Pierre Monteux was born in Paris on April 4, 1875, member of a family which had been settled in Provence for many generations. He began his career in the ancient "Cafe Concert La Cigale" in Montmartre. His elder brother Paul taught him the violin and his mother, Madame Monteux-Brisac, a Conservatoire teacher, saw to it that his way soon led from Montmartre to Montparnasse. Along with Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot, he attended classes at the Conservatoire and there won the "Premier Prix." Later as an orchestral player with the Colonne and at the Opera Comique, he was an active witness of the great period of Massenet and of Debussy's rise.
He also developed himself as a chamber musician, by playing the viola in the Capet Quartet and, in the summer season, working at the Casino in Dieppe where, besides directing operas, operettas and concerts, he was also required to look after dance-music balls and other festivities-- a kind of eighteenth century "divertissement" job which gave him hard schooling in all aspects of his profession. His first big chance came in 1911 when Petroushka was under rehearsal by the Russian Ballet. The conductor Tcherepnin had fallen ill and Stravinsky, lookeing for a substitute who could at least rehearse the music, turned to Pierne for advice. Pierne recommended Monteux and Monteux did the work so well that Stravinsky entrusted him with the first performance.
The premiere took place on June 13, 1911 in Paris and with it Monteux's spectacular rise began. After that, he conducted the first performances of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe ( 1912) and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). Today, these two events are connected forever with his name-- the printed scores of the two works carry it proudly. London, Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Monte Carlo--all these cities soon saw him conduct. In the meantime, he had been made chief conductor of the Russian Ballet and the focus, therefore, of its musical activities--a fascinating role, interrupted only by the First World War.
After WW I, he went to America to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in New York and also the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After this he returned to Europe, and the invitation from the Concertgebouw was followed by the decade in Amsterdam. Meanwhile he conducted the Paris Symphony Orchestra, finally leaving for America again to assume command of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for seventeen years. Pierre Monteux first came to Amsterdam in 1924 to act as co-conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, along with Willem Mengelberg.
He carried out this function for ten consecutive years and during that time gave fresh depths to our musical life, as much in the field of orchestral music as in music drama. It was to his inspiration to a large extent, that the recent creative flowering in Dutch music traces its beginnings. His passionate advocacy of the work of Willem Pijper, whose Third Symphony is dedicated to him, is symptomatic in this respect.
Later, when outside calls caused him to relax the full pressure of his valuable work in the Netherlands, he was never long absent (except during the war) from the Concertgebouw rostrum and in fact was scheduled to appear in Amsterdam again-- to conduct the orchestra and to complete a series of recordings with it that he had already begun when death intervened.