“I am a very good-natured person at heart, I think. Am I?” Lorin Maazel, the 79-year-old chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, turns to his teenage son, Orson, who looks back in bashful silence.

Most critics would be less retiring; their reaction would be a resounding “no”. Despite his six-year tenure at the helm of America's most famous orchestra, despite his formidable career, Maazel has had an almost comically bad relationship with the critical establishment.

For two decades, he has been the conductor that the critics have loved to hate, a target of some of the most vitriolic and entertaining name-calling in recent musical history. “His efficient concerts,” read one review, “have the heart and soul of a sausage machine.” Maazel is a “vulgarian”, “imperious”, “greedy”, a “latter-day Napoleon”, “a little man with a big ego”, the “widely detested conductor of the New York Philharmonic”. Critics have had a dig at his appearance, his “curling upper lip” and even, he tells me, his walk.

“I remember one review said: ‘You could see by the way Mr Maazel walks to the podium what an arrogant, absolutely obnoxious human he is.' I was just walking to the podium.”

We are sat in his Lincoln Centre studio in New York. Maazel is sprawled in a chair, wearing the whitest jacket I have seen, twiddling with his shades, all in all looking pretty flash and relaxed and very un-Napoleonic. We discuss his forthcoming two-day visit to the Proms with the New York Philharmonic. The last time he visited London in 2005, it was to conduct the premiere of his opera, 1984, at Covent Garden. It received a critical mauling that, if possible, puts all his previous ones in the shade. Did that upset him? “Oh, I was thrilled!” he says. “They succeeded in turning this opera into the subject of the day. And some of these quotes were so wonderfully vicious, they are going straight into my autobiography. I'm going to have a whole chapter on them.”

His talk could sound a little defensive (can bad press really be that “thrilling”?) if it wasn't for the reality of box office receipts. The run at Covent Garden sold out, La Scala made a profit and a DVD is selling well.

These are the strange ups and downs of a business that Maazel has known since he was knee-high, when his father believed that Lorin was a reincarnation of Mozart. A pretty reasonable assumption considering his conducting debut was at 8, Leopold Stokowski proclaimed him “the prodigy of the century” at 9 and, at 11, Arturo Toscanini invited him to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra. At 16 the precocious boy Mozart became a man and it all came to an end - “Who wants to see a 16-year- old conduct?” - so he enrolled at a night school and paid his way as a violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

“This was fantastic for me,” he says. “When I came back to the profession the second time around all that vanity, all that belief in fame and that thrill at being known is no longer there. So I never became arrogant or conceited.”

According to many, however, a conceited, imperious maestro is exactly what he became: one who rampaged through orchestras, demanding greater and greater fees with increasingly desultory results. For others, however, his numerous early firsts (he was the first American to conduct at Bayreuth; the first American to head the Deutsche Oper) and career successes could be no fluke. Maazel was a genius, whose exacting style, awesome technique and peerless musicianship had rightly lifted him into an elite set of super-successful conductors.

Either way, he had difficult times. In 1982 he left the Cleveland Symph-ony Orchestra on such bad terms that he never went back - “They just do not want to see his face there,” one observer explained.

According to Maazel, however, Cleveland was a special case. “My predecessor, George Szell, was an autocrat, who treated the players like second-class citizens. They came out of that relationship hating all conductors, not just me,” he explains. “It took them about five years to work out all their Szell aggressions on Maazel.”

His torrid time there did nothing to stop his inexorable rise, however. He reached his peak in 1989, when he stood poised to take over at the Berlin Philharmonic after the death of Herbert von Karajan.

When it was announced that Claudio Abbado had beaten him to the top job, Maazel cancelled his future engagements with the orchestra and wrote a furious letter of complaint to every member of the orchestra.

In the 1990s, revelations emerged about his conducting fees, which some claimed were the first to break through the $1 million mark. In raising the bar so dramatically, he was accused of bankrupting the industry and of money-grubbing. Maazel is unrepentant. “In one concert I collected enough money to have 150,000 kids vaccinated against smallpox. What have those who complain about how much money I make done for people, where are their contributions to society?”

Earlier this year controversy hit yet again when Maazel visited North Korea with the New York Philharmonic. Appropriate? Maazel is adamant it was. “I'm very happy we did it. And, indeed, the information from very top- flight American negotiators is that, very much because of this concert, we may have a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough in the next 18 months.”

And, with only one year to go with the New York orchestra, Maazel has plans to whip up more storms. Next year, he will defy the authentic performance brigade with his own defiantly modern performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos - “Authenticity is such a scam.” And peacekeeping could also return, in the form of a trip to Iran - “If there is a belief that it could make a positive contribution, I'd be happy to go.”

But he is running out of time. In 2009, after seven tough but happy years, he hands over to Alan Gilbert. Is he looking forward to it? “They are the first orchestra I have really and truly fallen in love with. So I shall leave them with some regret. But I won't miss the workload - no way.”

His tenure with the New York Philharmonic has become a crowning achievement to his career. Even so, next year's departure couldn't come a moment too soon. “I set seven years as being the absolute limit. One, I like the number. Two, I'm not getting any younger. Three, Toscanini stayed here exactly seven years,” he grins broadly. “And I like to quit while I'm ahead.”

Lorin Maazel conducts the New York Philharmonic at the Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (www.bbc. co.uk/proms 0845 4015040), on Thur and Fri

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