Carlo
Maria Giulini (1914 – 2005)
Carlo
Maria Giulini was an aristocrat among
conductors, a man who might just as
easily have chosen a religious vocation
rather than a musical one. Perhaps the
most spiritual of all conductors, his
music often seemed borne of a deeper
personal awareness than that of his
contemporaries. This did not always
work, in either the recording studio
or the concert hall, but a Giulini performance
was always an event. His death, just
a month after his 91st birthday,
closes a chapter in Italian music that
stretched throughout the twentieth century
and juxtaposed a school of conducting
that contrasted with its central European,
Germanic antithesis. From Toscanini,
through to Cantelli and de Sabata and
finally Giulini, Italian conducting
had a unique aesthetic to which each
of these defining musical figures made
a significant, and lasting, contribution.
Giulini was almost alone amongst this
Italianate quartet in that his style
of conducting owed something to that
Germanic tradition: the dynamism and
purity of his sound recalled Toscanini,
but the later spaciousness and more
Romantic edge to his performances in
Berlin and Vienna nodded instinctively
towards the tradition of Furtwängler.
Unlike some of his
great predecessors (Wand, Toscanini,
Stokowski and most notably Monteux )
Carlo Maria Giulini did not have an
Indian Summer of recordings to strengthen
his legacy. He all but stopped conducting
concerts at the end of the 1980s, having
already abandoned opera for a second
time in 1985. Yet, despite a long and
fruitful career that spanned over half
a century his repertoire was perhaps
the smallest of any of the great conductors.
Apart from Bruckner’s second symphony
(which he recorded with the Wiener Symphoniker
in 1974, and remains unique because
it is one of the only recorded performances
to follow the Nowak edition in its entirety)
he concentrated in the latter stages
of his career on Bruckner’s final three
symphonies, this time with the Wiener
Philharmoniker. They are often beautifully
paced performances, not overly monumental
in conception, and with an astute sense
of dynamics to them. Of Mahler’s symphonies,
he only conducted the First, Fourth
and Ninth symphonies, in recordings
which are not really part of any distinct
Mahlerian tradition. His recording of
Das Lied von der Erde, on the
other hand, is one of the very greatest
ever made. In Tchaikovsky he made outstanding
recordings with the Philharmonia of
the "Little Russian" (1956) and the
Sixth (1959); Walter Legge asked Giulini
to conduct the Fifth, but he initially
refused. Believing in Legge’s incorruptible
musical judgment, however, Giulini was
eventually persuaded to undertake a
recording of the work. After fifteen
minutes he put down his baton and refused
to go on. Giulini was vindicated in
his view that he had no sympathy for
the work; it was a typically musical
gesture from a conductor who knew what
his musical limitations were. With Dvorak’s
Ninth, a work Giulini had not conducted
in the concert hall before he made his
celebrated recording of the symphony
in 1961, Legge’s instincts proved correct.
When Legge first hired
Giulini those limitations were gaping:
Giulini came to both Mozart and Beethoven
quite late in his career, principally
because he would only tackle a score
once he had absorbed every detail. Haydn
was a paradise the Italian had yet to
embrace. He would not even begin to
tackle Bach until the 1960s. Operatically,
he seemed to shy away from Verdi, except
for the Requiem and Falstaff
(which, ironically, became the opera
with which Giulini broke his near fifteen
year absence from the opera pit), and
Puccini was a composer who left the
conductor distanced. The dividends were
often handsomely rewarded, however:
his Don Giovanni, with the Philharmonia
Orchestra, is epic, the detail and clarity
unsurpassed. His Verdi, from La Traviata
in 1955 with Callas, a performance phrased
with such naturalness and intelligence,
through to an unusually powerful, though
often persuasive live Rigoletto
with a young Pavarotti, and Falstaff,
languidly, and beautifully conducted
in 1982, all testify to an opera conductor
of unusual sensitivity and gifts. Yet,
paradoxically, those final two Verdi
operas (Rigoletto and Falstaff)
reveal opposing Giulini traits: the
former is almost wilful in its abuses
of Verdian manners and direction; the
latter, is amongst the closest recordings
to exist which pertain to Verdi’s own
detailed markings. Giulini may well
have been the most gifted Italian conductor
of Italian opera in the twentieth century,
but given the clarity of time it is
arguable that the greatest conductor
of Italian opera was an Austrian, Herbert
von Karajan.
