A Conductor Who Isn’t There

If you believe Sergiu Celibidache, he won’t be at the podium of the Munich Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center at 8 on Friday and Saturday nights.

He won’t be at the podium again at 7 p.m. Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall. As a matter of perception, he won’t even be making his first North American tour, which some people think begins in Southern California this weekend.

“I have to be there in order to unify all the elements,” Celibidache said in a rare public appearance here this week. “I have to be there, but I’m not there. I’m at the beginning, and I’m also at the end. So where am I?

“I am there, because I am not there.”

For most celebrated conductors, touring is a rather ordinary activity. But there is nothing ordinary about Sergiu Celibidache.

The 76-year-old Romanian-born conductor remains a legend. Once Herbert von Karajan’s leading rival for the Berlin Philharmonic post, Celibidache now conducts five dozen concerts a year with the Munich Philharmonic, the orchestra he has headed for the past decade.

He demands 17 rehearsals for every program he conducts (other conductors manage with three to five), and he insists that those rehearsals be open to the public. He spends months every year secluded in a monastery in India. He is a philosopher who teaches an annual course on the phenomenology of music. His exotic long hair and elegant hands are nearly as famous today as Leopold Stokowski’s were, half a century ago.

Much of Celibidache’s reputation, however, exists on hearsay. He refuses to make recordings because, as he once put it, “you cannot press the sublime mystique of music into something that resembles a pancake.” (There has, however, long been a lively business in pirated Celibidache recordings.) He has appeared only once in the United States, five years ago, when he conducted the orchestra of the Curtis Institute in a Carnegie Hall benefit.

But that hearsay is extraordinary: The sheaf of press quotes handed out by the conductor’s management all concentrate on the revelatory, mystical experience he makes of music, an experience unlike that of any other conductor.

Refusing interviews and originally agreeing only to answer written questions with written replies, Celibidache was finally cajoled into holding a single press conference here Tuesday for his tour.

Seated at the head of a long table in the German Consulate, the conductor appeared hardly the ascetic or recluse he is reputed to be. Elegantly tailored in a blue suit and wearing a large, clangorous gold bracelet, Celibidache looked the role of any prosperous conductor. His English is fluent. He is an effusive, witty, charming, richly expressive and decidedly outspoken speaker, one who had an almost Falstaffian command of his audience.

Except for Leonard Bernstein and the late Sir Thomas Beecham, few conductors talk the way Celibidache does. A member of a sect called the “New Gnostics,” Celibidache rejects conventional connections between language, thought and reality. And he rejected the premise of many questions directed towards him. When asked for whom he makes music, he replied that he doesn’t make anything.

“I create the conditions so that a kind of spiritual process can take place,” he said.

“I’m not doing anything. I’m not touring the States and I think that this experience belongs to everybody. Everyone is open to what music can be, and this is why I’m touring. But it is not an objective that I want to come to you and show off music. No! I will give myself as much strength as is necessary to bring you up, to open yourself or maybe to close yourself.

“You may not be very happy with my answer. But for me your question is extraordinarily conventional.”

From then on the press conference became the challenge to talk about the lofty and indescribable.

For Celibidache, music is an experience that transcends ordinary knowledge and commonplace logic, although he said that it would take at least three months to explain that, which is why he teaches his course on the phenomenology of music at the University of Mainz.

Still, the conductor was able to come up with an example. Noted for his ability to bring to life the smallest details in music, he suggested that one imagine any single bar of a piece, say Bar 14.

“There are so many things to perceive in it,” he said. “In order to perceive you must be there, inside it. It is the spiritual product of Bars 13 and 14, and of Bar 1. It carries its own history. It carries in itself the end which will come.”

Put another way: “The end is in the beginning. There is nothing to be understood.” Or another: “By knowing the beginning and the end, I can transcend time.”

But ultimately Celibidache, who calls the study of philosophy lost time--but valuable because “in order to understand what wasted time is you must understand philosophy”--says that this spiritual essence of music is something that cannot be consciously explained.

It can, however, be experienced in performance, as long as the musician opens himself to it. First, however, for Celibidache that means reexamining the score each time he conducts it as if it were something new, finding the meaning for every note in it.

“I empty myself and try to discover how the composer has moved, why did he make that choice and not another.”

But that takes the proper conditions and attitudes to realize, something Celibidache rarely finds in the modern music business, where “too much music is mixed with economic interests.” (The Munich Philharmonic’s press kit, however, happens to include a glossy photo of a smiling Celibidache stepping into his gleaming, new Audi--the manufacturer of which is sponsoring the orchestra’s tour.)

It is partly because Celibidache believes the record business sullies the spiritual essence of music that he doesn’t record. “How can I sell something I believe?” he asks. “This is dirt!”

And he also holds recordings accountable for many of the ills of today’s musical life. “How does a young conductor learn a symphony? He buys a record, plays it 300 times and becomes spontaneous. “

And Celibidache also considers record companies a pernicious influence over the orchestral life of big cities. “Conductors in Europe now are the people Deutsche Grammophon recommends,” he complains. But he has long given up on big cities. Don’t, he says, even get him started on the musical situation of London.

But when asked why he accepted his post in Munich, Celibidache answers, “Why not?”

He amplifies on that by saying that he has found Munich a very open-minded city. So he decided to make the Munich Philharmonic one of the best orchestras in the world, something he feels he has accomplished, at least when it is prepared by its music director.

This weekend Los Angeles will offer a rare, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity to find out if that is really so.

The orchestra’s Friday program offers music by Rossini, Hindemith and Brahms. Saturday, the single work on the agenda is Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. And on Sunday, works by Ravel, Richard Strauss and Mussorgsky will be featured.