CLEVELAND, OH.- One night last fall, Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, walked onto the stage of Severance Hall, crossed over to the podium and faced the audience. He was neither solemn nor particularly expressive; he just flashed a Mona Lisa smile before turning to the players and gesturing the downbeat of a Mozart symphony.

For the regulars in the audience, this was a familiar sight. Welser-Möst, 63, is known more for his authoritative, even demanding, conducting than for his showmanship. And what followed that night was also familiar, as the orchestra turned out a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart program, a new percussion concerto and a Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky rarity at the exhilaratingly high level that has led many to call this ensemble the finest in America.

Unflashy yet unmatched. Such is the culture of the Cleveland Orchestra, an oasis of excellence, maintained and nurtured since Welser-Möst became its music director in 2002. And while there is more to come — the orchestra opens Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series with a pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York on Jan. 20 and 21 — the end of his tenure is in sight: He announced Thursday that he would not renew his contract when it expires in 2027, which is relatively soon given the far-ahead planning cycles of classical music.

By then, Welser-Möst, who first took up the baton after a life-altering accident and is now conducting through treatments for cancer, will have become the longest-serving music director in the Cleveland Orchestra’s history. During that time, he has risen to the top of his field, especially in his home country, Austria, where he is adored by the Vienna Philharmonic and has practically been in residence at the prestigious Salzburg Festival over the past decade.

In an age and an industry that reward celebrity savviness, Welser-Möst is among the precious few conductors who have built their reputations on skill alone — occasionally stepping into the limelight but mostly letting the music speak for itself. In a thinly veiled nod to media-hungry maestros, he once wrote: “I have no photos from a fitness studio on Instagram, no Facebook posts from my private circle and no tweets wearing bathing trunks. On the podium, too, it is unlikely that the public or critics will catch me breaking into a spontaneous dance.”

His accomplishments in Cleveland are more woven into the ethos of the orchestra than declared. Most of the players today were appointed under his leadership, and he has vastly expanded their repertoire; as of last year, he had conducted the ensemble in over 1,000 works, with more in the pipeline before he leaves.

“It’s not that I’m running out of ideas,” Welser-Möst said during one of several interviews. “But I think it’s good to leave on a high note, better than when people say, ‘Oh, God, when is he gone?’ As in ‘Rosenkavalier,’ everything has a time, and I think 25 years — I never thought I would stay that long.”

—

Born in Upper Austria as Franz Leopold Maria Möst — the stage name came later, with “Welser” taken from his hometown, Wels — he got his start in music by learning violin from a nun named Sister Gerburga, who liberally slapped her students’ hands with a ruler. When a new secondary school for music opened nearby in Linz, he auditioned, was accepted and began studying with an eye toward a career at the Vienna Philharmonic.

But in 1978, on the way back from a performance of Franz Schubert’s Mass in G, he was in a car accident that left him with three broken vertebrae and severe nerve damage in two of his fingers. Welser-Möst is not one for superstition, but he wrote in his memoir, “From Silence,” that the day of the accident was full of eerie coincidences: The car had swerved off the icy road at the exact time of Schubert’s death, 150 years to the day; and he, an 18-year-old, had just played a piece that Schubert wrote when he, too, was 18. The first thing Welser-Möst heard when he awoke in the hospital? That Mass. Regardless of what it all meant, he wrote, “That Sunday was a fateful day for me, to which I owe much of what I am today.”

Already interested in conducting and unable to continue on violin because of the damage to his hand, Welser-Möst shifted his focus to the podium. After a post in Sweden, he was appointed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an unhappy tenure from the start. The British press called him “Frankly Worse Than Most,” something he laughs off today but certainly didn’t at the time. Even after he left, to take on the musical leadership of the Zurich Opera House, he was described in Switzerland as the “loser from London.”

The story was different in the United States, where his manager Edna Landau, whom he considers his “Jewish mom,” carefully plotted his rollout. She had seen him conduct in Zurich in the mid-1980s, and was “impressed by his confidence, his naturalness, his incredible musicianship,” she said. Still, “I took my time with him.”

His U.S. debut, in 1989, was with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Cleveland followed in 1993. The requests for him to return came swiftly, and when talks began for the job in Cleveland, Landau and Welser-Möst weighed the decision with care. Welser-Möst wanted to cultivate an environment like the one he grew up in, with music embedded in education and the everyday life of a community.

It’s a lofty goal but one common among American orchestras, and Welser-Möst has taken it seriously over the past two decades in Cleveland. He lives there for a substantial period of the year (instead of flying in for brief engagements), involving himself in community programs and collaborations, engaging with politics and befriending local luminaries like rock music presenter Jules Belkin.

