CARLO MARIA GIULINI occupied a central position in the grand line of the Italian conductors of the 20th century. His immediate predecessors were Arturo Toscanini and Victor de Sabata. Later Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti were to follow in the same footsteps. But among his generation Giulini remained unchallenged after the early death of his one major rival, Guido Cantelli.

Toscanini first heard him conduct a little-known Haydn opera on Italian radio in 1950 and immediately recognised Giulini’s potential. Toscanini took no pupils; and in any case Giulini, whose career had been interrupted by the war, was already in his mid- thirties. But the two became friends at once and remained so until Toscanini’s death. De Sabata brought Giulini to La Scala, where he soon became music director and shared in some of Callas’s early triumphs.

Giulini’s mature reputation, both in the opera house and the concert hall, was founded on a very small repertoire. He spent long hours of private preparation and refused to perform a work in public until he was steeped in it and felt it part of his very being. Certain composers he avoided completely — Puccini was one of them. Nor did he ever tackle the operas of Richard Strauss. Towards Wagner he was ambivalent, expressing interest in Tristan but declaring that he had little sympathy with The Ring.

Giulini had a love-hate relationship with the world’s leading opera houses, including La Scala. Verdi and Mozart may have been in his blood, but Giulini the perfectionist was constantly at odds with the compromises and shortcuts demanded by theatre managements. He refused to conduct without proper rehearsal periods and had no time for jet-age singers anxious to fit in the odd extra lucrative engagement instead of concentrating on the work in hand. He was only really happy collaborating with directors such as Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli, who shared his vision and stayed faithful to the wishes of the composer.

In 1967 he announced that he was leaving opera for good, after a strong disagreement over a production of Don Giovanni. He made a limited number of Verdi recordings in the studio for Deutsche Grammophon (DG), but otherwise kept to his word, apart from being persuaded to conduct Ronald Eyre’s staging of Falstaff, which began in Los Angeles, came to Covent Garden and ended in Florence. The performance had a serene autumnal glow, very Giulini. But Verdi’s last opera was also to be Giulini’s last in the theatre. Otello, a mountain he had often considered scaling, was left unperformed. Thereafter, Giulini restricted himself to the concert hall and to recordings, especially of the German Romantics, with his beloved Brahms to the fore.

On the podium Giulini was the least flamboyant of men. He maintained the balance of an athlete, moving little and conveying his demands with his long, tapering fingers and above all his eyes. A glance fixed on an individual player conveyed exactly what he wanted. If things were going well he would even close his eyes, as if communing privately with the composer.

This action added to his reputation of being something of a mystic. But in most matters he was distinctly practical. In rehearsal he rarely raised his voice and almost always kept his criticisms private. Quantities of singers passed through his hands, especially in the Verdi Requiem, a favourite piece as it had been for de Sabata. A poor performance from the soprano would elicit simply a terse “With ‘er again, never” to the person foolish enough to engage the singer in the first place.

The man was as fastidious as the musician. Giulini’s aquiline features and tall, slim body commanded attention immediately he walked into a room. So did his dress, usually a three-piece suit of expensive cut, with a prominent gold watch chain. He held himself like an Edwardian gentleman, and had the courtesy to match.

Carlo Maria Giulini, however, was of solid middle-class stock. By his own reckoning his parents were gentle and unsophisticated people. He was born in Barletta, Apulia, in 1914. His father was a timber merchant, and Carlo Maria grew up in Bolzano in the Dolomites which, thanks to post-First World War frontier adjustments, had just ceased being the Austrian Bozen. They were Italians in a mainly German-speaking area, which could explain Giulini’s twin devotion to Italian opera and German symphonies. It certainly accounted for his exceptional linguistic fluency.

His first musical experience was hearing an itinerant Gypsy play the fiddle. That prompted him to ask for a violin as a birthday present. A local music teacher recommended him to the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome, where he switched to viola. By the time he was 18 he had joined the local Augusteo Orchestra as a professional. He formed his own band of players and got his first experience of conducting while also observing from the back desks of the Augusteo the techniques of the great maestri of the day.

In Rome Giulini met Marcella de Girolami, the daughter of an industrialist. They married during the war and more than 40 years later, when he returned to Santa Cecilia to record Il trovatore for DG, Giulini became uncharacteristically sentimental over the streets which had formed the backdrop to their youthful romance.

He was always reluctant to talk about the war. The early part of it he spent as an officer in the Italian Army fighting the partisans in Yugoslavia. The experience turned him into a pacifist and confirmed strong anti-Fascist feelings.

When he returned to Rome he deserted with three fellow officers. The action prompted the commander to print posters of Giulini as a wanted man and display them in Rome with orders that he should be shot when caught. But Giulini was not betrayed, and Marcella smuggled scores for him to study in hiding.