He was born Franz Leopold Maria Möst in Upper Austria – the stage name came later, with “Welser” taken from his hometown of Wels – and began his career in music by learning the violin from a nun named Sister Gerburga, who was generous to her students tapped his hands with a ruler. When a new music high school opened near Linz, he applied, was accepted and began studying with the aim of a career with the Vienna Philharmonic.
But in 1978, on the way back from a performance of Schubert's Mass in G major, he was in a car accident in which he broke three vertebrae and suffered severe nerve damage to two fingers. Welser-Möst is not a supporter of superstition, but he wrote in his memoirs “From Silence” that the day of the accident was full of eerie coincidences: the car had left the icy road at the exact time of Schubert's death, 150 years to the day exact day; and he, an 18-year-old, had just performed a piece that Schubert had written when he was also 18. The first thing Welser-Möst heard when he woke up in the hospital? This fair. Regardless of what it all meant, he wrote, “That Sunday was a fateful day for me, to which I owe much of who I am today.”
Welser-Möst was already interested in conducting and was unable to continue playing the violin due to an injury to his hand. He shifted his focus to the podium. After a stay in Sweden he was appointed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an unhappy tenure from the start. The British press called him “Frankly Worse Than Most,” which he laughs about now, but certainly not back then. Even after he left to take over the musical direction of the Zurich Opera House, he was described in Switzerland as the “loser from London”.
The story was different in the United States, where his manager Edna Landau, whom he considers his “Jewish mother,” carefully planned his rollout. She had seen him conduct in Zurich in the mid-1980s and was “impressed by his confidence, his naturalness, his incredible musicality,” she said. Still, she added, “I made time for him.”
He made his American debut in 1989 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Cleveland followed suit in 1993. Requests for his return came quickly, and as discussions about the Cleveland job began, Landau and Welser-Möst carefully weighed the decision. Welser-Möst wanted to create an environment like the one he grew up in, where music is embedded in a community's education and everyday life.
It's a lofty goal, but one common among American orchestras, and Welser-Möst has taken it seriously over the past two decades in Cleveland. He lives there much of the year (instead of flying in for short appointments), participates in community programs and collaborations, gets involved in politics, and befriends local luminaries like rock music host Jules Belkin.