Rafael Kubelik

Rafael Kubelik ranks among the most lastingly admired conductors to emerge from Eastern Europe in the years after World War II. He enjoyed the rare satisfaction of surviving the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia that had forced him into exile and of returning to his native country as a revered figure toward the close of his life. Throughout his professional life he earned widespread audience affection and critical respect on both sides of the Atlantic, above all for his interpretations of late-Romantic and twentieth-century scores.

Born the son of the violinist Jan Kubelik (1880-1940), Rafael Kubelik entered the Prague Conservatory intending to pursue composition. At nineteen he conducted the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time; three years later, in 1939, he was appointed Music Director of the National Opera in Brno. He assumed leadership of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra itself in 1941 and remained in that post until 1948. When a communist regime seized power that year, Kubelik departed Czechoslovakia and lived abroad for the next four decades.

In 1950 he took the podium of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during one of its most unsettled periods. The ensemble, established in 1891 by Theodore Thomas and led by him until 1905, had been guided thereafter by Frederick Stock until Stock’s death in 1942. Three music directors followed in rapid succession; Wilhelm Furtwängler accepted the post but withdrew before beginning it amid controversy over his wartime record.

Kubelik’s three-year tenure proved difficult. A conductor who favored persuasion over authoritarian command, he struggled to impose discipline on the players. At thirty-six his musical outlook had been formed in the early decades of the twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth, and his programs featured far more contemporary music than Chicago audiences and reviewers then preferred. The mismatch proved irreconcilable, and he relinquished the post after three seasons; Fritz Reiner succeeded him.

His Chicago years nevertheless coincided with the orchestra’s first extensive series of long-playing recordings for Mercury. Among the most admired of the two dozen discs he made there were a gripping account of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and several distinguished performances of Smetana’s My Fatherland. From 1955 to 1958 Kubelik served as Music Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he led the British premieres of Janáček’s Jenůfa and Berlioz’s Les Troyens. Between 1961 and 1979 he headed the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, recording extensively for Deutsche Grammophon; during the 1973-74 season he also became principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. He returned frequently as a guest in Chicago and, in 1973, settled in Switzerland and acquired Swiss citizenship.

Audiences prized Kubelik for the luminous orchestral colors he elicited, especially in the late-Romantic and post-Romantic repertory that formed the core of his reputation. That repertory embraced much Russian music of the late nineteenth century as well as the nationalist works of his compatriots Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Bedřich Smetana. He recorded the latter composer’s Má Vlast at least four times on four different labels, spanning the monaural era to the digital age; the final version captured a live performance in Prague in 1990 celebrating the end of communist rule and was later issued by Supraphon. He appeared as guest conductor with nearly every major orchestra and made numerous recordings in Britain, the United States, and Germany.

After the collapse of the communist regime Kubelik, whose health had been fragile for some time, returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in forty years, hoping to devote himself once more to composition. He had already written five operas, several symphonies, concertante pieces, vocal works, and chamber music, yet he remained known primarily as a conductor. He died in Lucerne in 1996 following a prolonged illness.

Kubelik belonged to the last generation of conductors whose training and early careers predated World War II—Sir Georg Solti being the only active survivor of that cohort at the time—and he embodied a robust post-Romantic style well suited to both concert hall and recording studio. The large number of his recordings still available, distributed across both historical and modern sections of record shops and including four distinct versions of Má Vlast, attests to the lasting appeal and authority of his performances. In Czech music he had few peers, yet his cycles of Beethoven and Mahler also remained in circulation for many years. Although relatively few of his opera performances were captured on disc, those that exist continue to be held in high regard, particularly his Rigoletto.