Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996) on his Philosophy of Music

 

This extraordinary Romanian-born conductor studied in Romania and later in Paris and Berlin, excelling in various disciplines (math, philosophy, piano, composition and conducting). At the age of 33, Sergiu was already conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra til 1952. After he worked with radio orchestras in Stockholm, Stuttgart and Paris. From 1973-75 he was the primary permanent guest conductor of the French Orchestre National and in 1979 he became the director of the Munich Philharmonic, which he made one of the best in the world. Celi was also considered to be an outstanding maestro giving master courses on orchestral conducting in Siena (Accademia Musicale Chigiana), Germany (Mainz University) and at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, PA. He had many great students and among them were Regino Sáinz de la Maza, D. Carbajal, D. Barenboim, etc.

He always preferred the immediacy and human perception of a live performance rather than recordings, and felt that recordings obstructed the listener's involvement or "transcendant experience" with the music and gave a distorted representation of the live performance. However, EMI Classics and Deutsche Grammophon released posthumously broadcast performances. The repertoire is diverse spanning from the

Renaissance (Josquin des Pres) all the way to the 20th century (Stravinsky, Bartok, etc.) At the same time he appears to interpret more frequently Romantic (Beethoven, Bruckner, etc.) and post-Romantic composers (Debussy, Ravel, etc).