This article first appeared in Danish,, as pictured, in the Autumn 2024 issue of the Danish magazine Klassisk – an outstanding publication to which I am proud to contribute regularly and to which you should all subscribe. I’m very grateful for the magazine’s permission to republish it in English.
Eight years ago, in her mid-twenties, Marie Jacquot was working as a Kapellmeister at a small German opera house. She made a promise to herself. ‘I said, if I am 30 and I have not made it as a conductor, I will do something else.’
What would she have done? ‘I like animals, so maybe a vet, or running a day-care centre for dogs,’ she replies, in absolute sincerity. She had plenty of options. She could have continued her career path as a professional tennis player, which had taken her to victory at the junior rounds of the French Open. She could have become a professional trombonist, having studied the instrument in Paris.
But there was no need. By the time she turned 30, Jacquot had indeed ‘made it’ as a conductor and was about to be nominated for the Newcomer of the Year prize at the International Opera Awards. This summer, she completed her first season as principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. In August she joined the Royal Danish Theatre as principal conductor. In two years, she will combine her position in Copenhagen with the chief conductorship of the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne – one of Germany’s most prestigious radio orchestras.
Those orchestras are the lucky ones. There are many more who wanted to sign the conductor whose rapid rise has been described by Radio France as ‘irresistible’.
Jacquot was born in Paris, but grew up in Chartres, the picturesque town in the Loire Valley famous for its gothic cathedral. ‘I went to a lot of organ and brass band concerts,’ she says. ‘There was plenty of Bruckner performed in the cathedral, so I probably got my desire to play the trombone from there.’
But there was another career path beckoning: competitive sport. ‘I was good [at tennis] and I liked it,’ says Jacquot. ‘You ‘play’ tennis just like you ‘play’ music – it’s the same verb. But the deeper you get into tennis, the more the idea of ‘play’ disappears: you’re playing against someone and someone is playing against you. This competitive aspect I did not enjoy and it wasn’t fun anymore. The more I played the trombone in the orchestra, the more I saw that it was about playing together with people. This grew more and more in my soul and I realized I needed to stop tennis and make music.’
Isn’t there a competitive element to conducting? ‘I benefitted from tennis,’ says Jacquot, ‘from the hard work, the preparation, the mental strength. Being in front of an orchestra is not easy for your mind. But competition is something I know and something I don’t want. I try not to look left and right and see how she is doing or how he is doing [other conductors]. I just do my thing as well as I can. I prepare as well as I can. I give my best and it either works or it doesn’t work.’
As a 14-year-old trombonist, Jacquot joined a conducting class that had just been established in Chartres. ‘You have good arms’, her teacher there told her, she remembers. She later applied to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, failing the trombone exam but passing the conducting exam. Among her teachers in Vienna was Fabio Luisi, current chief conductor of the DR Symphony Orchestra, who taught at the school for one semester. ‘Marie was a very interesting student back then,’ Luisi told me last year, ‘and she has developed beautifully since. I am very happy about her position at the opera [in Copenhagen].’
For any conductor, the big challenges come in the first few years. ‘Everything is new when you finish school and as my family isn’t from a musical background, I didn’t have the advantage of knowing how the profession works,’ Jacquot says. ‘Orchestras want someone conducting who already has a lot of experience, and when you’re starting out you don’t have any. You are confronted with difficult situations; you make mistakes and you learn from them. Sometimes you make a good decision, sometimes you make a bad decision. Next time the same situation comes up, you think you know how to deal with it but you’re with a different group of human beings who might react differently. So even though you do it right, it might actually be the wrong decision.’
Are there orchestras she’s failed to conduct well? ‘Yes. Not a lot, maybe two.’ What went wrong? ‘You can’t tell. Often it’s just about timing – being there at the wrong time. Or having a personality that doesn’t suit the orchestra, or having musical ideas that won’t work with the mentality of the orchestra. But that’s actually what I love about the job. Ultimately it’s about how you communicate with other human beings. It’s never just a routine.’
