Rafael Kubelik at Covent Garden
Rafael Kubelik at Covent Garden
‘Kubelik made a great contribution to music in London. With his ability to give unstintingly to colleagues, company, audience and above all to music, he was a pleasure to work for and with. In thinking of his own career, he might easily not agree with me, but I know that, if I were asked, I should find it hard not to nominate his three years at Covent Garden as the best of my life.’
So wrote Lord Harewood, reminiscing in 1971 about Rafael Kubelik’s tenure as Musical Director of Covent Garden Opera between 1955 and 1958. Harewood, as General Administrator David Webster’s planning assistant, had been one of the few people involved in the approach to Kubelik in the spring of 1954, following his triumph conducting a new production of Katya Kabanova for Sadler’s Wells. The appointment, publicly announced on 7 October 1954, came as a surprise. There had been an interregnum after Karl Rankl’s resignation in summer 1951, after which several desultory invitations came to nothing. The most likely candidate had seemed to be Rudolf Kempe, but he would not be tied down and preferred to return as a regular guest, an association which Kubelik welcomed.
Although Kubelik in his mid-20s had been Music Director of Brno Opera in his native Czechoslovakia from 1939 to 1941, when it was closed down by the occupying Nazis, he was better known as a violinist, pianist and symphonic conductor. After the brief euphoria between the end of the war in 1945 and the imposition of communism in 1948, he had conducted the Czech Philharmonic and been a founder of the Prague Spring in 1946. He exiled himself in 1948, later commenting: ‘I had lived through one form of bestial tyranny, Nazism. As a matter of principle I was not going to live through another’. He kept his word and was not reunited with the Czech Philharmonic until 1990.
Aged 34, Kubelik made his UK debut conducting Glyndebourne’s production of Don Giovanni at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival, on the recommendation of Bruno Walter. Between 1950 and 1953, he was Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he supplemented the standard German-dominated repertory with a commitment to introducing contemporary and lesser-known music. One such composer was his compatriot Leoš Janáček, to whose growing reputation he contributed with a BBC studio recording of Jenůfa, featuring the Dutch soprano Gré Brouwenstijn, in 1951 and the pioneering Katya at Sadler’s Wells in 1954 (both of which are available on Music Preserved), and later with the first Jenůfas at Covent Garden in 1956.
For his calling card in the season before taking up the position, he chose an earlier Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s Bartered Bride. It embodied his core values as an ensemble opera which could be performed in English with a cast of resident artists, including as Mařenka Elsie Morrison who years later became his wife. He continued his predecessor’s policy of developing resident singers and musicians, and being willing to rehearse and conduct them in routine revivals of standard repertory. Nonetheless, his first production as Musical Director set down a marker for Covent Garden’s aspiration to join the top international circuit. It was the company’s first Otello, with the then leading exponent of the title role, Ramón Vinay, and Brouwenstijn as Desdemona. A recording from the first series of performances in 1955 may be heard on Music Preserved. As a boy of 12, I attended the 1957 revival and remember the terrifying, still power of Vinay’s presence and the way Kubelik supported Brouwenstijn’s line in the finale of Act 3.
Those of us lucky enough to learn our opera from those Kubelik years took for granted the breadth of his repertoire and his dedication to the company. He conducted my first Peter Grimes (available on Music Preserved) and Jenůfa and the UK premiere of Poulenc’s Carmelites, all in 1958. But most would judge the greatest achievement of his Covent Garden years to be the first (almost) complete staging of Berlioz’s Trojans, unveiled in 1957 (available on Music Preserved) and repeated during the theatre’s centenary season the following summer. This massive undertaking, cast from the company except for the American Blanche Thebom as Dido, revealed one of the masterpieces of opera. It is evidence of the company assembled during those years that Jon Vickers was Aeneas and Amy Shuard Cassandra, and that small roles were taken by Joan Carlyle, Marie Collier, Forbes Robinson and Michael Langdon, among others.
There were disappointments, especially with Wagner. Neither Kubelik’s Mastersingers nor his Tristan were judged to have reached the level of Kempe’s Ring. He was also criticised for some under-rehearsed revivals which he dutifully conducted. And, in the final year of his contract, some projects slipped away. For the centenary production, Don Carlos was preferred to Smetana’s Dalibor (with Vickers), though Kubelik was characteristically generous in welcoming Giulini’s engagement for the Verdi. The Verdi opera he really wanted to present was Falstaff in English, but it was postponed. The prospect of Covent Garden hosting the premiere of Martinů’s Greek Passion was vetoed by the Board, to Kubelik’s intense regret. The undoubted success of Don Carlos encouraged Board members led by the new chairman Lord Drogheda to press for more original language productions, ironically since it was given in Italian translation of the original French. The transition away from opera in the vernacular was gradual, but greater reliance on foreign guests slowly eroded the local company mindset which was the essence of Kubelik’s operatic credo.
Lord Harewood shared that belief, and was given the opportunity to enact it when appointed Managing Director of English National Opera in 1972, the year after paying tribute to his ‘best years’ at Covent Garden with Kubelik. If Kubelik had been asked to nominate his ‘best years’, he would have surely chosen instead his 18-year period from 1961 to 1979 with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra which he led in live performances and recordings which included enduring interpretations of the complete Mahler symphonies and Wagner’s Meistersinger and Parsifal, as well as core German classics and Czech repertory. Music Preserved can offer marvellous live performances of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, with Janet Baker, and Czech music including Dvořák’s Amid Nature, Martinů’s Double Concerto and Janáček’s Sinfonietta. The evident rapport between conductor and musicians conveyed itself to audiences and to other conductors who revered Kubelik for his honesty and modesty as well as his musicianship. His latest successor as Chief Conductor, Simon Rattle, has spoken of the impact Kubelik’s Mahler had on him as a young man growing up in Liverpool, and how it inspired him to take up the Bavarian position in 2023.
Kubelik returned to Covent Garden in 1968 for a memorable series of Jenůfas with Marie Collier, Astrid Varnay, Richard Cassilly and John Lanigan in the leading roles and with his original and never surpassed Foreman and co-translator Otakar Kraus still in place.
In his later years, Kubelik retired from conducting because of chronic arthritis, but the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and fall of Communism drew him back to his native land, where he conducted Smetana’s Má vlast at the opening concert of the 1990 Prague Spring Festival, 44 years after its founding concert, an unforgettable occasion.
Kubelik died in 1996, aged 82. As Director of the Royal Opera at the time, I became determined that we should stage Martinů’s Greek Passion as a belated memorial to right the injustice perpetrated in the late 1950s. We planned an elaborate co-production with the Bregenz Festival and engaged Charles Mackerras, another strong advocate of the piece, to conduct it for Covent Garden in its original version. And I arranged for Elsie Morrison to be invited to the premiere.
Nicholas Payne
August 2026
