NEW YORK, NY.- There is a touching documentary about Otto Klemperer, that steadfast titan of conducting who died 50 years ago, by filmmaker Philo Bregstein. Watch it for long enough, and a rather surprising face appears — surprising, at least, if you think of Klemperer as he is so often imagined, as only the last in a venerable line of German musicians, and not as the architect of something new.
The talking head is Pierre Boulez, the leading modernist of his era. Klemperer, he suggests, was a different kind of conductor, neither interested in “sentimentality in music,” as his contemporary Bruno Walter had been, nor in “rhetoric and pathos,” like his rival Wilhelm Furtwängler. Klemperer, Boulez said, seemed “much more interested in the signification of the form of music.” For Boulez, there was no higher compliment to give.
Fascinatingly, the respect was mutual. Klemperer baffled the younger man by sitting through his rehearsals for hours at a time, infirm yet curious; in Boulez, he heard “an absolutely first-class conductor with an enormous talent in Haydn and Mozart as well as in Debussy and the modern repertory.” Years after Klemperer’s death, Boulez was still paying tribute to “the rebel who, despite his advanced age, retained an alertness of reaction and a freshness of expression which made the conformity of a good number of his younger colleagues seem very pallid, very timid and very dull.”
Klemperer, the rebel? He might not have seemed that way near the end of his life. Seated sternly before the Philharmonia Orchestra in London in the 1960s, he appeared to many to be the solemn custodian of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. “In an age of well-tailored virtuoso conductors,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times in 1961, “he stands out like a Michelangelo sculpture among Dresden figurines.”
But Klemperer was far more than that. Even in his dotage, his Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms were still distinctive, perhaps even more so as they became trudging and weighty with time. His outstanding biographer, critic Peter Heyworth, has shown how his rhythmically firm, formally exact readings traced their origins to the years before the rise of Nazism, when the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and the other composers he championed came to influence his aesthetics generally. If the dramatic legacy of his tenure at the insurgent Kroll Opera in Berlin, from 1927 to 1931, was taken up after World War II by Walter Felsenstein and Wieland Wagner, both of whom sought him as a collaborator, Klemperer tended his musical legacy himself. As Boulez heard, it was not only tradition that he guarded, but the desire to upend it.
Such is made clear in two essential box sets that Warner has released to mark the anniversary of Klemperer’s death. One is dedicated mostly to the classic symphonic recordings that he made for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London from 1954 to 1971, and the other collects his accounts of opera and sacred music from the same period. Many of them are still little short of stunning — radical, even — more than half a century after they were made.
As Heyworth recounts, it was a miracle that Klemperer survived to make those recordings, and therefore to be remembered as he now can be. Afflicted with a bipolar disorder so harsh that his destructive manias and inconsolable depressions lasted for years at a time, his harrowing life story included scandalous love affairs, attacks by Nazis, exile from Germany, a brain tumor, paralysis, poverty, nights in prison, muggings, confrontations with Stalinism and McCarthyism, and a fire that nearly burned him to death in his own bed.
Klemperer was one of those conductors who sought to get out of the way of the music, to play a score objectively. It was an impulse he shared with Arturo Toscanini, whom he admired enough to say, in 1929, that “his performances are more than beautiful, they are right.” Strict, sincere, strong, Klemperer’s readings had momentum whether his tempos were glacial, as they could be near his end, or inflammatory, as they often were before that. His austerity of purpose implied no lack of intensity in execution, such that Heyworth described the effect in 1961 as one of “inspired literalness.” But the aim was impossible to fulfill, and, rather like Toscanini, Klemperer arrived at a style and sound that remains immediately audible as his.
The ideal was still there, though. Klemperer’s Bach may never have been constant, fleet and fervent and flecked with period instruments earlier in his career, then mighty and massive, even mournful later on. Yet what he once said of conducting those works applies broadly as well: “It is the interpreter’s task not to stand between them and the public, but to be the link between the two,” he wrote in the Times in 1942, when his career was at its nadir. “The unadorned interpretation is always the best.”
KLEMPERER WAS BORN in Breslau, Germany, in 1885, but he grew up in Hamburg. He trained in Frankfurt and Berlin, where he studied with Hans Pfitzner, spent time with Ferruccio Busoni and, in 1905, conducted the offstage band in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Mahler was there, and Klemperer became obsessed with him. In 1907, Mahler scrawled a note of recommendation that promised that he was “predestined for the career of a conductor.” As Heyworth notes, Klemperer held it close until his dying day, dedicating himself to the questing ideals of the man who wrote it.
