Michael Tilson Thomas Showed Us How to Love

The last time I saw Michael Tilson Thomas, it wasn’t on stage at Davies Symphony Hall. It was at the Roxie Theater, at a screening of the 1932 film Merrily We Go To Hell, in July of last year.

He and his husband, Joshua Robison, stood smiling in the lobby after the film, out in the city they loved. I couldn’t help but give him a nod and a “Good to see you.” It was always good to see him. When Thomas was around, you knew something exciting was likely to happen.

After one of the world’s most remarkable careers in classical music, Thomas died Wednesday at age 81, at his home. The phrase “surrounded by loved ones” usually conjures images of family around a bedside. I like to imagine the entire population of San Francisco surrounding him.

Because, my goodness, he showed us how to love music, which is to say how to love the world, and each other.

I’ve seen others propose that Thomas “demystified” classical music, but I would argue that he did the opposite. He made it accessible, yes. But he also held it up with wonder, and said, “Isn’t this so terrifically mysterious, so beautiful, how all these different elements somehow work together, to create this incredible thing called music?”

I know, because he had that effect on me.

I first encountered Michael Tilson Thomas in 1995, during his first season at the San Francisco Symphony as Music Director, conducting Stravinsky with the young violinist Midori. At age 19, I’d just gotten off tour with my punk band. I went with a friend I’d met at a warehouse show. Not the typical audience for classical music, in other words.

But I was transfixed. I’d taken piano lessons as a child, and played in the school band, and had left formality behind for more ferocious, chaotic music that moved me, made by bands like D.R.I., Septic Death and Neurosis. That night in 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas pulled me back.

He did it again in 2001, continuing undaunted with a scheduled performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 just one day after 9/11. Nicknamed the “Tragic” symphony, the piece’s finale inspired by death and loss utilized a giant hammer smashed upon a large drum. The whole thing was appropriately thundering, and turbulent. I walked out of Davies that night in a daze at the power of great art.

A recording of that performance won a Grammy award. It also turned me into a Mahler convert. “Get that Renaissance music out — we are a Mahler city!” I sometimes like to joke. But it’s true: in the tradition of his mentor Leonard Bernstein, Thomas made us all Mahler fans.

Then in 2015, Thomas premiered SoundBox, a series of classical concerts in the warehouse-like back hall of Davies. At Soundbox, you could stand instead of sit. You could use your phone. You could drink. You could be yourself at a classical show, basically, which meant the world for people like myself more used to sweaty clubs than concert halls.

And it worked. That first season, I was exposed to Meredith Monk’s wildly pulsating Panda Chant II and Lou Harrison’s fiery Pacifika Rondo selection “A Hatred of the Filthy Bomb” — two classical pieces that are, frankly, punk as hell, and right up my alley. More than a decade later, Soundbox is still running, and producing classical converts.

Naturally, the past four years have brought a poignance to each Thomas appearance, knowing his diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Not that he ever wanted anybody to be sad about it. When he made his final series appearance to conduct a soaring Mahler’s 5th in 2024 — using no sheet music — he smiled and joked around during his entrance, setting an upbeat mood.

At the end, the applause was so long and sustained that he finally quieted the crowd by miming that it was time for him to have a nightcap and go to bed.

The mood was even more upbeat, even jovial, at his 80th birthday concert last year. As if to spite the news that his cancer had returned, Thomas happily conducted Britten and Respighi; an all-star cast sang Thomas’ favorite songs; and a giant balloon drop capped the evening.

He sat on stage, singing along, holding Robison’s hand. Commemorative blue bandanas draped on every seat bore a quote from Thomas, reading, in part, “To be an artist is to have the courage for rebirth and growth. It’s neverending.”

Thomas cared deeply about music. “When we first met during my job interview, we spent the entire conversation on a single piece of music — Ligeti’s Violin Concerto,” said San Francisco Symphony CEO Matthew Spivey. “That was how he came to know people, and came to know the world.”

He also often insisted that the true measure of his life’s work was not the many, many accolades and awards for his music, but its lasting effect on the audience.

“I love this music that I make,” he once told KQED’s Michael Krasny in 2015. “But I’ve always said that for me, the most important moment in music was what happens when the music ends. When the symphony stops, what is left then?”

Now that Thomas’ music has ended, I can tell you what’s left: a whole lot of love.