Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles on 21 December 1944, the only child of Ted Thomas, a Broadway stage manager who later worked as a film and television producer, and Roberta (Meritzer) Thomas, a middle school history teacher. His paternal grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, were celebrated stars of New York's Yiddish theatre, and the family's artistic tradition stretched back to his great-grandfather Pincus, an actor and playwright, and to a long line of cantors. His father, born Theodor Herzl Tomashefsky, was also a poet and painter. A child prodigy, he studied piano and oboe; playing oboe in a junior high orchestra at 12, he met cellist Joshua Robison, who later became his life partner. The architect Frank Gehry sometimes babysat him when both were growing up in Los Angeles.

He studied at the University of Southern California, taking piano with John Crown and composition and conducting with Ingolf Dahl. He graduated from what is now the USC Thornton School of Music in 1967 and earned a master of music degree in 1976. An injury ended plans for a career as a concert pianist. During his USC years he worked with Igor Stravinsky, and as a student of Friedelind Wagner he served as a musical assistant and assistant conductor at the Bayreuth Festival. Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein became mentors and friends. Late in life USC named him Judge Widney Professor of Music.

After winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood in 1969, he became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and gained international recognition at 24 when he replaced the ailing William Steinberg mid-concert. He remained in Boston as principal guest conductor until 1974. He was music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic from 1971 to 1979, hosted the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts from 1971 to 1977, and was principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1981 to 1985. He also led opera, including the US premiere of the three-act version of Berg's Lulu at Santa Fe Opera. In 1987 he founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, serving as artistic director until 2022. He was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995 and later its conductor laureate. From 1995 to 2020 he was music director of the San Francisco Symphony, its longest-serving music director, launching the SFS Media label, recording a complete Mahler cycle and creating the Keeping Score series. He led the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in 2009 and 2011, appeared on Metallica's S&M2 in 2020, and composed works including From the Diary of Anne Frank (1990), Shówa/Shoáh (1995), Poems of Emily Dickinson (2002) and Meditations on Rilke (2019).

Tilson Thomas lived in San Francisco. He met Joshua Robison, a cellist and later an educator, in a junior high school orchestra when they were 12 and 11. They reconnected in New York in the mid-1970s through Robison's sister, the flutist Paula Robison, became life partners by 1976, and Robison also served as his business partner and manager. NPR noted that at a time when many gay people stayed in the closet, their relationship was never much of a secret. They married on 2 November 2014. Robison died on 22 February 2026 at 79 after a spinal cord injury the previous August. The couple had no children publicly reported; their survivors include sisters, nieces and nephews.

He believed classical music should be a living, shared experience rather than a museum piece. He programmed American music insistently, championing Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich and John Adams alongside Mahler and Stravinsky, and he devoted much of his career to education, from the Young People's Concerts to Keeping Score and the New World Symphony. He embraced popular music and new media, citing James Brown as an influence on his rhythm and working with Elvis Costello, Metallica and YouTube. Facing terminal illness, he described his final years as a coda, calling his life's coda generous and rich.

No major scandal is documented. Some critics, including in NPR's obituary, noted that his American programming in San Francisco featured relatively few works by women or Black composers and less of the more austere modernists such as Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, which they saw as a missed opportunity to widen the orchestra's repertory.

He is credited with turning the San Francisco Symphony into a world-class orchestra, leading nearly 1,800 concerts over a 52-year relationship with it. The New World Symphony he founded has trained more than a thousand young musicians, many now in major orchestras. His Mahler recordings, Keeping Score series and pioneering recordings of Copland, Ives and Reich are central to his recorded legacy. In December 2023 San Francisco unveiled an honorary MTT Way street sign outside Davies Symphony Hall. He also led the Thomashefsky Project to preserve his grandparents' theatrical legacy.

He won 12 Grammy Awards, including Best Classical Album for Mahler symphonies with the San Francisco Symphony (2004, 2006 and 2010), Best Orchestral Performance (1997, 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2013), Best Choral Performance (1976 for Orff's Carmina Burana with the Cleveland Orchestra, and 2010) and Best Classical Compendium in 2021 for his own From the Diary of Anne Frank and Meditations on Rilke. He received a Peabody Award in 2007 for The MTT Files, the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2019.

He hosted the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts on CBS from 1971 to 1977 and appeared alongside Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the 1976 special Bugs and Daffy's Carnival of the Animals. He made a series for the BBC with the London Symphony Orchestra, appeared regularly on PBS Great Performances, and hosted Keeping Score on PBS from 2006. The Thomashefskys, his tribute to his grandparents, aired on Great Performances in 2012. He was the subject of the 2023 American Masters documentary Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is, and he gave a TED talk on music and emotion through time.

In August 2021 he disclosed that he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme. He returned to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in January 2022, stepped back from the New World Symphony that year, and gave his final San Francisco subscription concerts with Mahler's Fifth Symphony in January 2024. In February 2025 he announced that the tumour had returned, and his last public performance was a belated 80th birthday concert with the San Francisco Symphony on 26 April 2025. He died at home in San Francisco on 22 April 2026, aged 81, surrounded by family and friends, as announced by his publicist Constance Shuman and the San Francisco Symphony. Burial or resting place details have not been made public. The symphony dedicated its June 2026 performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to him.