THE SILENT CONDUCTOR
NORDLINGER, JAY
THE SILENT CONDUCTOR Celibidache on Record at Last By Jay Nordlinger If music has a mystery man, it must be Sergiu Celibidache, the late Romanian conductor who refused to record, forsook...
...And still, the man is a mystery—a maddening, awe-inspiring eccentric...
...He remained in that post until 1952, when Furtwängler was permitted to return...
...But now the Zen master will cast his spells on disc, for an eternity that he both feared and abhorred...
...By 1945, he was conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, replacing Furtwäng-ler, who was subject to denazification...
...The sound on these pirates is abysmal, but they are useful documents nonetheless—canned peas that suffice in the absence of fresh ones...
...He was difficult to book as a guest conductor, demanding as he did at least six rehearsals (a tremendous strain on an orchestra's purse) and requiring all players to conform to his idea of truth, which he did not view as subjective...
...In the Munich set, Celi is on a rarefied plane, flouting convention, obeying what he regards as the iron logic of the score on his stand...
...Neither did Celi get around much...
...The first set (pirated from live broadcasts) offers a middle-aged Celibidache with shoddy provincial orchestras...
...Does one genuinely experience Celibidache in these recordings...
...Celi suffocates Beethoven's Fifth, for instance, rendering it too carefully, as though he has thought and rehearsed the piece to death...
...Occasionally, a pirate Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The Tchaikovsky Sixth, on the other hand, is magisterial...
...Tempos, for example, were determined by the acoustics of a hall, for "time is space"—a concept that no recording can honor...
...Even the Schubert B-minor Symphony, often a tired warhorse, is thrilling...
...If Celi worried that recordings would puncture his aura, he need not have: He remains inscrutable...
...The Mozart C-minor Mass is spiritually and intellectually superb...
...He belongs with the first rank of conductors—Wilhelm Furtwän-gler, John Barbirolli, George Szell— yet he is relatively unknown, even to the music-appreciating public...
...Soon after, Celibidache journeyed to the Far East, where he became a devoted Buddhist ("I am a practical Zen man," he would later say...
...Celibidache did the oppo-site—and neither man served the public especially well, each hunkered down in his particular absolutism...
...Strauss's Death and Transfiguration is a model of control—one, long, inexorable arc...
...Some orchestras would hire him anyway, suffering the financial loss (despite increased ticket prices...
...Ultimately, Celibidache must answer to posterity, and he must do so in the traditional way—through recordings, misleading as they can be...
...Never has the closing movement—a C-major sunbath— been so joyless...
...Or very few of them...
...The Italian recordings reveal a deeply individualistic conductor, prone to jarring heresy but usually persuasive...
...The gramophone," he complained, "is a dead thing," and music, "like peas, should not be canned: It loses its flavor, its scent, its life...
...Now, however, two years after the conductor's death at the age of eighty-four, a plethora of recordings has hit the market, giving Celi-bidache a wider audience than he ever allowed himself in a half-century as a major musical figure...
...But music had seized his brain...
...Scholars and musicians flocked to his (infrequent) concerts, hoping to learn the secrets of this strange visionary...
...The pianist Glenn Gould, Celibidache's fellow dissenter, withdrew entirely from concert life and confined himself to the recording studio...
...Celibidache was born in 1912...
...THE SILENT CONDUCTOR Celibidache on Record at Last By Jay Nordlinger If music has a mystery man, it must be Sergiu Celibidache, the late Romanian conductor who refused to record, forsook celebrity, and held legions of admirers in his spell...
...Celibidache wrote dense tracts on the unrecordable "epiphenome-na" of music, but for the layman he kept it simple: Listening to a recording was like "going to bed with a picture of Brigitte Bardot...
...Musicians—exhausted but amazed—would practice through their breaks...
...Thus is Celibidache forced from the realm of myth to be judged...
...After graduation from a Moldavian music academy, he went to Berlin to study mathematics and philosophy...
...But always he was his own man, having something important—even if it struck many as wrong—to say...
...The second set gives us Celi with his final orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, in concerts captured on archival tape...
...Celibidache in old age was shockingly uneven: a self-indulgent kook on one night, a prophet the next...
...but, of course, one had no records...
...And he decided that he would never again record...
...One would hear tales of what "Celi" had done—"Oh, you should have been there...
...Not as one did in the hall, where Celi was mesmeric, but recordings are adequate souvenirs—far better than photos of sex kittens...
...But one man's "autumnal glow" is another man's ponderousness...
...When he found his way back to Europe, he assumed a series of second-rate—even third-rate—positions, often with radio orchestras...
...Every performance—no matter of what: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Debussy— is laden with gravity, a ceremony presided over by a high priest...
...We now have twelve discs distributed by Fonit Cetra, an arm of Italian radio, and ten more printed by EMI, with the controversial blessing of the conductor's family...
...recording became available, and it was treated as a forbidden text, marveled at and puzzled over...
...Music arises out of the moment," Celi liked to say, "and this moment cannot be fixed or repeated...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