Something clicked when Jacquot made her debut at the Royal Theatre with Gounod’s Faust in September 2021 – an opera in her native French. ‘Every performance was amazing,’ Jacquot recalls, pausing before adding: ‘of course, some performances were a little less good than others. But the musicianship, they way we played music together, was there every time.’
Opera hadn’t been part of Jacquot’s plan. ‘I did not like opera because I had never seen one and as a trombonist I had no connection to voices. I also hated contemporary music.’ When she arrived in Vienna to study, she needed to learn two things quickly: the German language and how to rehearse. ‘So I agreed to conduct all the works by the student composers, about 100 world premieres,’ she says, widening her eyes.
That brought her to the attention of Kirill Petrenko, then general music director (GMD) of the Bayerischen Staatsoper, now chief of the Berliner Philharmoniker, who hired her as an assistant in Munich for two months, working on the world premiere of Miroslav Srnka’s opera South Pole. The Kapellmeister job followed, at the theatre in Würzburg. It was a baptism of fire into the world of the opera house.
‘It was very hard,’ Jacquot recalls now. ‘You need to be there for everybody, basically. You have to conduct your own productions and stand in for the GMD, who might suddenly not be around for two weeks. Then you have an orchestra that thinks it’s better than it is, which for a young conductor is not easy. And the smaller the opera house, the bigger the problems.’ Why? ‘Not enough people, everyone doing a little bit too much – challenging on a human level. Oooh it was hard…three years, I don’t know how I did it! But I would certainly do it again.’
She did it again, immediately – moving from Würzburg to a Kapellmeister position at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, a more prestigious company but one that uses two theatres and two orchestras, one each in Düsseldorf and Duisburg. That put Jacquot on another sharp learning curve. ‘You conduct La Traviata with the Düsseldorf Philharmoniker at the theatre in Dusseldorf, then two nights later you conduct it at the theatre in Duisburg with the Duisburg Philharmoniker. It was like driving two different cars, one Ferrari, one huge truck. You learn different ways to move, different ways to communicate. What an experience; it was amazing!’
After six years as a Kapellmeister, Jacquot had fallen for opera and the operatic way of doing things – the essential flexibility between singers on the stage and orchestra beneath it; the transplanting of chamber music ideals onto the largest of scales. It taught her how to accompany concerto soloists, she says – one of her biggest fears as a student conductor. When the world opened up after the Covid-19 pandemic, it was time to hit the road as a freelance conductor.
When we meet at Hotel Kong Arthur, near Dronning Louise’s Bridge in Copenhagen, Jacquot has been working for two days with the DR Symphony Orchestra, preparing a challenging programme including Elgar’s Symphony No 2. She appears bright-eyed, energetic but calm. She is clear in her thoughts and expression. In a grey trouser suit, she has the demeanor of a lawyer more than a maestro. She listens do my questions attentively. She leans forward, her elbows on her knees, to answer them.
Two days later, she conducted the Elgar for the first time: a bracing and fluent performance of the greatest and most technically difficult symphony ever written in England that remains in general currency. ‘I take it like a train journey through the English landscape,’ she told me back at the hotel; ‘you are passing different moods and different weathers, but you’re not going in to each one too deeply, or you miss the spirit of the piece.’
Most of us in Copenhagen had only ever seen Jacquot conduct from the shoulders-up: in one of the city’s two opera pits (Faust in 2021, next the gala concert to mark the fifty year reign of Margrethe II in 2022, then a finely-balanced reading of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in October 2023). In the DR Concert Hall, Jacquot was strikingly impressive – her gestural language as refined and judicious as the young Vladimir Jurowski’s (she also has his breadth of repertoire), her resolute stance reminding me Vasily Sinaisky’s. If the ‘good arms’ her teacher described came from tennis, so does her careful footwork. ‘I worked a lot on the “how you look” aspect of conducting,’ she admits; ‘the job has a theatrical aspect to it – a visual aspect. It’s a little like mime.’