“Franz brought a different perspective to the orchestra,” Belkin said. “From what I could see from the outside in previous years, it seemed that the conductors were always certainly brilliant but somewhat divorced from the community itself. Once in a while, he’ll bring up a subject that’s being discussed down at City Hall, not necessarily affecting the orchestra but affecting the city.

“And we went to the zoo with our wives,” Belkin added. “How many conductors have been to the zoo?”

Welser-Möst estimated that it took him about six seasons to settle in with the orchestra, even if there was no question of their chemistry. He may seem cool and clinical in performance, but offstage he is wry and warm, bookish without taking himself too seriously. During Thomas W. Morris’ years as the orchestra’s chief executive, Welser-Möst engineered annual pranks for his birthday. “The little boy in Franz was really energized by that,” Landau said.

The orchestra’s current leader, André Gremillet, has also been close with Welser-Möst. During an early meeting at Welser-Möst’s home, “he was in T-shirt and jeans, you know, very relaxed, and he was quizzing me, because he wanted to know who this guy is,” Gremillet said. “I was doing the same, and right away, I got the sense that this is someone with whom you could have a genuine communication, as opposed to the maestro who wants to just do his thing.”

Musicians have described similarly collaborative relationships with Welser-Möst, relationships that don’t require a lot of talking. Afendi Yusuf, the orchestra’s principal clarinet, said that when he was hired, he was struck by the ethos of efficiency and camaraderie, “in a way that made it easier to see what I had to do to contribute to the greater whole.” And Frank Rosenwein, the principal oboe, noted that Welser-Möst leads one of the best-organized rehearsals he has experienced.

The Cleveland Orchestra, said Jung-min Amy Lee, its associate concertmaster, doesn’t respond well to conductors who come with “preconceived ideas” about a score. But Welser-Möst “is really in the moment, collaborating with us and understanding the potential of what this group is able to do.”

Welser-Möst also won over the self-governing players of the Vienna Philharmonic. After an unremarkable debut with them in the late 1990s, he stepped in at the last minute, without a rehearsal, for a “Tristan und Isolde” in 2003.

“That’s when they said, ‘He really knows his stuff,’” Welser-Möst recalled. “Now whenever I stand in front of them, it’s just making music with good friends.”

Violinist Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chair, has called Welser-Möst “one of us,” which to the conductor felt like “getting knighted by the Queen.” Froschauer has also said that while the orchestra doesn’t have a chief conductor, it secretly has two: Riccardo Muti and Welser-Möst.

—

Welser-Möst took on, in 2010, the music directorship of the Vienna State Opera, whose pit ensemble overlaps with the Philharmonic. But he clashed with Dominique Meyer, who was then the artistic director, over casting and programming, and in 2014 he resigned, pulling out of all his engagements there at the start of the season.

He continued to lead the Vienna Philharmonic in opera productions at the Salzburg Festival but didn’t return to the State Opera. It wasn’t until Bogdan Roscic was appointed to succeed Meyer, in 2017, that he began to reconcile with the company.

“He’s one of the most important opera conductors of our time,” Roscic said. “We hit it off. I found it very stimulating to be able to develop things together. We have plans to 2030, which is in a sense the most sincere compliment we can pay each other.”

Welser-Möst’s future with the State Opera is all the more remarkable because he has begun to wind down his performance schedule and retire works from his repertoire, like Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” and Richard Wagner’s “Ring.”

“Whether it’s a Brahms cycle, which I will not be doing anymore, or ‘Elektra,’ you have to be intellectually on top of your game, but also physically,” Welser-Möst said. “There’s a good reason why Herbert von Karajan said you shouldn’t conduct ‘Elektra’ after the age of 60.”

Last summer, back pain forced him to withdraw from Giuseppe Verdi’s “Macbeth” in Salzburg, and in September, he had a cancerous tumor removed, with a good prognosis but treatment planned through this year. Before his diagnosis, however, he had already decided to retire specific works and step down from his post in Cleveland.

“We all only live so long, and there are many other things I enjoy,” he said. “I don’t have to make a ‘career’ anymore. I’m extremely grateful, and gratitude is the best path to happiness.”

“Other people I’ve seen leaving major posts — you know, it ends in bitterness and whatnot. I was there when the relationship between the Berlin Phil and Karajan exploded. I don’t want that.”

He is not on a path to repeat that history in Cleveland. Gremillet said that “to find another partner like this, of that stature, is going to be incredibly challenging.” And so far, their programming for his farewell seasons builds on the orchestra’s repertoire, looking more to the future than to Welser-Möst’s past.

“We have great plans for the next four years,” Welser-Möst said. “Then I move on, and they move on. Life is full of farewells.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.