RAFAEL KUBELÍK

16 ENGLISH
Working in London meant that he had to devote his attentions to operatic
repertoire – albeit temporarily. In 1954 he conducted an extremely successful
new performance of Janáček’s Katja Kabanova at the Sadler’s Wells Opera,
resulting in him being appointed music director at Covent Garden Opera in
1955; he conducted the first London performances of Janáček’s Jenufa (1956)
and Berlioz’ Les Troyens (1957) at Covent Garden – it was also the very first time
that both parts of the powerful piece were performed during one evening. The
fact that operas were sung in English under his direction did not only make him
friends among his contemporaries – he wanted to build up a kind of national
English ensemble at the very highest level – and when Sir Thomas Beecham
criticised him in public for these plans, Kubelík backed down, deeply hurt.
There then followed years of Kubelík fulfilling his international commitments,
for example with the Vienna Philharmonic he had admired since his youth,
and the Israel Philharmonic – these were the years that formed the “Kubelík
myth” and he started being treated like a kind of second Furtwängler. This was
helped by a certain physical similarity. He was tall, body bowed slightly forward
with similar facial structure, with a similar sense of mission, impetuosity and
emotional depth to his interpretations. All this was coupled with his deliberately
shrouding baton technique, which was not aimed at creating metronomic
precision but rather expressed a blend of mental perception and musical
emotion (incidentally, Furtwängler also worked as a composer). Kubelík was
both appreciated and respected by the orchestra musicians he worked with.
On the one hand, he was helped by his phenomenal memory, so that the saying
was soon doing the rounds: Kubelík was one of the few conductors who had
the score in their heads, and not the other way round. On the other hand, he
was never loud and never tried to pick on his musicians but once again, quite
the democrat, tried to motivate all those involved in a production through
engagement, enthusiasm and artistically convincing solutions.
In 1961 Kubelík suffered a great personal loss when his wife died following a
car accident – he dedicated his second requiem to her memory: Requiem pro
memoria uxoris. November of the same year heralded in a period of true artistic
fulfillment when he succeeded Eugen Jochum as principal conductor of the
Bayerische Rudfunk’s symphony orchestra in Munich. This association was
extremely fortunate and proved to be long lasting – Kubelík and the orchestra
first parted company in 1983. He helped the orchestra to a perfection that was
by no means cold perfection for its own sake (”How can you think that perfection
just means accuracy? Are there not more interesting kinds of perfection than
precision?”) but rather served structure and humanistic expression. Every
once in a while his high ethic standards and temperament made him into
an uncomfortable contemporary however. In Munich in 1972, when the CSU
party (Christian Social Union) won a landslide election victory and there were
signs that new impending broadcasting laws were equal to enforced political
conformity, Kubelík protested loudly in public and threatened to resign if the
Bayerische Rundfunk really did become the “CSU’s radio wavelength”.