Despite his manic depression, and being a terrifying presence for players and singers alike, Klemperer rose quickly through the opera houses of Central Europe, before settling in Germany: in Cologne, from 1917 to 1924, and Wiesbaden, from 1924 to 1927. He became known for his advocacy of new music; if Leos Janacek and Stravinsky were favorites, and Hindemith and Kurt Weill later on, he could struggle with Arnold Schoenberg. And as he took charge of the Kroll — which aimed to offer a new kind of opera for the new dawn of Germany embodied in the Weimar Republic — he became known, too, for a new kind of aesthetic, the sonic corollary of the modernism that could often be discerned in designs for the house’s stage.
Klemperer had been regarded as a theatrical conductor, perhaps overly so. “Every drum beat heralded a calamity,” a Viennese critic said of his Beethoven in 1921. Some of that volatility is evident in a Brahms First from 1928 and many other early recordings that are preserved on the Archiphon label, which has invaluably documented Klemperer’s activities beyond his London triumphs.
Steadily, though, the strength of line emerged, the integrity of form, the ethic of simplicity. “We found nothing of the melodramatic, nothing of the sensational,” Lawrence Gilman applauded after his New York debut in 1926. Listen now to Wilhelm Furtwängler in Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, and the ear is disoriented for a moment by a past long gone, by a Romanticism inherited from Richard Wagner. But to listen to Klemperer’s terse, angular account from 1927, is to hear the future through the hiss.
The musical face of the Weimar Republic, and Jewish by birth (though he converted to Catholicism in 1919, not returning to Judaism until 1967), Klemperer was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He settled in Los Angeles, but he did not prosper from the émigré experience, as others did. Missing out on posts in Philadelphia and New York, and turning down an opportunity in Pittsburgh that Fritz Reiner gladly seized, he was fired from the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1940. Having survived brain surgery and meningitis the year before, he laid waste to his reputation in a manic period so ruinous that his wife nearly committed him.
It took Klemperer more than a decade to rebuild his career, partly in Budapest, Hungary, though he remained potent when he made it onto a podium; take the insatiable Franz Schubert and Mozart that he recorded for Vox in Paris in 1950, or his savage Mahler Second from Amsterdam in 1951, best heard on Pristine. As late as 1953, steady employment appeared implausible, let alone the exalted stature he soon earned.
Some of Klemperer’s London recordings can be a struggle to hear now, especially some of those he made after the Philharmonia had beaten back the efforts of its founder, EMI producer Walter Legge, to silence it for good, and turned itself into the New Philharmonia in 1964. Klemperer never much cared for virtuosity, and as his beat became less steady and his tempos wound down, standards among the Philharmonia players he served as conductor for life after 1959 began to slip. Warner’s remastering can do nothing for accounts of Robert Schumann and Anton Bruckner that almost fall apart, though other late recordings transcend any such failings; a “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Così Fan Tutte,” from 1970 and 1971, are cast not as fripperies, but as immense tragedies.
Before that, though, Klemperer and the Philharmonia made marvels. “I always say that it’s the orchestra that makes the music, not the conductor,” Klemperer said in 1970, and one of the most interesting things about these recordings is how emotion still breaks through the discipline he imparts on, say, his troubled Mozart and his carefully contained Mahler. A third movement of Brahms’ Third, from 1957 and part of a commanding cycle, is one example; so is a coda to the adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh from 1960. Stripping Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky of sentimentality was another matter, though Klemperer certainly tried: It is not hard to hear a desperate “Pathétique,” from 1961, as the reading of a man who knew pain all too well.
Above all, there is Klemperer’s Beethoven. His “Fidelio” and “Missa Solemnis” recordings have always been seen as remarkable for their seemingly invulnerable belief, but their solidity appears to have been hard won. If there is an impregnable quality to the “Eroica” Symphony and the “Leonore” overtures that he and the Philharmonia made in stereo, as if the freedom that they promise were never in doubt, there is more of a sense of jeopardy to their mono predecessors, as if that freedom had to be earned, measure by difficult measure.
As Legge completed a Beethoven cycle with Klemperer in 1957, he wrote to a colleague that the results “will be prized as long as records are collected.” So they should be.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
