Among his students in France and America who went on to international fame were Lorin Maazel, Igor Markevitch, Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn and David Zinman.

At the last minute Saint-Saëns judged the player engaged for the important and difficult organ part to be inadequate and, as a celebrated virtuoso organist, decided to play it himself.

[22] In December 1900 Monteux played the solo viola part in Berlioz's Harold in Italy, rarely heard in Paris at the time, with the Colonne Orchestra conducted by Felix Mottl.

[23] In 1902 he secured a junior conducting post at the Dieppe casino, a seasonal appointment for the summer months which brought him into contact with leading musicians from the Paris orchestras and well-known soloists on vacation.

[29] In later years Monteux disapproved of the appropriation of symphonic music for ballets, but he made an exception for Scheherazade, and, as his biographer John Canarina observes, at that stage in his career his views on the matter carried little weight.

A planned visit to St Petersburg had to be cancelled because the Narodny Dom theatre burned down,[34] and in Vienna the Philharmonic was unequal to the difficulties of the score of Petrushka.

[36] In the middle of the tour Monteux was briefly summoned back to Paris by the Concerts Colonne, which had the contractual right to recall him, to deputise for Pierné; his own deputy, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, took temporary musical charge of the Ballets Russes.

Monteux was the conductor for the two outstanding works of the season, Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet version of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, made with the composer's approval,[39] and Fokine's Daphnis et Chloé to a score commissioned from Ravel.

[45] Together they worked on the score from March to May 1913, and to get the orchestra of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to cope with the unfamiliar and difficult music Monteux held seventeen rehearsals, an unusually large number.

[52] Monteux believed that most of the anger aroused by the work was due not to the music but to Nijinsky's choreography, described by Stravinsky as "knock-kneed and long-haired Lolitas jumping up and down".

[57] After just over two years on active service he was released from military duties after Diaghilev prevailed on the French government to second Monteux to conduct the Ballets Russes on a North American tour.

In New York in 1916 Monteux refused to conduct Nijinsky's new ballet Till Eulenspiegel as the music was by a German – Richard Strauss – so a conductor had to be engaged for those performances.

[59] At the Met (as the Metropolitan Opera is generally called), Monteux conducted familiar French works such as Faust, Carmen and Samson and Delilah, with singers including Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Louise Homer and Giovanni Martinelli.

"[65] Nor was he drawn to further engagements as a ballet conductor: "it offers special problems of fitting in with the dances and the dancers, most of whom, I'm sorry to say, seem to have musical appreciation confined to an ability to count beats.

[12] Another is that the primmer members of Boston society disapproved of Monteux's morals: he and his second wife had gradually drifted apart and by 1924 he was living with Doris Hodgkins, an American divorcée, and her two children.

[80] Their preferred repertoire overlapped in some of the classics, but Mengelberg had his own favourites from Bach's St. Matthew Passion to Mahler symphonies, and was happy to leave Debussy and Stravinsky to Monteux.

[81] While in Amsterdam Monteux conducted a number of operas, including Pelléas et Mélisande (its Dutch premiere), Carmen, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, a Lully and Ravel double bill of Acis et Galatée and L'Heure espagnole, Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (also brought to the Paris Opéra)[82] and Verdi's Falstaff.

In his final two years with the orchestra other conductors, notably the rising young Dutchman Eduard van Beinum, were allocated concerts that would previously have been given to Monteux, who amicably withdrew from his position in Amsterdam in 1934.

[87] In 1928 the arts patron the Princesse de Polignac combined with the fashion designer Coco Chanel to propose a new orchestra, well enough paid to keep its players from taking conflicting engagements.

[7] The orchestra's generous funding in the first years allowed for ample rehearsals and adventurous programming, presenting contemporary music and the lesser-known works of earlier composers as well as the classic repertoire.

[n 10] Soloists included the pianists George Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Arthur Rubinstein and Schnabel, the violinists Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin and the young Isaac Stern, and singers such as Kirsten Flagstad and Alexander Kipnis.

Internationally known alumni of the school include Leon Fleisher, Erich Kunzel, Lorin Maazel, Neville Marriner, Hugh Wolff and David Zinman.

[118] He briefly reappeared on the podium at the War Memorial Opera House within a year, as co-conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's coast-to-coast American tour, at Munch's invitation.

[120] The production had what Canarina calls "a stellar cast" headed by Jussi Björling, Victoria de los Ángeles, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni and Robert Merrill, but the critics, including Virgil Thomson and Irving Kolodin, reserved their highest praise for Monteux's conducting.

In addition to the French repertoire with which, to his occasional irritation, he was generally associated, he programmed Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, as well as later composers including Granados, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams.

The presentation was made by Sir Adrian Boult, who recalled that as they left the platform, "Monteux gave two little groans as we walked down the passage, and I suddenly found my arms full of violins and bows.

He ignored taboos on employing black artists;[147] reportedly, during the days of segregation in the US, when told he could not be served in a restaurant "for colored folk" he insisted that he was coloured – pink.

[125] The record producer Erik Smith recalled of Monteux's rehearsals with the Vienna Philharmonic for Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Brahms's Second, "although he could not speak to the orchestra in German, he transformed their playing from one take to the next".

Seeing him at work, modest and quiet, it is difficult to realize that he is a bigger box office attraction at the Metropolitan Opera House than any prima donna ... that he is the only conductor regularly invited to take charge of America's 'big three' – the Boston, Philadelphia and New York Philharmonic orchestras.

[157] The critic William Mann, along with many others, regarded him as a "supremely authoritative" conductor of Brahms,[158] though Cardus disagreed: "In German music Monteux, naturally enough, missed harmonic weight and the right heavily lunged tempo.