Sergiu Celibidache, 1966. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the history of the classical record there is a hole in the shape of a man. Sergiu Celibidache, a Romanian, one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century, spent half his career refusing what for all his colleagues was the goal: the recording studio. His authorised discography, in his lifetime, is almost empty, and the boxed sets that bear his name today came out after his death, by decision of the family, from radio tapes and live recordings.
It was not a pose. It was a philosophy, built over the years and argued with ferocity. Celibidache, who taught university courses in the phenomenology of music, held that music is not an object but an experience: it happens in a place, with that acoustic, in front of those people, once only. The record freezes one of the infinite possible versions and passes it off as the thing itself: asked why he did not record, he replied, according to the quip universally attributed to him, that listening to a record is like kissing the photograph of a beautiful woman. One can smile, but behind it lies a serious idea: the same one by which his tempos, in the late years in Munich, widened to durations the record executives considered commercially insane. In the hall, with that control of sound, they worked: the right tempo, he said, depends on the acoustic, and no record has an acoustic.
His biography also contains one of the great sliding-doors moments of twentieth-century music. In 1945, at twenty-eight, he found himself at the head of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the most famous orchestra in the world, in a Berlin of rubble, while Furtwängler awaited denazification. He kept it for seven years. When in 1954 it came to choosing the permanent successor, the orchestra preferred Herbert von Karajan, the man who would make of the record an empire of hundreds of titles. The two names have remained ever since the opposite poles of the profession: recording as monument, performance as unrepeatable event.
Who is right, each of us decides with our own ears. But the final paradox deserves to be savoured: today we know Celibidache almost only through the records he did not want, and those records, born as radio documents and not as products, often sound more alive than the official recordings of his rivals. Since Caruso sang into the gramophone, recorded music has chased the event; the man who refused to chase it ended up proving, despite himself, how much the original was worth.