Sergiu Celibidache

As a general principle, I avoid fussiness in my choice of symphony recordings and aspire to omnivorism in my listening diet. Some regard Bernstein as a bowdlerizer; I find him charmingly energetic. And I am just as happy to listen to him conduct the New York Philharmonic in the finale of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony at his blistering pace as I am to cherish Yevgeny Mravinsky’s slow, austere rendition with the Leningrad Philharmonic. Vive la différence.

Yet I have one gigantic, overriding exception. Anytime I want to listen to a Bruckner symphony, which, for me, is usually two to three times a week, I turn first to any recording made of Sergiu Celibidache. My preference is contrarian in two ways. Bruckner’s symphonies are decidedly an acquired taste, and Celibidache has a certain infamy in classical music circles as well. When I type his name into the YouTube search bar, one of the first results I get is a takedown video titled “Sergiu Celibidache—Mad Perhaps, but A Genius? Not.”

Taken together, Bruckner and Celibidache are a forbidding combination. Celibidache’s unhurried tempos stretch the already slow-building structure of Bruckner’s symphonies to the breaking point. A typical Celibidache recording will be somewhere around fifteen minutes longer than the average recording by another conductor. Considering that Bruckner’s symphonies already log in at over an hour each, this pace tests the patience of many. For a certain sliver of the listening public, though, myself very much included, Celibidache’s performances of Bruckner’s symphonies—well, Symphonies Three through Nine, as he never deigned to conduct the first two or the composer-renounced “Zero”—have attained something of a cult status. The match is perfect.

Celibidache courted controversy throughout his career—most infamously in his insistence that a woman, hired by blind audition, could not adequately fulfill the duties of principal trombonist with the Munich Philharmonic, where he served as conductor for much of his career. Indeed, his own ascent in the conducting world began thanks to controversy, though not his own. Just after the end of World War II, he acted as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic while Wilhelm Furtwängler underwent denazification. When the job went to Herbert von Karajan instead of Celibidache after Furtwängler’s death, he renounced the orchestra, refusing to conduct it again for nearly forty years. For the next three decades, he wandered, mostly conducting radio symphony orchestras, until in 1979 he settled in Munich, by which time he had become equally an object of fascination and ridicule.

During these wandering years, Celibidache refined his conducting philosophy and technique into the mature approach which emerged in Munich. Celibidache’s musical philosophy, rooted in his study of Zen Buddhism, was premised on the idea that the moment of performance created transcendent experiences. Every quirky element of his style, from his painstaking rehearsal demands to his insistence on conducting every piece sans score, aimed at this central conceit: to make music an experience for all involved—himself and the musicians no less than the audience—that went beyond mundane realities. It was for this reason that he was famously reluctant to make records: most available Celibidache recordings come from live performances, and even these he often blanched at releasing to the public. For Celibidache, every variable, including environmental acoustics, played an integral role in the final musical result, and the special alchemy of a particular performance could only be reproduced palely—if at all—at home.

His Ahabian pursuit of transcendence also inspired his most infamous characteristic as a conductor: those glacial tempos. I readily admit that there are pieces and moments where the gambit fails him. His Munich recording of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis robs that piece of its necessary verve and bounce, and getting through it can be a slog. Even some moments that should work don’t. For example, the opening of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, the mysterious edges of which should bear up well under Celibidache’s pace, instead feel too stately, too little menacing, at his relaxed tempo. But when he hits, he hits. His Brahms First is perfect, from the booming timpani at the beginning to the gradual build of the final movement.

