A Man Without

"A new great name!" trumpeted the critic for Prague's Vecerni Praha. Great, yes; new, hardly. Sergiu Celibi-dache has been conducting for 20 years. Still, the reaction was understandably familiar. As the most unheard and unsung of the world's leading maestros, Celibidache (chay-lee-bee-da/7-kay) is forever being discovered.

The latest discovery came at the Prague Spring Festival of Music, which celebrated its 20th anniversary with the biggest and most impressive roster of conductors to appear at any of Europe's summer music festivals--among them George Szell, Charles Munch, Zubin Mehta and Georg Solti. Fronted with such competition, Celibi-dache's debut with the Czech Philharmonic was a stunning triumph. He realized, raved one critic, "qualities of the orchestra which until now we could only imagine." Under his baton, Hindemith's Metamorphosis "became a new discovery," Brahms's Fourth Symphony "a perfection of color and dynamics as we have never heard before."

Worth the Labor. That the Czechs heard Celibidache at all was no small achievement. A man of passionate convictions who "would rather starve" than give an imperfect performance, Celibidache has become an artist in self-imposed exile. While other guest conductors accept three rehearsals as sufficient preparation for a concert, Celibidache demands at least ten. He has been known, for example, to spend six rehearsals perfecting Webern's Variations for Orchestra, a work that lasts less than six minutes. The musicians who have worked under him agree that the result is worth all the painstaking labor. Says Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, recalling a performance at La Scala: "His accompaniment was unforgettable. I played a concerto I had played hundreds of times before, but with Celibidache it seemed like a completely new work. I never understood why a conductor so absolutely marvelous was as little known and as little in demand."

Mostly, it is because Celibidache's heavy rehearsal demands are financially impractical. Largely for that reason, he has never performed in the U.S. Yet, surprisingly enough he still conducts about 50 concerts a year, mainly in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Israel and Latin America. He also steadfastly refuses to make recordings because "even with stereo, it comes out in no more than tv>>--> dimensions, whereas music is three-dimensional."

Lone Wolf. Now 53, the swarthy, hot-eyed, wavy-haired Celibidache has been bucking musical conventions since 1933, when he defied parental opposition and fled his native Rumania to study music in Paris and later, during the war years, at the University of Berlin. At the end of the war he took over the Berlin Philharmonic, rebuilt it singlehanded into an orchestra of international rank. In 1952, when Wilhelm Furtwangler was denazified and reinstated as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Celibidache drifted off to-pursue his lone-wolf existence.

Today, he says, "my home is hotel rooms." He is a man without a country, without an orchestra, without a recording contract. All he has instead is his talent and an exalted vision. He says: "I have never compromised."

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