Music Maestro Zubin Mehta: The Globally Acclaimed Indian And World Citizen

Some silences speak louder than sound. On July 7, 1990, the eve of the FIFA World Cup Final, one such silence descended upon Rome’s ancient Baths of Caracalla, a hush so complete, so captivating, that the very stones of the amphitheatre seemed to hold their breath. History was preparing itself to be made. Beneath a full moon that burnished the ruins in pale gold, Mumbai-born conductor Zubin Mehta stood before the 198-member Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, baton in hand, immaculate in a black tuxedo.

Behind him, facing 8,000 spectators and an unseen television audience of hundreds of millions, stood three men who had never before shared a stage: Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti. Three voices. Three legends. One evening that would become the most-watched classical music event in recorded history.

That Mehta was chosen to helm this singular occasion was no accident of fate. He possessed something rare in a conductor: an architecture of relationships. He had worked intimately with musicians across decades of shared stages; he understood the grammar of their voices, the geography of their ambitions, and the precise emotional territory in which each man’s gift most brilliantly expressed itself.

He also possessed the theatrical authority, calm, and talent to hold together an ensemble of three century-defining voices and bend them into a single transcendent purpose. The two-and-a-half-hour concert transformed Rome that evening. The Three Tenors were born not merely as a phenomenon, but as a force on the world stage.

A few years ago, on a fall afternoon, I sat across from Zubin Mehta on a wicker chair on the patio of his Mediterranean villa in Los Angeles, a house perched magnificently on a private mountain above the Pacific. The spectacular view harmonized the east with the west, much like its owner. He mentioned that he had bought the property from Steve McQueen.

Somehow, this seemed entirely fitting, one icon acquiring the home of another. Mehta settled into his chair with the ease of a man unbothered by altitude, whether physical or professional. He poured Californian orange juice with a host’s attentiveness, and as the afternoon light softened into amber, he spoke with the measured generosity of someone who has spent a lifetime listening as carefully as he has led. There is in him no performance of greatness, only the quiet confidence of a man who has long since made peace with his own measure.

Born nine decades ago on April 29, 1936, into a middle-class Parsi family in Mumbai, shaped by the intimate musical world of his gifted father, and forged on the stages of Vienna, Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem, Zubin Mehta’s life is an extraordinary story of a man who became a citizen of the world and forever loved the land of his birth. In his 2006 autobiography Zubin Mehta: The Score of My Life, he reveals, “I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms’s four symphonies and Richard Strauss’s tone poems.” At eighteen, he left India for Vienna to study at the prestigious Akademie für Musik, where he worked under Hans Swarowsky. In 1958, took first prize in the international conducting competition in Liverpool in a field of 100 contestants.

At 26, he moved to the United States and was appointed the youngest permanent conductor in the history of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Besides revitalizing the LA musical scene, he led the Montreal Symphony from 1961 to 1967. An acclaimed figure in the western music world, he was invited to take charge of the New York Philharmonic from 1978 to 1991. Mehta and the New York Philharmonic presented Ravi Shankar as soloist in a performance titled “Raga-Mala,” in  April 1981. The following year, Mehta led the New York Philharmonic at the White House, when President Reagan honored Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the occasion of her visit to the United States. In Sept 1984, the New York Philharmonic, under Mehta, drew repeated concert applause in their first concert in New Delhi.  In 2023, he conducted the famed Bavarian State Orchestra at the Shalimar Garden, on the banks of Dal Lake in Srinagar. He has returned repeatedly to conduct in India, working to nurture classical music in the country.

Of all the deep bonds Mehta forged across his career, perhaps none is more singular or more enduring than his relationship with Israel and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which was founded in 1936, the year Mehta was born. The lifelong maverick was appointed Music Advisor of  Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969, Music Director in 1977, and Music Director for Life in 1981. Earlier, as the six-day Arab-Israeli war broke out in June 1967, Mehta cancelled most of his engagements and took the last El Al plane from Rome to Tel Aviv as he believed music mattered. During and after the war, he conducted the Israel Philharmonic in several concerts. At the Berlin Festival in 1971, the Israel Philharmonic, led by him, had proudly played ‘Hatikvah’ (Israel’s National Anthem) with their heads high.

The performance brought tears to the eyes of the German audience. He returned to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and again during the Gulf War in 1991, capturing the defiant beauty of music in extremity. Prime Minister Shimon Peres bestowed him with the Presidential Medal of Distinction, and the nation granted him Israeli citizenship.

Mehta has created a body of work in global concert halls with the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Vienna, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York Philharmonics. In the course of his career, he has gained the highest admiration in the international community. In 2001, he was presented with Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, the German government bestowed him with the Commander’s Cross of the German Order of Merit, and the Australians appointed him an Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia.

The Kennedy Center honored him for lifetime achievement in the performing arts and he was named one of the winners of the Premium Imperial awards by the Japan Art Association in Tokyo. He is also a recipient of the United Nations Lifetime Achievement Peace and Tolerance Award and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Now in his 90^th year, Zubin Mehta has connected worlds that rarely touch, across a sixty-year career. Yet India has remained the gravitational centre of Mehta’s emotional universe. Mumbai’s favourite son once said, “I love India, and it is important for my spirit to go back. I feel I belong so much. When I land in Bombay, it’s like I never left. I never even changed my passport.”

His most favoured cuisine is Indian, and he is reported to carry Indian spices to Michelin-starred European restaurants to add chiles to the food. On May 8, 2026, a mural celebrating Zubin Mehta in the Lodhi Art District in New Delhi was inaugurated by Israeli Ambassador Reuven Azar. The next logical step for the capital city would be to build a world-class concert hall in Delhi in the name of the music maestro.

To spend an afternoon with Zubin Mehta is to encounter a person with the capacity to make every hall feel distinctive, and every musical performance extraordinary. Under his baton, the largest orchestral machinery becomes something almost conversational. Audiences do not merely attend his concerts; they are drawn forward by some gravitational warmth of an Indian maestro standing at the intersection of antiquity and modernity, who conducts time itself into stillness. The silence before the music. The silence after. And in between, something that will not be repeated. 

(Bhuvan Lall is a Creative Entrepreneur, Film Producer, Author of Namaste Cannes, and the biographer of Subhas Chandra Bose, Har Dayal, and Sardar Patel.)