Carlo Maria Giulini

Carlo Maria Giulini stood among the foremost conductors of the twentieth century, admired for the penetrating yet understated manner in which he approached both symphonic and operatic literature. Beyond his homeland, he maintained extended professional ties in Britain and the United States.

Born May 9, 1914, in the southeastern Italian town of Barletta, Giulini moved with his family to Bolzano while still a child. At that time the northern city formed part of the Austrian Empire; after World War I it passed back to Italy, although German remained the dominant language for decades. Growing up amid these surroundings, Giulini absorbed a steady diet of German and Austrian music. He started violin instruction at five and, at sixteen, entered Rome’s Conservatorio Santa Cecilia to study viola and conducting. Shortly afterward he secured a position in the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, then called the Orchestra dell’Augusteo. Two years later he captured first prize in a conducting contest, yet military service soon interrupted every aspect of his career. Drafted into the Italian army, the pacifist Giulini—who opposed Benito Mussolini—served at the Croatian front without discharging his weapon. Later he hid for nine months in a tunnel beneath his wife’s uncle’s house while wanted posters bearing his photograph appeared throughout Rome. He resurfaced only after Allied forces liberated the capital in June 1944. Within days he led the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98.

Giulini subsequently directed the RAI Orchestra in Rome and, from 1946 to 1954, the Milan Radio Orchestra. He also mounted productions at the opera house in Bergamo, where he presented not only standard Italian works but also Baroque and Classical pieces then rarely staged. Arturo Toscanini took notice and recommended him to La Scala, where Giulini served as assistant conductor beginning in 1952 and became principal conductor the next year. During his five-year tenure he brought Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea to the house for the first time and collaborated with the young directors Franco Zeffirelli and Luchino Visconti. Outraged by an audience that jeered Maria Callas, Giulini left La Scala; although he later encountered administrative friction at English opera companies, his 1955 account of Verdi’s Don Carlos in Visconti’s production drew widespread praise. Operatic engagements nevertheless grew infrequent through the 1950s and 1960s. His first recording, a concert performance of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro with the Philharmonia Orchestra, appeared in 1959.

Thereafter Giulini concentrated increasingly on orchestral work. He made his American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1955, initiating a durable association that led to his appointment as principal guest conductor in 1969 and, from the late 1970s, a series of Deutsche Grammophon recordings. In 1978 he succeeded Zubin Mehta as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which he also recorded extensively before relinquishing the post in 1984; guest appearances with that ensemble and many others continued for years. His repertory remained focused rather than broad, each new score admitted only after exhaustive preparation. Beethoven to Bruckner constituted the core of his German Romantic programming. In his final decades Giulini recorded prolifically; fifteen releases under his name appeared in 2005, the year he died in Brescia on June 14. Reissues continued to surface afterward, and by the early 2020s his discography exceeded three hundred entries.