Carlo Maria Giulini: In the memory of postwar London operagoers, the Covent Garden Don Carlos of 1958 remains one of the glories of the decade; for many the most satisfying operatic performance they had experienced until then.
Luchino Visconti's magisterial production, with a cast that could not only sing but act, ensured the success of the staging, but it was the treatment of Verdi's score by the Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, who has died aged 91, that was the real revelation.
The piece was not well known, and generally thought to be uneven and difficult to bring off.
Yet what emerged under Giulini's baton was a consistent, convincing masterpiece of astonishing power and lyrical tension.
Born in Barletta, along the Adriatic coast from the southern city of Bari, he was never taken to the opera as a child. At the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome he studied viola and composition, only later taking up conducting under Bernardino Molinari.
He played in the orchestra provided by the conservatory for the Teatro Augusteo, where he had the luck to work under Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer.
After he graduated in 1941, war service with the Italian army took him to Yugoslavia.
However, opposed to fascism, he went underground, hiding for nine months in a secret room in his wife's uncle's house, with a portrait of Mussolini hanging on the wall outside.
Giulini made his own conducting debut with the Augusteo orchestra in May 1945. In the following year he became musical director of Italian Radio, forming the Milan Radio Orchestra in 1950 and making numerous broadcasts of little-known works. He made his debut in the opera house with La Traviata at Bergamo in the same year, and conducted important revivals of Verdi's Attila (in a concert version) in Venice in 1951, and in 1952 Cavalli's Didone at the Florence Maggio Musicale and Gluck's Iphigénie En Tauride at Aix-en-Provence.
Return visits to these and other festivals brought more successes, but it was a broadcast performance of Haydn's comedy Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon, then virtually unknown) which proved the turning point.
It attracted the attention of Arturo Toscanini, and subsequently of Victor de Sabata, who quickly engaged him as his assistant at La Scala: in February 1952, with Falla's La Vida Breve, Giulini conducted his first opera at Italy's most famous opera house, and succeeded de Sabata as its principal conductor in 1953.
During his five years at La Scala, Giulini conducted only 13 productions, but these included three works new to the repertory - Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces; three marking the operatic debut of the producer Franco Zeffirelli - L'Italiana in Algeri, Cenerentola and L'Elisir D'Amore; and Gluck's Alceste and a Traviata with Maria Callas, the latter in a superb production by Visconti.
It was at this period that Giulini was first able to work with colleagues who shared his views about the relationship of music and the stage in opera, and the results were spectacular: the Traviata, originally scheduled for four performances in 1955, had to be allotted another 17 in the following season.
Meanwhile he had not neglected the concert platform. He made his US debut in Chicago in 1955, and in 1958, at the time of the Covent Garden Don Carlos, began an association with the Philharmonia Orchestra which was to bear fruit in a rich succession of concerts and recordings for EMI. He returned to the Royal Opera House for a Traviata in 1967, no doubt lured by the presence of Visconti as producer, but immediately after it announced his intention of abandoning opera. He did actually conduct one more Figaro at Rome in 1968, but otherwise kept his word for the next 14 years.
After a guest season with the Hallé Orchestra, he returned to Chicago, where in 1969 he became joint conductor of the city's symphony orchestra with Georg Solti.
Four years later he moved on to the Vienna Symphony Orchestra as principal conductor, having made his Salzburg Festival debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1970, and added another classic to the recorded repertory with the Don Carlos of 1971.
However, the recordings which followed in London and Chicago during the later 1970s tended more and more towards the weightier end of the symphonic repertory - Beethoven, including a Ninth Symphony and a Missa Solemnis, Brahms, Brückner and Mahler - a trend that continued when he took up his last permanent engagement, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he presided as chief conductor from 1978 until 1984.
It was during this period that Giulini was finally persuaded to return to opera, and in 1981 he conducted a production of Falstaff that subsequently travelled to London and Florence, and was recorded in 1983.
The Trovatore that followed in 1984 was a shock to those accustomed to the standard interpretations of this elemental and passionate work; but the expansive tempi and the clarity of orchestral textures showed the score to advantage, with no loss of intensity.
The freshness and absolute conviction of the approach proved profoundly rewarding, as also in his last operatic recording, the Rigoletto of 1985.
His later orchestral records included especially fine accounts of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Brückner's Ninth Symphony, with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras respectively, and in his late 70s he embarked upon a remarkable series of the Beethoven symphonies with the new La Scala Philharmonic.
Giulini was undoubtedly one of the great conductors of his day.
His music-making was essentially thoughtful, perfectionist and passionately sincere: the dynamism that lent such brilliance to performances of Rossini or Ravel in the earlier part of his career provided the power house for the deeply considered, profoundly musical interpretations of his middle years.
The exhaustive preparation and minute attention to detail that he demanded limited the range of his repertoire, but patently sprang from an integrity he shared with conductors such as Toscanini, Furtwängler and Klemperer.
His wife, Marcella, died in 1995, and their three sons survive him.
Carlo Maria Giulini, born May 9th, 1914; died June 14th, 2005
