Kubelík was the sixth child of the Bohemian violinist Jan Kubelík, whom he described as "a kind of god to me." At his graduation concert from the Prague Conservatory he played a Paganini concerto and a composition of his own for violin and orchestra. Kubelík was also an accomplished pianist.

In 1939, Rafael Kubelík became music director of the Brno Opera, a position he held until the Nazis shut the company down on 12 November 1941. The Nazis allowed the Czech Philharmonic to continue operating, and Kubelík became its principal conductor. In 1944, after various incidents, including one in which he declined to greet the Nazi Reich-Protector with a Hitler salute — along with his refusal to conduct Wagner during the War — Kubelík went undercover in the countryside to avaoid the SS and Gestapo.

In 1946, he helped found the Prague Spring Festival, and conducted its opening concert. But after the Communist coup of February 1948, Kubelík left Czechoslovakia, vowing not to return until the country was liberated. "I had lived through one form of bestial tyranny, Nazism," he told an interviewer, "As a matter of principle I was not going to live through another." In 1949 he flew to London for an engagement at Glyndebourne and it was England that became his home for the next 40 years.

In 1953, the Communist government convicted the couple in absentia of "taking illicit leave" abroad. In 1956, the regime invited him back "with promises of freedom to do anything I wanted," said Kubelík, but he refused the invitation. In a 1957 letter to The Times, Kubelík said he would seriously consider returning only when all the country's political prisoners were freed and all émigrés were given as much freedom as he would have possessed. He was invited back by the regime in 1966 but again refused; in 1968, after the Prague Spring had ended by the Soviet invasion, he organized an international boycott, in which most of the major classical artists of the West participated. Kubelík eventually did return to Prague after the fall of Communism, leading the Czech Philharmonic in the Prague Spring Festival in 1990.

Click on image for full size printable inlay image 1. Vyšehrad (The High Castle) 2. Vltava (The Moldau) 3. Šárka 4. Z českých luhů a hájů (From Bohemia's Woods and Fields) 5. Tábor 6. Blaník