Rafael Kubelík

The life and career of Czech-born conductor Rafael Kubelík traces the entire history of 20th-century Europe, from his birth at the tail-end of the Austro-Hungarian empire to his triumphant return, after decades of exile, to newly liberated Prague in 1990. A musical ambassador for the work of his compatriots Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček, he was also in the vanguard of champions of Mahler and Bruckner, and of Berlioz’s epic drama Les Troyens, of which he gave a landmark fully staged and essentially complete performance at Covent Garden in 1957. Born in Bohemia mere weeks before the outbreak of war in 1914, the son of violinist Jan Kubelík, he grew up surrounded by music, studying violin with his father before entering the Prague Conservatory to study piano, violin, composition and conducting. In 1939, Kubelík was appointed Music Director of Brno Opera, where he first presented Berlioz’s opera in its truncated version, and after the company was closed by the country’s Nazi occupiers, became Principal Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, an orchestra he had first conducted when he was still under 20. Open resistance to the occupation ultimately led him into hiding, but he returned to Prague to conduct the first post-war concert in 1945, and was among the founders of the Prague Spring Festival the following year. After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, he and his wife defected, and he did not return to his homeland for more than 40 years. Kubelík’s career in the 1950s took him from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Covent Garden, where he conducted the first UK performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa, but his most stable period was his 18-year tenure as Music Director of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in Munich from 1961 to 1979. Much of his vast legacy of recordings dates from this time, including a complete Mahler cycle with the orchestra, as well as benchmark versions of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal. Having become a Swiss citizen in 1967, he started to appear regularly at the Lucerne Festival, and had a brief spell as Music Director of the Met, where he again introduced Les Troyens. After retiring from conducting in the mid-1980s, Kubelík returned to the podium in the euphoric months that followed the “Velvet Revolution”. Václav Havel had persuaded him to open the 1990 Prague Spring Festival with the Czech Philharmonic, and he conducted a triumphal performance of Smetana’s Má vlast – “My Homeland”. A film of this historic event movingly conveys all the energy, musicality, and warmth of a man “known both for his exactingly meticulous rehearsals and for a fatherly generosity that enabled him to inspire extraordinary performances from each and every player” (Die Zeit). Kubelík died in Lucerne in 1996, at the age of 82.