Interview | The Way Home: India-Born Danish Conductor Maria Badstue's Journey With Music

and I—I took the one less traveled by”

—Robert Frost

India-born Danish conductor Maria Badstue sits on a chair, her bushy brows hovering over ‘the duck tales of Danish descent’ she recites to her daughter. She touches her nose often; and fall silent, slightly discomfited, whenever the conversation drifts towards the orphanage she was adopted from.

“What would a five-month-old know?” she asks. Her daughter—Nordic, Scandinavian—and she herself of Indian descent, both anchored to the brown skin she wears.

Badstue was in Mumbai for the sixth time to conduct the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) at the NCPA. The SOI Chamber Orchestra collaborated with musicians from The Royal Academy of Music and The Royal Danish Academy of Music under Badstue’s baton. The programme featured Carl Nielsen’s radiant Helios Overture, followed by one of Rachmaninoff’s most beloved works, performed by celebrated Danish concert pianist, Søren Rastogi.

“I wish I had come earlier,” says Badstue. She visited India for the first time in 2017. She had lived in Thisted, Denmark, for all the years before that. Badstue was only five months old when a Danish couple adopted her from an orphanage in Pandharpur, a pilgrimage town along the Chandrabhaga River in Maharashtra. The thought of meeting her birth parents had never occurred to her. The mirage of that hope never shimmered before her. In fact, it wasn’t until 2017 that she opened the briefcase that held the documents of her adoption.

“I was already home. I couldn’t be running behind a colour,” she says. “I was this person with brown skin in a class of whites, but I never felt I didn’t belong because everyone was welcoming. But…”

When she landed in India for the first time, she recalls, “I saw people like me. Is there a word I can pen down to describe how I felt?” For years, the only glimpse she had of India was in the mirror—her own face, her eyes.

She says that when her parents told her who she was, it created a distance within her. “Maybe that’s why I chose something [a profession] so difficult,” she guesses. “I could’ve gone for something normal, but I chose this.”

Race and language often dictate where a person is perceived to belong. Though Badstue is fluent in Danish, she recounts how earlier people in Denmark would often switch to English when speaking to her—perhaps unconsciously responding to her appearance rather than her accent. “They’d assume I was a foreigner, even though I grew up there, spoke like them, lived like them,” she reflects.

In India, the contrast is equally stark. When addressed in Hindi, her instinctive response—“Excuse me?”—often draws puzzled or amused looks, sometimes even mocking expressions. She finds herself caught in a strange in-between: in Denmark, she is read as Indian; in India, she is read as ‘foreign’.

Already being ‘raced out’, she often questioned the mirror: what is left within me?

Music. A language porous to borders. For her, music became the only language that didn’t ask where she is from. The one space where she belongs. Her interest in Western classical music grew even though no one in her family is a musician. Over the years, she says, it has made her question if it is genetic.

For Badstue, conducting transcended mere technique; it became a profound journey of personal evolution—a crucible for transformation. The shy, anxious child she once was found her voice in the commanding act of leading orchestras. Her artistic path was indelibly shaped by the mentorship of Finnish maestro Jorma Panula, globally revered as one of the most influential figures in orchestral conducting.

“Conducting,” she says, “is less about technique and more about the conductor’s overall personality, resilience, and capacity to endure.”

Panula, she notes, possessed an uncanny ability to perceive the unspoken, to divine what lay beneath the surface.

From the nascent blare of a trumpet in the local scout organisation’s brass band, Badstue’s destiny as a conductor began to unfurl. The echo of those early notes, struck in childhood innocence, quickly matured into leadership when, at the age of 14, she took up the baton for her first brass band. By the age of 20, she was already commanding a professional orchestra—a testament to her innate talent and burgeoning authority. Her formal education led her to the Danish National Academy of Music, where she initially immersed herself in the disciplined study of the trumpet.

“When I auditioned for conducting studies at the Oslo Academy in 2011, I told myself that if I didn’t get in, I would go to India,” Badstue recalls, a wry smile playing on her lips. “I had put everything at stake—such a childish act, really. But oh, how I wish I had come earlier!”

Two aspects of India have left a lasting impression on her—the extraordinary abundance of musical talent, and the stark poverty that exists in unsettling proximity to urban affluence. Glancing at the crowded streets just beyond the gleaming facades of high-rises and multiplexes, she often thinks, “It could just as easily have been me on the streets.” That awareness, she says, has never left her.

She pauses, eyes drifting to her hands, fingers tracing faint arcs across her palm. “There’s something missing,” she says softly. “The Indian classical rhythms, they should have been here, along the edges. If only if I had visited earlier.”

The thought hangs in the air for a moment before giving way to memory. From across the table, she shuffles through a folder containing student profiles from the Nordic Masterclass for Conductors, an initiative she co-founded in 2012. The programme was born from a simple yet ambitious aim: to offer young conductors direct podium experience with professional orchestras, under the guidance of her mentor, Panula.

“Learning is illiterate. It doesn’t know the rulebook of stopping,” says Badstue with all the enthusiasm of a toddler.

She walks across the stage of the Tata Theatre with a grace honed over decades, yet the weight of leadership never quite leaves her. “It’s a lonely profession,” she admits. “You carry a horde of voices on your shoulders. Art is something shouldered.”

Still, she carries it forward, humming:

‘‘Two roads diverged in a wood,

and I—I took the one less traveled by’’

Pritha Vashishth is 해외카지노’s Mumbai-based correspondent