Conductor who excelled in the operatic repertoire

Few conductors can claim to have carried out their profession since childhood, but Lorin Maazel, who has died aged 84, made his distinguished debut at the age of nine.

Since then his various manifestations have included violinist, composer, opera director and multilingual narrator and film-maker, but it is for an especially masterful art of conducting he will be remembered.

Orchestral musicians may recall him with less than the warmest affection, and a more collegial attitude in the world of music has turned its back on the title “maestro” by which Maazel liked to be referred, but he always maintained impressive results.

In 1932, two years after his birth near Paris, Maazel's parents, Lincoln and Marie, moved the family back to their native America. It was there that the five-year-old began to study violin. Within a few years, he was deemed ready for the podium and made his official debut with the University of Idaho Orchestra, conducting Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. "You had to rub your eyes to believe it," wrote a critic of a New York appearance, "this chubby little figure in a white linen suit pace-making for an orchestra of 70 , and giving every cue on the dot."

After he studied mathematics, languages and philosophy at Pittsburgh University, a Fulbright scholarship took him to Italy to study baroque music in 1951. At 30 he became the youngest conductor (and the first American) to appear at Bayreuth's Wagner festival, in Lohengrin, and a post at the Deutsche Oper, in Berlin, followed in 1965.

Film soundtracks He conducted the soundtrack for Joseph Losey's groundbreaking Don Giovanni in 1979 and went on to work on other films he admired – Francesco Rosi's Carmen (1984) and Franco Zeffirelli's Otello (1986). He shone in the Italian operatic repertoire and among the highlights of over 300 recordings are several instalments in his Puccini cycles. Here, as in so much else, he was passionately engaged in what he most admired and altogether more aloof when the score posed fewer challenges.

His overdue debut at the Royal Opera, London, with Verdi's Luisa Miller in 1978, brought an enthusiastic response, but at the same time, a rehearsal with Covent Garden musicians broke down because the players felt he was making unreasonable demands. His artistic and general directorship of the Vienna State Opera was curtailed in 1984. This may not have been his fault: the city's notoriously intransigent musicians had already clashed with more amenable figures.

In the orchestral repertoire, his Decca recordings of the 1960s, chiefly his Sibelius and Tchaikovsky symphonies, still have an impulsive freshness; and at least two of his Mahler symphonies, from the 1980s, are among the most expressive and finely balanced versions.

He achieved distinguished results with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he was first consultant and then chief conductor from 1988 to 1996, and he quickly settled into his stride as the music director of the New York Philharmonic from 2002.

He is survived by his third wife, the actor Dietlinde Turban and their two sons and daughter, along with a son and three daughters from previous marriages.