Opera Scotland

Sixten Ehrling Suggest updates

Born Malmö, 3 April 1918.

Died New York, 13 February 2005.

Swedish conductor.

Sixten Ehrling was one of the most notable Swedish musicians during the decades after the war. He graduated from the Stockholm Royal Academy of Music in 1939, having studied violin, piano, organ, conducting and composition. Throughout his career he was acknowledged as an authority on twentieth century music. He immediately joined the Royal Opera, Stockholm, as a repetiteur, and made his first appearance as a conductor the following year. He then moved to Dresden, spending 1941 as Karl Böhm's assistant, before going for two seasons to Gothenburg.

By 1944 he was back in Stockholm, and remained there for the next twenty years, being chief conductor from 1953-1960. He led the company both to the Edinburgh Festival in 1959 and to Covent Garden the following year. His most important colleague in those years was the director and administrator Göran Gentele, who directed the famous stagings of Un ballo in maschera and Wozzeck that came to Scotland, as well as Carmen, He parted company with the opera company after a falling out soon afterwards.

He spent the second phase of his career largely in the United States, beginning in 1963 as director of the Detroit Symphony. He later moved to a similar post with the Denver Symphony. In the later years of Rudolf Bing's management of the Metropolitan Opera, he was a frequent guest conductor, starting with Peter Grimes and Duke Bluebeard's Castle in 1974. He also conducted several performances of The Ring.