Just as a few droplets of water can draw deeper, subtler flavors from a complex Scotch, so too some pieces of music benefit from an opening up, a stretching out of the musical line that reveals subtleties of structure and pattern. This is true of Bruckner’s symphonies. With their mammoth running times, slowly developing melodies, and repetitive structures, they strike some as bloated, turgid messes. I once heard a musicologist, an expert in Beethoven, make a derisive quip about struggling to stay awake during a Bruckner performance. An uncharitable but expedient way to describe Bruckner to the uninitiated is to compare him to his successor Mahler: Bruckner is like Mahler but with all the excitement drained out, the spiky edges smoothed to rounded corners. For some, then, listening to Bruckner proves to be a test of endurance because his music forgoes the satisfying exclamation points that so many other symphonists make their stock-in-trade. Even the loud moments in Bruckner tend to arrive gradually—not the lightning strike but the roll of distant thunder. Bruckner traffics in indirectness, taking the long way around his melodic lines and his slow counter-rhythms.

At several points in my life, friends have tried to get me into Go, the ancient Chinese board game that has become a sort of hipster chess in America. Whenever they try to win me over, my friends tell me that the elegance of Go lies in its emphasis on creating space rather than in directly attacking the opponent; though it’s possible to capture enemy pieces, the real trick lies in carving out empty space on the board that your pieces control. While this testimony has never convinced me to stick with Go, I have come to think of it as a helpful explanation of Bruckner’s compositional style. Rather than directly attacking with hard-charging tempos or harsh sforzandos, Bruckner attempts to create vast, hollow pockets of empty space where his music can linger in the spaces in between sound. Just as cathedrals require plentiful empty space to allow for the proper play of light and sound, so too does Bruckner cultivate the spaces between notes and musical lines, to fill those empty places with meaning. That’s another way I think about his symphonies: as cathedrals of sound.

Such an image resonates, perhaps even too tidily, with Bruckner’s own life as a faithful (if troubled) Austrian Catholic of the late nineteenth century. He never married, despite numerous attempts to get himself engaged, and lived a simple, somewhat ascetic life until his death at age seventy-two. Taken from the outside, he had an unremarkable, even boring, existence, but into the empty spaces of his biography he poured music, both as an accomplished organist and as a composer, not merely of symphonies but of sacred choral music as well. His proficiency on the organ suggests at least one origin point for his compositional style, as the instrument lends itself to complicated polyphony and both requires and enables a certain musical patience. To this day Viennese concertgoers flock to hear recitals of Bruckner’s symphonies transcribed for the organ.

Bruckner’s exterior belied his experimental nature as a composer. In the Vienna of his day he was a decided musical progressive, indebted above all to Wagner. But whatever he owed to his predecessors, Bruckner’s style is unmistakably his own. His soaring melodies build slowly, only to disassemble and reconstruct themselves with slight differences; he delighted in the gradual widening of his musical gyre. While he loved a good moving bass line now and again, most often he filled the foundation on which his melodies rest less with counterpoint than with shimmering ornament: string tremolos by the boatload, plenty of sustained long tones in the brass section.

Celibidache’s quest for transcendence in the moment of performance meshes well with Bruckner’s compositional style because the symphonies rarely feel like they move forward in chronological time, instead creating a circularity that allows space for contemplation. The beginning of the Fourth Symphony, for instance, features one of Bruckner’s best-known melodies, a yearning tune for solo French horn over a layer of string tremolo. Regardless of performance, the melody has a spare beauty that emerges from its slow, simple alternation between perfect and augmented fifths. But at Celibidache’s slackened pace, the horn line reaches sublimity, a hunting call breaking forth from the dawn of time. It is precisely the space Celibidache’s tempo allows, the slowness of transition from note to note, that elevates the melody from the merely beautiful to the sublime. As an audience we strain to connect the dots between the notes, something we can only do through an act of concentrated attention.

The opening melody eventually gives way to a new theme that features one of Bruckner’s favorite rhythms: a duple followed by a triplet. In quicker performances, the first melody builds to the second theme in a way that feels propulsive, so that the second theme releases an explosion of energy, the triplet creating an illusion of acceleration. A speeding up of this sort necessarily makes the symphony feel like a progression from one idea to the next, but Celibidache’s restrained approach to this second melody builds a sense of continuity between the musical lines. When the brass chime in with their version of the triplet rhythm, he has them separate their notes with deliberation, so that we feel the space between notes once more and know that we are not so far removed from the opening melody as we might suppose. Through Celibidache’s unhastiness, we grasp more fully Bruckner’s art, his desire to hold on to what has come before in the symphony even as he moves into a new line, a simultaneity that creates a productive tension in the mind of the listener.

