RAFAEL KUBELÍK

14 ENGLISH
had a close relationship with his father but never made a big thing of the fact
that his father was a world famous musician – and never relied on his famous
name opening doors for him. During later years, music lovers would stumble
across the kindredship between Jan and Rafael Kubelík by accident. At the most,
in view of his immense examination programme, it could be interpreted that
Kubelík made great demands on himself due to his parentage: he performed a
violin concerto by Paganini, composed a fantasia for violin and orchestra and
conducted a Dvorák symphony.
He gave his debut as a conductor at the age of nineteen with the Czech
Philharmonic – even before he had completed his studies; the programme
included Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, alongside Kubelík’s Fantasia No. 2 for
violin and orchestra, played by his father. Between 1936 and 1939 Kubelík kept
returning to conduct the Czech Philharmonic as a staff guest conductor and in
1937, when the principal conductor Václav Talich was taken ill, it was Kubelík
who took the orchestra on a concert tour of Great Britain and Belgium; the
twenty concerts were such a resounding success that the tour was repeated in
the following year. In 1939 he conducted the orchestra during ten legendary
concert evenings, in which his father – based on the role model of Rubinstein’s
“Historical Concerts” – performed thirty violin concertos, tracing the history of
this genre from the late Italian baroque period to the modern age.
At this point in time Kubelík had already taken up the position of music director
at the opera house in Brno (earlier Brünn), a position he held from 1939 until
the house was closed by the Nazis in 1941. One of the projects that caused a
sensation during this period was the production of one his favourite works:
Hector Berlioz’ opera Les Troyens. In memory of his father, who had died in 1940,
he wrote his first major choral symphonic work – Requiem pro memoria patris.
One year later he returned once more to the Czech Philharmonic in Prague
– this time as principal conductor. However, unlike Talich, who had rarely set
out on tours with the orchestra, Kubelík toured through England, France and
Switzerland – especially after his home country had been liberated in 1945 (at
the end of the war he had conducted an open air rendition of Smetana’s My
Fatherland in Prague) – and gained valuable contacts in the process. Due to the
fact that he had refused to collaborate with the Germans during occupation,
Kubelík was actively involved in the cultural redevelopment of Czechoslovakia
and was given a post with the Czech Philharmonic. He strengthened the
orchestra, mainly taking on young musicians, and considered it to be one of
his most important duties towards Russian, American and French music and
the Jewish composers banned during the war – to ‘make amends, so that true
values are once again recognised in Prague.‘
This was also a productive period for the composer Kubelík: he wrote several
string quartets and operas, in addition to a symphony. However, political
freedom was not to last long – the Communists came to power in 1948 – but