This was a consequence of his deciding he had had enough, not the cause," she said this week from Halifax.  Mr. Tintner's cognitive problems started, she said, after, not before, he told her of his wishes.

Comment is not easy for music lovers who last saw Mr. Tintner conduct - the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and McGill Symphony Orchestra - in the fall of 1992. Certainly he seemed then the last person in the world who would contemplate suicide.

"Full of beans," is how Mr. Tintner described himself to me in 1990 before conducting the touring SNS at the Universite de Montreal.  Boris Brott, Mr. Tintner's predecessor at SNS, probably speaks for many in expressing complete bewilderment at his death: "He was such an optimistic person, so vibrant and enthusiastic."

Even if Mr. Tintner's personal charm and magnanimity are pushed resolutely to the sidelines, his suicide is hard to reconcile with his calling. Self-destruction is almost unknown among conductors, who require, above all qualifications, confidence and force of will.

Of course, Mr. Tintner - much as he looked like a conductor with his white mane and expressively lineated face - was not typical of his species. His vast experience (he was born in Vienna and studied conducting with Felix Weingartner, one of the progenitors of the art) gave him every right to claim authority. Still, he remained fiercely allergic to the hubris with which so many of his colleagues adorn themselves.

The fact that Mr. Tintner found happiness in Halifax, after post-war exile in New Zealand and Australia, shows how removed he was from conventional maestro aspirations.

"The conductor is a servant," Mr. Tintner told me, "and he must never forget that he is a servant. He may be wrong in his way of serving the really great people, the people who wrote the music. But he must know his place."

Perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Tintner felt bound in service most strongly to the music of Anton Bruckner - himself a humble man. And if this vegetarian socialist did not share his master's faith in God, it was no obstacle to understanding.

"Bruckner was a deeply religious man - we all know that," Mr. Tintner said. "But what he created speaks even to sinners like me."

It is a consolation to his admirers that Mr. Tintner was able to complete his survey of Bruckner Symphonies, most with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, for the Naxos label. This promises to be among the most edifying and complete cycles, including as it does the two early non-canonical Symphonies and alternative movements from different versions.

Mr. Tintner's 1983 recording of the first version of the Eighth Symphony, with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, was a classic of performing scholarship. Some Montrealers will remember his affinity for this most mountainous of scores from his 1992 performance (of the Haas edition) with McGill.

"Lengthy crescendos had the gradual, tidal weight Bruckner intended and the phrases of the Adagio rose and fell with the inevitability of human breath," was my judgement in The Gazette.  It is both a mystery and a shame that the MSO never engaged Mr. Tintner for a performance of his favourite composer.

Mr. Tintner obviously lost one reason to extend his life when he finished the Naxos project. Still, there is a paradox here, for Bruckner - as sick as Mr. Tintner at the end - would never have considered taking his own life. Their ultimate commonality can be found only in Bruckner's works and Mr. Tintner's performances of them. Both will live forever.