Where Giulini remained
unsurpassed was in his recordings of
Verdi’s Requiem. Opening every
subscription season with the Philharmonia
Orchestra for some years with performances
of the work, they became legendary events.
Until recently, his magnificent studio
recording with an almost impossibly
distinguished line-up of soloists, seemed
unassailable. But over the past couple
of years, a number of BBC performances
have been issued which reveal even greater
authority and distinction. They remain
probably his greatest recorded legacy,
amongst the most vital performances
to have ever been committed to disc.
Giulini the man was
a beguiling figure. He once told a member
of the Philharmonia that he was not
a saint (a comment provoked by persistent
critical comments that his performances
of the Requiem were ‘Heavenly’);
the response from the player was that
Giulini was the nearest to a saint he
had ever met. This kind of affection
was universal. It was frequently said
that Giulini had no enemies and perhaps
because he had trained as a viola player
(and played under conductors such as
Strauss, Toscanini, Klemperer and Walter)
his empathy with orchestral players
was almost unanimously positive and
instructive. If he had one problem as
a conductor it was that his downbeat
was almost unrecognizable; and yet,
orchestras followed him preternaturally.
His gentleness – almost meekness – quite
probably hid a demanding musical interior,
yet he was not prone to outrages or
fiery podium antics as some of his contemporaries
were. In return, orchestras gave their
best to him. A notable exception to
this was a short recording period with
the London Symphony Orchestra (the performance
being Beethoven’s Ninth) where he was
treated so badly by the players that
he refused to work with the orchestra
ever again (an LSO syndrome at that
time, which also saw conductors such
as Jochum and Rattle also refusing to
work with the orchestra). And in an
age when conductors are paid massive
fees, for often second-rate performances,
Giulini was almost embarrassed to accept
payment. For him, music was something
that he loved making; it was up to his
astute wife to ensure that Giulini received
what he deserved, especially in Los
Angeles, which he left only when his
wife fell ill.
The simplicity of his
life, an almost cloistered one, which
involved extended breaks during his
musical year to indulge in his passions
of walking, reading and travel, recalls
that of another great conductor, Carlos
Kleiber. Musically, they have much in
common: they shared a limited repertoire,
and an almost religious devotion to
music making. They also shared a reluctance
to make music. But there the similarity
ends. Kleiber was such a naturally gifted
conductor that his rise to greatness
was inevitable. With Giulini it was
entirely different. He had to be coaxed
into making great music, and it no longer
seems coincidental that his most fruitful
period was with Walter Legge and the
Philharmonia. Yet, even that relationship
was founded on an event which may well
have seen Giulini sidelined for a much
longer period of time. The death of
Cantelli in 1956 left Legge with no
Italian conductor to undertake that
section of the repertoire he wanted
recorded; Giulini filled the gap.
Giulini’s death closes
a chapter in Italian conducting (one,
thankfully, still being written under
the batons of Claudio Abbado, Riccardo
Muti and Riccardo Chailly). His legacy,
however, will probably not be as extensive
as with some other conductors who have
died in recent years. His performances
lacked the insight of a Sinopoli, they
missed the sheer electricity and fire
of a Kleiber. He leaves behind no distinctive
‘Giulini style’. Yet, listen to any
of the great records he made in the
late 1950s and the 1960s, or even his
last Bruckner performances, and what
shines through is a heartfelt, almost
beatific, quality for the music he is
conducting. He was above all a supreme
communicator and that alone will ensure
that his recordings never become redundant.
Marc Bridle
