Manuel Rosenthal

Around this time he met Léo Sir, inventor of string instruments known as the dixtuor, and was persuaded to play the sursoprano (a 4th higher than the violin) and find composers to write for this new medium.

Through this Rosenthal met eminent young Parisian composers of whom Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger were the most distinguished, and also contributed his own music to a recital in Paris in October 1921.

[4] His Sonatine for two violins and piano, composed for a sight-reading examination, was acclaimed after its performance at the 99th concert of the Société musicale indépendante in Paris at the end of October 1924, attended by both Nadia Boulanger and Alexis Roland-Manuel.

In the same year Serge Koussevitzky, in Paris during the Exposition, invited Rosenthal to become assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony under him – an offer reiterated after a Salle Pleyel concert on the eve of war in 1939.

[7] Rosenthal's musical career was interrupted by World War II when, as a corporal in the 300th infantry regiment stationed in 1939 in Alsace near the Rhine, he was taken prisoner by the Germans in May 1940.

[7] In his final year with the orchestra, he brought it to England to join Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic in a concert organized by Jack Hylton that filled the Harringay Arena with 13,500 listeners.

Having accepted the post of composer-in-residence at the College of Puget Sound, he was invited to become music director of the Seattle Symphony, which he conducted from 1948–1951 while undertaking guest engagements in San Francisco and Buenos Aires.

[7] He was music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Liège from 1964-1967, and professor of conducting at the Paris Conservatoire from 1962 to 1974, where he established a more demanding schedule for his students, who included Yan Pascal Tortelier, Eliahu Inbal, Jacques Mercier, Marc Soustrot and Jean-Claude Casadesus.

The BBC in Manchester invited him to conduct an opera of his choice in 1973, which turned out to be Emmanuel Chabrier's Le roi malgré lui, for which he chose a French cast.

[1] In February 1981, Rosenthal made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York in a mixed-bill of 20th century French stage works, returning in 1983 for Francis Poulenc's 1957 operatic masterpiece Dialogues des carmélites and for further appearances in 1986-87.

[10] He conducted the first performance of Claude Debussy's radical 1902 operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande in Russia, in Moscow in 1988, and later that year premiered the same work in Caracas, Venezuela.

[11] His reputation as a composer was sealed in France with Jeanne d'Arc, first performed in 1936, although this was followed by a production of the light-hearted one-act operetta La Poule Noire of 1937.