Rafael Kubelík

Rafael Kubelík was born in Býchory, Bohemia, in June 1914, the son of the violinist Jan Kubelík. He studied composition and conducting at the Prague Conservatory and made his début with the Czech Philharmonic at twenty in 1934. He served as music director of the Czech Philharmonic from 1942 to 1948, conducting through the German occupation and the immediate post-war years, and refused to conduct for the Nazi authorities — an act that contributed to the orchestra’s post-war prestige.

He left Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover in 1948 and did not return to his country until 1990. He held conducting posts as music director of the Chicago Symphony (1950–53), at Covent Garden (1955–58), and most lastingly with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich (1961–79), where his decades-long tenure produced the recorded Mahler and Dvořák cycles that defined his international reputation. He served briefly as the first music director of the Metropolitan Opera in 1973 but resigned within a year. He was particularly associated with the Czech repertoire, the central German symphonic tradition, and Mahler.

Kubelík returned to conduct the Czech Philharmonic in May 1990, opening the Prague Spring Festival with *Má vlast* in the first concert after the Velvet Revolution — a public moment of considerable symbolic weight. He died in Lucerne in August 1996. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his work with European orchestras in twentieth-century performance.