Julius Rudel

Born: March 6, 1921; Died: June 26, 2014.

Julius Rudel, who has died aged 93, was one of America's most distinguished operatic conductors, famed for his nurturing of the financially unstable New York City Opera through good years and bad, and for keeping that plucky company, the New York Metropolitan's closest rival, successfully afloat for quarter of a century amid numerous financial crises until he eventually decided to go freelance in 1979.

At the time of his death, he had survived eight months longer than the imperilled company itself, which finally went bankrupt earlier this year. "I never imagined in my wildest dreams I would outlive the company," the Austrian-born maestro declared soon after its collapse.

Appearing at a commemorative ceremony in a wheelchair, he was cheered by a full house.

Not only had he served inspirationally as the City Opera's principal conductor but also as its stage director and impresario, controlling its precarious budget, and creating its often sensational productions. Handel's Julius Caesar was the most famous and Boito's Mefistofele, which he conducted partly in near-darkness with a light on the end of his baton, the most notorious.

He selected his own casts and signed their contracts, which meant he did all the things Rudolf Bing so famously did at the Met, as well as conducting the performances himself.

Not that he made do with inferior singing talent, or aspired to be a Herbert von Karajan in the orchestra pit. He was an efficient and adventurous conductor, more fatherly than stellar, his supporters said.

But he was a superb talent scout. The great Beverly Sills - whose roles included Cleopatra in Julius Caesar and Elena in Mefistofele - was his star soprano, but he also encouraged a little-known young tenor, Placido Domingo, casting him as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly and steering his career to the heights.

He similarly enabled another future star, Jose Carreras, to make his name.

With Rudel at the helm, the City Opera owed much of its artistic success as a "People's Opera" to the pleasure he took in his vibrant productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and similar hits, which he staged alongside greater, more serious works, thereby creating larger, broader-based audiences for his activities. Opera, he proclaimed, had to be both music and drama, and if it could not find an audience it would fail.

With the support of the Ford Foundation, he ensured the City Opera developed a more gung-ho approach to its repertoire. To achieve this, he was not afraid to encourage American composers.

One of his triumphs was his sensational staging of Douglas Moore's The Ballad Of Baby Doe, starring Beverly Sills. He also encouraged the young Leonard Bernstein with his production of Trouble In Tahiti.

Although the bulk of his appearances were in America, where he conducted 200 times at the New York Metropolitan after going freelance, his fame became worldwide.

On one occasion he brought the burly Canadian tenor Jon Vickers to Covent Garden to portray Handel's Samson, complying with the singer's demand there would be no counter-tenors - or, as Vickers put it, castrati - in the cast.

Born in Vienna, the reputedly lugubrious Rudel was the son of a Jewish lawyer who died just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

With his mother and a younger brother, he made his escape to New York, where he worked as a delivery boy and switchboard operator to pay for his studies at the Mannes College Of Music.

Spotting an advert for the newly founded New York City Opera, which had won the support of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, he applied for a job on the "lowest rung of the ladder," which meant working in the props department, running auditions and acting as staff pianist.

Success soon followed. When the company's original musical director resigned in 1957, young Rudel succeeded him because, he said, he knew the job from the bottom up. Under his aegis, the company moved from its cramped premises to the Lincoln Centre, where the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, and the Met also had their homes.

But the company's financial insecurity was unending and his decision to resign (he was succeeded by his protege Beverly Sills) freed him to perform elsewhere, including his native Vienna and Prague, where he conducted Don Giovanni standing on the very spot, he said, where Mozart had unveiled it. Back in 1942, he had married Rita Gillis, a New York neuropsychologist who died in 1984. He is survived by his son and two daughters, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.