Serving Genius: Carlo Maria Giulini (review)

This is the first book-length biographical treatment in English of the Italian opera and orchestral conductor Carlo Maria Giulini (1914–2005). Giulini first became known conducting opera in Europe, but in the latter half of his career he focused on symphonic music. From 1973–1976, he was principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and then conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1978–1984. A musician of uncompromising ideals and great personal integrity, Giulini eschewed the media spotlight and rarely gave interviews.

Thomas Saler’s enthusiasm about the life and work of Giulini is evident throughout the book. In large part, the book is based on fifty-one interviews Saler had with musicians, administrators, critics, and others who had worked with Giulini. References are also made to oral history interviews from the Chicago Symphony Archives and at UCLA. Other sources include newspapers and magazines such as the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Gramophone, and High Fidelity. There are a few citations from books and Web sites.

Saler, at one time a piano student at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, also had studied conducting. He is now a freelance financial writer. The tone of this modestly sized book is very much that of a journalist, not a scholar, writing for a general classical music audience. His conservatory training gives him facility to write about musical matters that are beyond the scope of many journalists who write about musicians. The writing is largely free of technical musical terminology. While much of the book is biographical, Saler also tries to paint a picture of the important musical facets that made Giulini the artist that he was. As Saler notes, Giulini was a man of integrity who led a life free of scandal. Saler’s observations of Giulini’s personal life and human frailties are both factual and sensitive.

Saler provides a list of the individuals he interviewed and provides documentation only for names and year, not locations. One has to look in the footnotes, and then find the passage in the text to further identify who the interview subjects are. No information is given about how the interviews were conducted, whether they were audio or video recordings, or if they are archived or available for future researchers. The list of interviews does not include other interviews cited in the footnotes. Although there are extensive footnotes, no bibliography is provided. There is no reference to the other two books on Guilini, one in Italian (Alessandro Zignani, Carlo Maria Giulini, Varese: Zecchini Editore, 2009), the other in French (Jean-Yves Bras, Carlo Maria Giulini, Paris: Bleu Nuit Editeur, 2006). Saler’s book discusses many of Giulini’s commercial recordings, but curiously, there is no discography, something that is standard in books on musicians who have made a substantial number of recordings.

Most of the quotes from the author’s interviews are short, and mostly used in an interpretive thread, as is common practice in traditional biographical writing. There are only a few quotations containing more than a few sentences. One of the primary aims of oral history is to allow individuals to speak in their own voice, rather than relying on an author’s interpretation. Giulini was a conductor with a distinctive but not iconoclastic approach to interpreting music, a viewpoint worth hearing. One of the few longer quotes (99) is from Bernard Jacobson’s book Conductors on Conducting (1979), which has an excellent extended interview with Giulini on the music of Johannes Brahms. Including more long quotes from Giulini and from other musicians Saler interviewed could have given richer and deeper insights into his ideas.

There is a theme that runs throughout the book that seeks to contrast Giulini’s approach to music with that of current conductors. He says “Giulini’s desire to go deeper than the printed notes puts him outside the ‘objectivist’ school of conducting that evolved during his career and had come to dominate the profession by the early twenty-first century...