Celibidache, the conductor who hated microphones, is reincarnated as John Malkovich | Culture | EUROtoday

In the high-quality print of Sergiu Celibidache’s very scarce discography we will learn, as a warning, that the recording was made in opposition to the categorical needs of the director. The Romanian musician’s fame started in 1945, when on the age of 33 he changed Wilhelm Furtwängler on the head of the Berlin Philharmonic, however his legend rests on his iron and unwavering refusal to be recorded. For Celibidache, listening to a Bruckner symphony on any industrial medium was equal, as he put it, “to making love to a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.” And as a way to keep away from the simulation of pirated recordings, which in his case reached cult proportions, earlier than every live performance he had the vases, the folds of the curtains and even the bottoms of the seats inspected.

The first biopic about Celibidache, which shall be screened this Friday in Madrid and on Sunday in Oviedo, begins exactly with the true anecdote of a girl within the viewers who’s found to have a microphone hidden underneath an inconceivable Marge Simpson coiffure. “My father had very good reasons to defend the truth of the live performance, everything that happens between the notes, that unrepeatable moment that cannot be recorded in any way,” says the director of the movie and the maestro’s solely son, Sergiu Ioan Celibidache (Paris, 57 years outdated), higher often known as Miki. “But at the same time I can only be grateful to those who disobeyed his orders, since a large part of his legacy comes from those clandestine recordings that he so detested.”

At the age of 10, Miki started to jot down down the adventures that his father advised him in a pocket book. In 1997, a 12 months after the director’s demise, he recovered some selfmade Super 8 tapes for the documentary The backyard of Celibidachefilmed on the household house in La Neuville-sur-Essonne, France, the place his father taught musical phenomenology courses. “Shortly after, I contacted several Hollywood production companies interested in my father’s life, but I quickly realized that a standard biopic would have betrayed his memory. So the project remained in a drawer for a long time until, with the help of my wife, we obtained financing in Romania, where we finally filmed what I always wanted it to be: a universal odyssey about pain.”

The Yellow Tie reveals the B facet of a person as “deeply fragile” as he’s reluctant to speak about his emotions. “Many people saw my father as an indestructible myth, a strong, inaccessible, even fearsome figure, but when writing the script I realized that behind the myth there was a vulnerable man, marked by exile and loss.” The yellow tie referred to within the title features because the rosebud of a life marked by an obsessive idea of demand. “My grandfather gave it to him when he was a teenager thinking he would become the prime minister of Romania, but my father had other plans.” In 1933, on the age of 21, he left his native Roman to work as a pianist in a bar in Bucharest earlier than making the leap to Berlin as a pupil of Heinz Tiessen.

Celibidache entered the Hochschule für Musik with the concept of ​​changing into a composer. “The Nazi delirium and the horror of the war made him change his mind,” says Miki. “He found it obscene to write music when people were starving.” Celibidache took the reins of the Berlin Philharmonic on an interim foundation with the town devastated and with hardly any assets. “They played in the middle of the ruins, but with people queuing in the street. The musicians adored it because they felt that it was giving them back their dignity.” Or as Celibidache himself says within the movie: “When there is nothing, music is everything.” That is why he by no means bought over the truth that, in 1954, the orchestra changed him with a conductor who represented precisely the other of what he had defended.

That man responded to the title of Herbert. “My father didn’t hate him, but he considered that Karajan was searching for the perfect sound while he aspired to true music.” They got here to movie a scene with the Kaiser that they later eradicated. “I didn’t want problems with image rights, or lawsuits, much less that his appearance would distract the viewer.” For two years, Celibidache went into exile in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Caracas. “It was a very hard time, but also enriching, as it allowed him to perfect his conducting technique and regain faith in the human experience of music.” Returning to Europe, he solely accepted positions in broadcasting orchestras with out recording commitments, together with a short interval at RTVE in Madrid.

In the movie, actor Ben Schnetzer offers with Celi’s youthful years till what is named the miracle live performance at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice in 1956, whereas John Malkovich dons a silver wig to play the now veteran, irascible, charming and at all times controversial director in his final stage as head of the Munich Philharmonic and Zen trainer in his mill-house on the banks of the Essonne. “Both Schnetzer and Malkovich received three months of classes from Konrad von Abel, one of my father’s former students,” he explains. “When we got to the set I asked them to forget everything they had learned and to imagine themselves pedaling on a bicycle. I want a man full of energy, I told them, a director who breathes with the orchestra.”

All the music that performs within the movie, from the Bruckner’s seventh a The hearth chicken of Stravinsky (through the audition with the Berliners), passing by way of the Egmont overture by Beethoven and an unpublished rating by Celibidache himself, was expressly recorded by the Enescu Philharmonic and the Romanian National. “In each resolution I’ve made I heard my father’s voice: ‘I already advised you this was silly!’ To which I responded: ‘Trust me, you will see,’ confesses Miki, who has acquired dozens of proposals to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s demise with materials rescued from the archives. “It could be done, but only if certain criteria are met. And without forgetting that the resulting album would never be a faithful portrait, just an ephemeral trace.”