BRUCKNER: Mass No. 3 in F Minor
Margaret Price (soprano); Doris Soffel (alto); Peter Straka (tenor); Matthias Hölle, Hans Sotin (basses); Munich Philharmonic Orchestra; Sergiu Celibidache
A Film by Jan Schmidt-Garre
ARTHAUS DVD 100 250 (60 minutes)
You can almost hear the rosin dust settling on the strings.
The problem with Celibidache—and it was always a problem for those who had to work with him—was his absolutism. Not just about recorded sound, which he dismissed with the contempt of a man who understood perfectly well what he was refusing, but about rehearsal time.
Fourteen days for the Mass in F Minor. Fourteen days. Watch Margaret Price’s face in this documentary and you’ll see what that means.
She looks exhausted—no, beyond exhausted. There’s a particular kind of weariness that comes from being held to impossible standards, from having every phrase dissected and reassembled until the spontaneity has been worked through, past, and somehow back into the music again. Yet what emerges in the fragments of performance we’re given here justifies, almost, the cruelty of the process.
Jan Schmidt-Garre’s camera catches Celibidache without a score (naturally—he conducted everything from memory, even in rehearsal), stopping mid-phrase to isolate a rising sixth in the second violins. The specificity is almost pedantic. Except it isn’t pedantic at all when you hear the result: those dynamics, that transparency of texture in the Kyrie, the way the Munich strings breathe as a single organism.
This is what fourteen days buys you. The leader himself—avuncular now, no longer the firebrand who terrorized orchestras in the 1950s—moves between German and — well — English with that effortless polyglot fluency. “Twelve minutes,” he announces for a break.
Not ten, not fifteen. Twelve. The precision is characteristic, maddening, and somehow endearing all at once.
There are flashes still of the old temperament, but mostly what you see is a man who has learned to channel his intensity into something more sustainable, if no less demanding. What’s frustrating about this DVD is its brevity and incompleteness. Sixty minutes is short measure by any standard, and we get only fragments of the actual interpretation interspersed with rehearsal footage.
One wants—no, needs—to hear how all this preparation manifests in the complete work. The Sanctus especially, with its demands on both orchestra and chorus, cries out for full documentation. Instead we’re left with tantalizing glimpses: Soffel’s dark-hued alto in the Agnus Dei, the — two basses (Hölle and Sotin) anchoring the Credo with that particular German solidity of tone.
Celibidache’s Bruckner—and this applies to the symphonies as much as to the Mass—operates on a different time scale from most conductors’. The tempos are broad, yes, but more importantly, the internal architecture reveals itself with a clarity that faster tempos obscure. He finds what he called the “tension of the moment,” that sense of inevitability where every note feels simultaneously spontaneous and predetermined.
It’s phenomenology applied to music-making, and whether or not you buy into his theoretical framework, the results speak for themselves. The film itself, part of Schmidt-Garre’s larger project documenting Celibidache over four years, has that intensity you don’t find in, say, the Karajan documentaries (one of which Arthaus has just reissued). Those films have a glossy inevitability about them, the sense of a career being packaged for posterity.
This feels rawer, more provisional—which is odd, given Celibidache’s legendary control over every aspect of performance. What remains unpublished from these sessions with Schmidt-Garre—Debussy, Dvořák, Mussorgsky, and — well — most tantalizing of all, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with Michelangeli and the London Symphony—suggests there’s still more to be revealed about this most uncompromising of conductors. His Berlin production of Bruckner’s Seventh, made thirty-eight years after he last conducted that band, had only limited circulation but remains essential.
And those Sony videos of the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies (now maddeningly unavailable) contain some of the most revelatory Bruckner on film. But this DVD, despite its limitations, offers something valuable: a glimpse into how Celibidache actually worked, how those impossibly refined performances were forged through relentless attention to detail. Whether that process was worth the cost—to the musicians, to Price’s vocal cords, to everyone’s sanity—is a question the film doesn’t answer.
Perhaps can’t answer. For specialists and devotees only, then. But for them, essential.
