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Rafael Kubelik: we loved our giants.

Article Excerpt
The typical story of a Czech musician is the story of a poor boy who overcomes his disadvantaged background and wins through to world recognition. Rafael Kubelik, however, knew the meaning of celebrity and a life of chateau luxury from childhood. His father, the violinist Jan Kubelik, was in his time as famous as Caruso or Destinnova. His mother came from a noble Hungarian family, and was notable mainly for her aristocratic whims and ability to run through Kubelik's large fees. It was at one of the chateaux that the family successively owned, in Bychory near Kolin, that Rafael was born, on the 29th of June 1914.

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School of Life

He had five sisters, all of them musically gifted, but his talent was the most outstanding. He started to learn to play the piano and the violin, and from his earliest years his meetings with his father were in themselves an education in music, and a later source of wonderful memories. "My father's concept of violin play was not just to play different works, but to use different tones for each. When I was small and used to listen to him practising, my father sometimes scratched the notes, as you might put it, looking for a new tone, trying it out. He wanted to hear all the different possibilities of the violin sound and identify the various styles. And suddenly emerging out of these scraped tones there would be some newly radiant phrase like an exquisite pearl. I was astounded, it was like a small miracle. And so I would ask him, "Why are you doing that? And he would say here you have to search like an alchemist for gold. He used to say that when you play Beethoven you must play Beethoven, and when you play Paganini you...

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