The end of Bruckner’s greatest symphony, the Eighth, provided Celibidache with perhaps the fullest test of his technique’s worthiness. At an hour and forty minutes—a full twenty minutes longer than other versions—
Celibidache’s Munich recordings of the symphony can be an endurance test for the uninitiated, but the method behind the madness becomes clear by the piece’s finale. Only a tempo as slow as Celibidache’s can bring out the unbearable tension in the final minutes of the work, as Bruckner builds and builds in volume and texture. While the strings play ascending lines that finally break out into a frenzied tremolo, the brass blow their ponderous melody at a gradually increasing volume, punctuated by occasional booms from the timpani (Watching the Munich Philharmonic play the symphony on video affords the added pleasure of seeing the timpanist Peter Sadlo strike away bombastically at the appropriate moments.)

Under the baton of, say, Karajan, the ending of the symphony sounds majestic and exhilarating, but it lacks almost entirely the ominous quality that Celibidache pulls forth from it. The strings are simply playing too fast in a quicker performance for the audience to fully appreciate the melancholy of their tune, or the intricacy of the pattern Bruckner gives them, not unlike a Bach fugue. At Celibidache’s speed, the anxious movement of the string line jostles against the slow menace of the brass chorale. And when Celibidache pauses before the final “restart,” about four minutes before the end, the silence stretches so long that you almost think he’s finished, only to have the orchestra return with a vengeance for one final push over the top. After this pause the orchestra shifts moods gradually, almost imperceptibly, from anxiety to triumph, but Celibidache still draws out each note so long that the audience senses how hard-won, how tenuous the transformation is.

But it’s not that Bruckner’s greatness shines only in moments of grandiosity. My personal favorite of his symphonies is his last, the Ninth, which he died before completing. What remains is a three-movement symphony, though at an hour and twenty minutes the work hardly feels diminished by its missing movement. In fact, through a happy accident, the final, slow movement feels like a fitting conclusion, not only to a symphony which Bruckner dedicated “to the beloved God” but to Bruckner’s work as a whole.

Like the ending of the Eighth, the final moments of the Ninth Symphony consist largely of slowly ascending and descending lines in the strings paired with long tones in the brass instruments. Here the emphasis switches, though, as the brass play the accompanying role to the strings, with a solo flute occasionally cutting through in a hopeful vein. The string line moves slowly, almost hesitantly, through its repetitions, as if the violins were wind-up toys running out of energy. The movement fades out on a quiet, sustained brass chord. After the Sturm und Drang of a lifetime of composition, Bruckner ends in a place of peaceful resignation, accepted into the arms of his beloved God. Celibidache, as usual, draws this closing moment out as long as possible, until it seems like the French horn players might burst. In doing so he creates one more moment of temporal tension: has the music finished, or does it linger?

Despite his protestations against the medium, Celibidache produced enough different recordings of Bruckner’s symphonies to make it possible to hear some of the evolution of his technique over time and to appreciate the scope of his achievement. For myself, I love the filmed recordings (available to watch in their grainy glory on YouTube) of the Munich Philharmonic’s performances of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in Tokyo in October 1990. There Celibidache sits, half hunched-over musical gremlin, half mafioso with his impeccably slicked-back white mane of hair. He’s not a flashy conductor—he moves with real economy, virtually immobile from the waist down—but he clearly acts with complete concentration and investment, occasionally letting slip a grunt in moments of special intensity. Working entirely from his own head, goading the orchestra along until it aligns with that internal vision, Celibidache opens up Bruckner for everyone in Suntory Hall, achieving those moments of transcendence he so longed for. At the end of both performances he slumps over, as if obliterated in the effort.