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John Nelson, a genial American conductor who made France love one of its own underappreciated musical sons, Hector Berlioz, died on March 31 at his home in Chicago. He was 83. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Kari Magdalena Chronopoulos, who did not specify the cause. Mr. Nelson made Berlioz (1803-1869), the wild man of 19th-century French music, his passion, performing and promoting his work ceaselessly during a career that stretched over 50 years on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a young conductor, he introduced Berlioz’s epic five-act opera “Les Troyens” (“The Trojans”) to New York in a 1972 Carnegie Hall performance deemed “highly successful” at the time by Raymond Ericson of The New York Times.
By the end of his career, Mr. Nelson was so closely identified with Berlioz, one of France’s most extravagant musicians, that the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph wrote, “John Nelson was clearly born with Berlioz in his genes.”
Those discs — “the first great ‘French’ recording” of the opera, Le Monde called them — won Gramophone magazine’s Recording of the Year award in 2018. In a 1988 interview with Le Monde, Mr. Nelson spoke of “the care with the smallest details” in the scores of Berlioz, demanding “articulation in the interior of the phrases.”
These qualities are evident in his celebrated recording of “Les Troyens,” where the composer’s mercurial shifts from delicacy to bombast within the same phrase are accomplished effortlessly in a recording that uses all six harps called for by Berlioz.
Berlioz had always been a problem child in the pantheon of high romantic composers: too bombastic, noisy and rule breaking for his French compatriots, and too quirky and unpredictable for adherents of a more restrained classical canon.
Nearly 85 years later, when Mr. Nelson suggested that Paris inaugurate its new Opera Bastille hall with “Les Troyens,” he was told, to his astonishment, that that was “out of the question.” Mr. Nelson said of Berlioz in a 2019 interview: “In France, back in those days, he wasn’t particularly well respected; he’s so out of the ordinary. Berlioz is just a little too far out for them.”
He added: “I think finally he’s begun to be recognized in France as one of their greatest.” Mr. Nelson had much to do with that.
John Wilton Nelson was born on Dec. 6, 1941, in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the son of Wilton and Thelma Nelson, who were missionaries with the Protestant Faith Mission. He returned to the United States when he was 11 to attend a private school in Orlando, Fla., where he began studying piano and organ.
He graduated from Wheaton College Conservatory of Music in Illinois in 1963 and later studied under the conductor Jean Morel at the Juilliard School in New York, where he received the Irving Berlin conducting prize and earned a master’s degree in choral and orchestral conducting in 1965.
While still at Juilliard, he began conducting the Greenwich Philharmonia (now the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra) in Connecticut and the New Jersey Pro Arte Chorale and Orchestra.
His notable recordings include Berlioz’s “Beatrice et Benedict” and his orchestral oeuvre; Haydn’s “The Creation”; Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” and symphonies; Handel’s “Messiah”; and contemporary works.
In addition to his daughter Ms. Chronopoulos, Mr. Nelson is survived by another daughter, Kirsten Nelson Hood; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Johnsen) Nelson, died in 2012.
After Mr. Nelson’s death, in an interview on the French radio station France Musique, Alain Lanceron, his producer at Warner Classics, spoke of the “humanity about him that came through in his recordings.” Mr. Nelson himself had a humble attitude toward the works he performed. “My God is my composer,” he told the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 2009. “If I serve myself, or if I serve anything else other than the composer, I feel like I’m being dishonest as an artist.”
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