Giulini’s answer to the question of what fascinated him about making music amounted to his Credo: “Music is a great miracle and a great mystery. Even a single note is a mystery, a miracle in itself. The note appears quite suddenly and as it is born it has already passed away. Everything to do with music is fascinating – whether conducting or playing.”

On 14 and 15 February 1984 there were performances of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde at the Philharmonie. Brigitte Fassbaender, a frequent guest of the Philharmonic in the years from 1971 to 1992, sang the contralto part. The Spaniard Francisco Araiza made his Philharmonic début in the tenor role. Klaus Geitel wrote of Giulini in the Berliner Morgenpost: “Thoughtful, he appeared manifestly and wholly ‘lost to the world’. He bears the baton vertically in a half-outstretched hand before him, a diviner in art... the way forward is his aim, the inner ardour of music-making. This is musicianship of complete naturalness, with no attempt to attract attention, serving the will of the music itself alone. ... Giulini’s art constantly combines German seriousness with mediterranean sensitivity. There is always the slight suggestion of Palladio shining through even the late romanticism of Bruckner. The clarity of interpretation rests not so much on a search for structure as an almost bodily, physical sense of wellbeing in the musical proportions, whether it be in Schubert or Mahler.”

Sybill Mahlke (Der Tagespiegel) was just as impressed as her colleague Geitel by the soloists in Das Lied von der Erde. Brigitte Fassbaender had once again shown her “sensitivity for broken musical characters” and Francisco Araiza had achieved a “masterly level of integration, precision and lyrical beauty”. Araiza’s distinguished singing was “a communication from that ambivalent twilight world of late Mahler, realising the Utopian character of the music.”

Excerpt from the note: Helge Grünewald, 2011 (translation: Jonathan Katz)