When we meet, Jacquot is fresh from conducing in America and Japan. ‘It’s important for me to experience different styles, different cultures, different sounds,’ she says; ‘I am still learning and I will never stop.’ Can she recognize different orchestral sound cultures in different parts of the world? ‘I’m generalizing, but in America, there is a culture to play what is written. You need to give a lot of input while conducting, because they’re waiting for you to tell them how to do it. In Vienna, they do it more themselves, as individuals, whereas in America they’re a little bit more like a well-drilled machine. So in Vienna it might not be absolutely together, but it might have this soul, this humanity, that maybe I miss in America.’
She draws comparison between the DR Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Danish Orchestra. ‘I am amazed at the precision of the DRSO, how they can play the Elgar in the second rehearsal. That’s a radio orchestra: you press record and they have to play well and play together. What I like about the Kapel is the kind of operatic music-making where you are constantly supporting singers, and out of that you get a different sound – moving together and finding each other. It’s a longer process.’
I ask Jacquot what made her accept the position with the Royal Theatre. ‘The Kapel [the orchestra],’ she replies without hesitation. ‘This amazing bond we had for the first time and that we had with Onegin and that I hope we will keep for the coming years. I see the potential the Kapel has, and that makes me very happy.’
Initially, the theatre offered her more – the post of chief conductor. ‘I did not want to be chief, so we met in the middle with principal conductor. There is a difference. It’s too early for me to take on too many non-musical responsibilities including human resources things. It’s not that I’m not grown up, but I want a few more years in my pocket before I take on that sort of thing. I need to learn how to be a chief conductor and to focus on the music, which I can do as principal conductor. I will continue freelancing until I take on the WDR job, and from then I will stop my guest conducting engagements and be more present for the Kapel, maybe able to take on more responsibilities, not only for my productions but for other ones. What I am doing now is a kind of transition. In the long term, I have no wish to conduct orchestras and leave again. I want to develop something together.’
In the new season, she conducts a revival of Damiano Micheiletto’s staging of Puccini’s Il Trittico (‘a chance to get to know the soloists ensemble’) and the Danish premiere of Manfred Trojahn’s 2011 opera Orest, written as a sequel to Strauss’s Elektra, staged by Kasper Holten (‘contemporary music is very important to me’, she says). But her plans concern more that what’s written in the season book. ‘There are many possibilities: making the playing in the Kapel even better; improving the sound of the theatre and the concert shell; fighting for more concerts; perhaps even having an orchestral academy, which is a big wish for me; maybe even appointing a Kapellmeister.’
When her sometime predecessor, the late Michael Boder, resigned his position as chief conductor at Det Kongelige Teater in 2016, he claimed he had ‘never had a conversation with the theatre [management] about art.’ Is Jacquot aware of the Royal Theatre’s layers of bureaucracy? ‘We have a new management now, with a new Kapelchef. We have made a new position, because the Kapel needs it, and that will make better communication between me, the Kapel, the house and Elisabeth [Elisabeth Linton, Artistic Director, Royal Danish Opera]. I hope the Kapel will have a more meaningful place in the whole house and will feel better supported. I think they all want to be even better than they already are, and I have some musical ideas. We will try to make that happen but basically, I want to learn my job.’
Right now, she is working with Linton on the repertoire for the season 2026-27. What we won’t be hearing from Jacquot is Janáček. She says she will only conduct operas in languages she can speak, which allows for French, Spanish, Italian, German and English (‘I have some affinity with Russian,’ she says, ‘and Onegin was an experimentation that went well’).
I ask about her life away from music. ‘I live in Graz with my fiancé’, she tells me (they have since married). ‘And no, music is not my whole life. I love going to restaurants, I love getting out into nature and I love rollercoasters.’ Does she have any pets? ‘I don’t, and I would love to. But I don’t want a pet at home on its own; if I want a pet, I want to be there for it – same with a child.’
Before we close, I congratulate Jacquot on her spate of recent awards. At a glitzy televised ceremony in France, Victoires de la Musique, she was named Conductor Revelation of the Year and presented with an Oscar-like trophy. She smirks. Has it put any more pressure on her? ‘I dooooon’t caaaaare!’ she exclaims with a smile, dipping her head down, drawing the words out in English – and in so doing, sounding so very French. ‘From this point, everything that happens in my career is a bonus, a gift. I live from one of the most beautiful jobs ever, making music. I’m happy.’
