Michael Tilson Thomas, who served as music director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years and became a preeminent figure in the global classical music scene, has died at age 81.

Thomas died Wednesday of complications from brain cancer, five years after he was diagnosed with an aggressive form, glioblastoma multiforme. The death also comes less than two months after the unexpected death of his husband, Joshua Robison, who died from complications due to a fall in their Pacific Heights home.

MTT, as he was known, conducted his final concert at Davies Symphony Hall almost exactly one year ago, celebrating his 80th birthday and presenting works by Benjamin Britten, his mentor Leonard Bernstein, and several of his own works. In February 2025 he had announced that his cancer had returned, and that he would be winding down his public appearances, culminating with concerts with Miami's New World Symphony, which he co-founded, and the final concert at Davies.

During his long tenure at the SF Symphony, Thomas's name and San Francisco became "synonymous in the world of classical music," as the Chronicle notes today.

"MTT didn’t just lead the Symphony," says Board Chair Priscilla Geeslin in a statement to the paper. "He became part of the cultural fabric of San Francisco itself, expanding what it meant to be an orchestra in a city like ours. His impact reached far beyond the concert hall, touching the life of the city in ways both visible and deeply personal. We were, quite simply, so lucky to have him."

Thomas was born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1944 to an entertainment industry family. His father worked in movies and television in Hollywood, and had been a producer at New York’s Mercury Theater Company — founded by Orson Welles and most infamous for "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Thomas's mother, Roberta Thomas, was the head of research for Columbia Pictures, and his grandparents Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky had been big in the Yiddish theater world.

Thomas met Robison when they were in a junior orchestra together, at ages 11 and 12, and spent 70 years at each others' side.

Thomas was considered a piano prodigy from a young age, attending the USC Thornton School of Music, and becoming an Assistant Conductor of the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in his 20s, as well as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood in 1969, at age 24.

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who was a mentor and friend of Thomas, told the New York Times Magazine in 1971, "I don’t fling the word genius around lightly, but I fling it around about Michael. He reminds me of me at that age, except that he knows more than I did. Not only music, but things like the functions of the brain, cerebrology, physics, biochemistry."

After founding the New World Symphony in 1987, to serve as an orchestral academy for gifted young musicians and prepare them for leadership roles in symphonies around the world, Thomas took on the role of principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995.

Thomas maintained ties to San Francisco throughout his life, having first conducted Mahler's 9th at the SF Symphony when he was 29 years old, in 1974. But once he landed in the role of music director in 1995, he became completely attached to and of the city for the remainder of his life.

He was known as a champion of Mahler as well as American composers like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, and contemporary composers like Steve Reich, John Cage, Steve Mackey, and Mason Bates.

Speaking to the Associated Press in 2004, Thomas said of classical music, "It’s meant to have various intriguing and alluring, questioning things that you hear on first hearing. But by its very nature it’s holding a lot of other secrets or a lot of other perspectives much closer to its chest, which only with repeated hearing you start realizing are there."

A planned celebration of Thomas's 25 years at the SF Symphony had to be moved online due to the pandemic in 2020, after which he formally stepped down as music director.

As he told the Chronicle that year, "I’m happiest when I feel the music gets to a place where no one is really quite sure who is making the music. It just seems to be happening wonderfully, miraculously, rather than as a result of someone who’s saying, ‘Follow me.’”

Below, a CBS Sunday Morning segment in which Lesley Stahl spoke to Thomas last year, on the occasion of his 80th birthday and his "final bow."

As he said when he made his farewell statement of sorts last year, "A coda can vary greatly in length. My life’s coda is generous and rich. Life is precious."

Previously: Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts Final SF Concert, Takes the Applause For His 80th Birthday

T0p image: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is honored during the 11th Annual California Hall of Fame ceremony at The California Museum on December 5, 2017 in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)