Both as a man and as a musician Giulini was often thought to be the very embodiment of elegance, in the the sense of someone to whom mannerliness, cultivated taste, and moral integrity mattered. This was true, yet as a rounded view of Giulini the man it takes insufficient account of the force of the fires banked up within. In his 1983 autobiography My First Forty Years Plácido Domingo wrote: ‘It would be difficult to find another musician with Giulini’s combination of gentleness and intensity. His music-making is extremely refined. Yet in [Verdi’s] ‘Dies irae’ he seemed to personify God the Father on the Day of Judgment. Not that he overacted or made pompous gestures: he simply became the music to a frightening degree. It was shocking to see someone who was so good and gentle demonstrate such power.’
It is said that in the ‘Dies irae’ Victor de Sabata would take the baton in both hands and bring it down like an executioner’s axe. Giulini’s baton motion in the ‘Dies irae’ was more like a scythe. In other places the beat was unusually expressive, a skill honed in the opera house where Giulini had worked with distinction during the 1950s. We can hear this in the way in which the singing of the tenor Luigi Ottolini (1925–2002) is so beautifully nursed, the phrasing exquisitely moulded. An accomplished tenor but never a big ‘name’, Ottolini was precisely the kind of soloist with whom Giulini liked to work in the Requiem. The bass Ivo Vinco (b.1927) and the mezzo–soprano Fiorenza Cossotto (b.1935) were also young singers near the start of their careers. (They were in fact husband and wife. They had married in 1958.)
The pairing of Cossotto and Joan Sutherland was another successful musical marriage. Sutherland had not exactly appeared from nowhere when she gave her now famous performances of the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden in February 1959. London audiences had known how good she was since the mid–1950s. This Edinburgh performance was also a triumph for the Philharmonia Chorus and its director Wilhelm Pitz. Walter Legge had founded the chorus in 1957 as the choral complement to his already prestigious Philharmonia Orchestra. It had made its international festival debut the previous September singing Handel’s Messiah under Sir Thomas Beecham in Lucerne. Now it found itself in Edinburgh making its own distinctive contribution to a performance which one writer described as being ‘as near to perfection as I ever hope to experience’.
