Thomas Schippers

Thomas Schippers (9 March 1930 – 16 December 1977) was an American conductor. He was highly regarded for his work in opera.

Biography Of Dutch ancestry and son of the owner of a large appliance store, Schippers was born in Portage, Michigan. He began playing piano at age four. After graduating from high school at age 13, he attended the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School.

Schippers made his debut at the New York City Opera at age twenty-one, and the Metropolitan Opera at twenty-five. He conducted world premieres of now well-known music by Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber. He conducted child actor Chet Allen in a theatrical version of Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. Schippers conducted in all the major opera houses of the United States and Europe, most notably the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, and founded Italy's Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi with Menotti and once described his perfect orchestra as being composed of "one-third Italian musicians for their line, one-third Jewish for their sound, a sprinkling of Germans for solidity".

Personal life Though reputed to be homosexual, Schippers married Elaine Lane "Nonie" Phipps (1939–1973) in 1965. An heiress to the Grace shipping fortune and a daughter of the noted American polo player Michael Grace Phipps, she died of ovarian cancer in 1973. Schippers died of lung cancer four years later.

According to professor, writer and opera scholar John Louis DiGaetani, Schippers had a long-term romantic relationship with Menotti and a shorter one with mathematician Sean Clarke. One of Leonard Bernstein's biographers claims that Schippers and Bernstein were also intimately involved.