One of the most interestingly controversial musical figures of his generation, the Italian conductor and composer, Giuseppe Sinopoli, died on April 20th aged 54, while conducting a performance of Verdi's Aida in Berlin - the work with which he made his operatic debut in his native Venice in 1978.
The symmetry might suggest a straight career trajectory for a man destined to conduct the great operas and symphonies of the Italian and German repertoires. In fact, the development of the young Giuseppe Sinopoli was altogether more interesting, and makes more sense of the studied, analytic light in which he revealed - or, for some listeners, destroyed - familiar masterpieces.
Until 1981, his reputation might have stood as a composer, following, to a certain extent, the examples of his fellow Venetian Bruno Maderna and the Veronese Franco Donatoni. Like Maderna, he studied for a while at Venice's Benedetto Marcello Conservatoire, but found greater fulfilment when he followed the senior composer to the more challenging musical environment of Darmstadt.
Parallel to this rigorous schooling, he followed the wishes of his Sicilian father and worked for a doctor's degree in medicine as a surgeon and psychiatrist at the University of Padua. In 1972, both of his disciplines came to fruition: he was appointed professor of contemporary and electronic music at the Venice Conservatoire, graduating meanwhile in Padua with a doctoral dissertation on criminal anthropology and, in the psychiatric field, with a study on the physiology of the acoustic mental area. He also took his first steps in conducting with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna, founding Venice's Bruno Maderna Ensemble three years later. His first major recording, in 1981, was of Maderna's music, though few such daring choices of repertoire ensued.
His compositions, like his later conducting, combined structural rigour with sensuous textures. After the 1981 Munich premiere of his opera Lou Sa- lome, taking as its protagonist the far-from-bluestocking colleague and muse of Nietzsche and Freud, composing took a back seat to conducting.
The 1980s was the decade in which Giuseppe Sinopoli, the conductor, came to power. His operatic supremacy was confirmed in 1985 with performances of Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and Tannhauser at the festival shrine of Bayreuth, where he was due to return to conduct the Ring cycle this summer.
He injected new life into Rome's Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra during a four-year tenure. He also began to alienate managements and audiences, principally at the Royal Opera and to a lesser extent at the Metropolitan, the Hamburg State Opera, Dresden's Semper Opera and Rome Opera, before taking up his post as principal conductor of London's Philharmonia Orchestra - with, as he admitted, little experience of large-scale symphonic concerts - in 1984.
It is easy to see where the critical hostility came from: his preference for slow speeds and mannered, sometimes lifeless phrasing, brought back a juggernaut approach to Brahms and Schumann at a time when authentic liveliness was the order of the day, and could result in some leaden evenings in the concert hall.
Yet there was always the phenomenal ear for layering of textures, however eccentric - the brass perspectives in his Bruckner interpretations were impressive, and recognisably Sinopolian, whatever the doubts about the pacing of the performance - and the capacity to surprise. The Mahler symphonies which he recorded for his loyal company, Deutsche Grammophon, flashed only occasional theatrical fire until an astonishing interpretation of the maverick Seventh, the hardest of the series to balance and articulate.
Taking place in London's Royal Festival Hall within days of a performance by the reigning Mahler conductor, Klaus Tennstedt, it bore the results of endless preparation, though in the cold light of the recording, the usual eccentricities of tempo and emphasis can easily pall.
Orchestral players were sometimes baffled by his peculiarly Italian brand of intellectualism; musicians never like too much talk, let alone an analytic seminar on the work in question. His relationship with the Philharmonia, buckling under the weight of critical opprobrium, nearly came to an end in early 1990, but he stayed on in his ennobled capacity as music director until 1994. There was too much at stake - the ever-fruitful contract with Deutsche Grammophon and tours to Japan and Germany. His Italian opera recordings were generally better received than his symphonic repertoire. Here, too, there were sometimes justified charges of excessive mannerism; and the conductor's habit of laying everything on the dissecting table resulted in conspicuous recording edits, sometimes in the middle of a singer's phrase or note. Yet his surprising affinity with the natural flow of the bel canto line usually triumphed, even at some dangerously slow speeds; his Madama Butterfly, with Mirella Freni in the title role, exposes the tough psychological study embedded in a lush musical idiom.
A new and significant post at the head of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, which he briefly took up in 1990, came to an end over details in the contract, though it did at least result in a shimmering, microscopically detailed recording of Strauss's Salome (the sequel, Elektra, made in Vienna, confirmed him as an exacting master of Strauss's most complex scores). He moved instead to the Staatskapelle Dresden, where the marriage of this subtle, soft-grained institution with an altogether tougher and more aggressively intellectual master succeeded against all odds. Earlier this year they undertook a punishing American tour.
Giuseppe Sinopoli's long-term ambition to benefit from the fruits of his archaeological studies at Rome University, and to indulge them with a swift retirement from the world of music, was not to be fulfilled, though his schedule for the near future shows no suggestion that he was near to attaining his dream. There is, inevitably, a frustrating sense of incompleteness, but at least half of his recorded legacy makes an impressive testament.
Giuseppe Sinopoli: born 1946; died, April 2001