Sergiu Celibidache: Firebrand and Philosopher Directed by Norbert Busè, and: Celibidache Rehearses Bruckner’s Ninth Directed by Jan Schmidt-Garre (review)

Numerous DVDs showing the iconoclastic Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache at work and in interview are now available. Norbert Busè’s documentary differentiates itself by blending such materials with reminiscences from people who had a wide variety of relationships with him. His sister Irina-Paraschiva Celebidachi describes Sergiu’s precocious youth. Sometime collaborator Daniel Barenboim tries to distill the essence of the mature conductor’s mesmeric power, noting both his attention to detail and his thoughtfulness. Musicologist and former student Peter Lang explains how, at least in retrospect, the maestro’s occasionally cutting criticisms and insistence on seeking a higher standard from oneself represents a healthy alternative to the widespread praise of mediocrity. Serge Ioan Celebidachi describes the tension between his father’s career and family life and emphasizes his dedication to teaching.

But for all the testimonials, Busè’s film does not make evident how Celibidache was more a “firebrand” or “philosopher” than other titans of the postwar podium. Those characteristics most frequently associated with the conductor—his penchant for slow tempos, his championing of Bruckner, his disdain for recording—are addressed infrequently or obliquely, perhaps because they have been explored extensively elsewhere, or perhaps because the filmmaker wanted to show the conductor in another light. Whether this less conventional approach is successful ultimately rests, then, on the quality of interviews and Busè’s skill in editing them together to create a different, cohesive view. But the interviews tend to be adulatory and vague, short on fact and long on superlatives, and the whole feels more like hagiography than the evaluation of an unusual and sometimes controversial figure.

Busè occasionally wastes time, letting Serge Ioan Celibidachi talk about his love for race cars and following an anonymous librarian through the stacks to find archival material (of little consequence) about Celibidache’s student years in Berlin. But other sections of the film are informative (e.g., descriptions of Celibidache’s own compositions from different periods of his life), evocative (e.g., shots of his childhood home in Romania, now in ruins), even compelling. Most compelling—and this is hardly a surprise—are those moments when the conductor is at work, conducting. The documentary itself includes only brief excerpts with Celibidache on the podium, and most of that time shows him in rehearsal, but the DVD includes as a bonus feature a 1950 video of him leading the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Fascinatingly, the conductor’s technique and demeanor in 1950 differ greatly from his more familiar Munich-era work; unfortunately, the sound is poor. The other bonus features on the DVD are extended versions of interviews with Celibidache’s sister and Daniel Barenboim, parts of which are used in the film, and another with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.

In a way, Jan Schmidt-Garre’s film Celibidache Rehearses Bruckner’s Ninth is a fitting companion to Busè’s documentary: Schmidt-Garre spends most of an hour fixed on Celibidache’s upper body, allowing us to study him in this 1991 rehearsal with the Munich Philharmonic. That one could contentedly watch a seated conductor, by that point capable of only modest movement, for the better part of an hour, meticulously working on brief sections of the slow movement from Bruckner’s Ninth, may itself be the best argument for the sort of mystical power described by so many interviewees in Busè’s film. And yet the things Celibidache addresses in rehearsal are the things any good conductor would address: balance, tempo, ensemble coordination, phrasing, breathing. Schmidt-Garre cleverly juxtaposes long sections of rehearsal with two sets of interviews: one with the maestro alone describing some of his general ideas about experiencing music, and one with him visiting a room in St. Florian Monastery, speaking about Bruckner, who lived and...