Otto Klemperer by Walter Legge

In May 1960, the conductor Otto Klemperer celebrated his 75th birthday. In the June issue, the EMI producer and managing director of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Walter Legge – who masterminded Klemperer's recording activities for EMI – wrote a birthday tribute…

Otto Klemperer by Walter Legge

OTTO KLEMPERER will be seventy five on May 14th. Columbia are celebrating the occasion by publishing on that day two records of orchestral excerpts from Wagner's operas and music-dramas which show aspects of Klemperer's art unfamiliar to the English-speaking world. His fame was first established as an operatic conductor and he was a man of nearly fifty before political exile in America compelled him to confine his musical activities to the concert hall for fourteen years.

Since the time when practice proved that 1arge musical forces could no longer be held together and directed from the harpsichord or by a violin-playing-leader, the great conductors have learned their craft and art in the opera-house. Klemperer began his career in 1907 at the German Opera in Prague, a theatre with a great tradition: Anton Seidl, Gustav Mahler, and Artur Nikisch had been there before him. It was a hard school. Then, as now in Central European opera-houses, the young conductor had not only to learn the current repertoire and to teach the solo singers and chorus their parts, but conduct off-stage choruses and bands and prepare performances for his seniors. The repertoire ranged from Mozart and Weber through Wagner and Verdi to Viennese operettas. At this period Klemperer thought nothing of alternating between Tannhäuser and The Merry Widow, between Lohengrin and The Laundry Maid in Prague and escaping to Vienna and Munich to assist at the rehearsals of Mahler's later symphonies.

From Prague he went to the Hamburg Opera, then one of the best theatres in Europe. The company included two promising beginners, Elisabeth Schumann and Lotte Lehmann, who first attracted attention as Pages in Lohengrin under his direction. With Caruso as a guest artist he conducted performances of Martha, Carmen and La Bohème. In 1914 he went to Strasbourg and from there as Musical Director to the Cologne Opera (1917-1924). The spread of his international fame began in the later years of this appointment. He conducted Fidelio, Tristan and Tannhäuser in Barcelona in 1920; Siegfried in Rome in 1923; Carmen in Moscow and Leningrad in 1924 and 1925.

An invitation to join the Berlin State Opera in 1924 he declined in favour of Musical Directorship of the Wiesbaden Opera, but in 1927 Klemperer accepted the Directorship of the Kroll-Oper in Berlin. This was the most controversial period of his career. At that time Berlin was the musical capital of the world. There were three opera houses: The Staatsoper, Unter den Linden, the Stadtische Oper in Charlottenburg and the Kroll-Oper, each playing seven times a week, ten months a year. The musical directors were respectively Kleiber, Bruno Walter and Klemperer. Furtwängler was Director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and when Siegfried Ochs died in 1928, Klemperer was invited to reorganize and direct the Philharmonic Chorus.

The older theatres concentrated mainly on the established repertoire. Klemperer, working on a much smaller subvention, built up a repertoire of forty-four works ranging from Gluck's Orphée through Wagner, Verdi and Offenbach to Janacek, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith. Under his direction the Kroll-Oper became the most vital experimental opera-house in the history of the art. Stimulated by his experience of the Russian theatres and in particular Stanislavsky's adventurous achievements Klemperer collected around him the most brilliant avant-gardists of the German theatre. The originality of his productions, his unconventional treatment of the standard repertoire and the high percentage of contemporary music aroused violent antagonism not only from the critics but from various political parties. The theatre was closed in 1931. He continued to conduct at the Staatsoper until February 1933 but in the following month on the seizure of power by the National Socialist Party, his contract was summarily cancelled.

Two months previously President von Hindenburg had presented Klemperer with the Goethe Medal for his services to German culture. In February he conducted a new production of Tannhäuser. Adolf Hitler was in the audience: Less than a month later Klemperer was a refugee in Switzerland.

From 1933 until 1947 Klemperer conducted no opera. He had already been to New York in 1926 and 1927 as guest conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra and in 1933 he was appointed Musical Director of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. In 1937 he founded the Pittsburgh Orchestra. For all the honours conferred upon him (Occidental College, Doctor of Law, h.c. 1936, and the same title by the Universities of California and Los Angeles in 1937), and his close friendship with his neighbour Arnold Schoenberg, the years of exile were years of tribulation. Possibly as the result of a fall from the rostrum during a rehearsal with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in February 1933 a brain tumour developed, the treatment and removal of which caused long periods of inactivity and finally left him lamed and partly paralysed.

In 1947, at the invitation of Dr Todt, the Director of the Budapest Opera and husband of the pianist Annie Fischer, Klemperer returned to Europe as Musical Director of the Budapest Opera. In three years he built up a remarkable ensemble and himself conducted and produced the five great Mozart operas, Meistersinger, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Fidelio, La Traviata and Tales of Hoffmann. During this period he also gave concerts in the principal European cities. His close association with London began in 1951 when he conducted the first two concerts given by the Philharrnonia Orchestra in the newly-opened Royal Festival Hall. The realization of plans for close collaboration between Klemperer and this orchestra was delayed by a fall at Montreal Airport. A multiple fracture of the femur immobilized him for several months and for the next years Klemperer was compelled to conduct sitting, a posture which would have been an even greater handicap for a man of less imposing stature. The improvement in his physical condition suffered further set-backs in winter 1954-55, when he had to undergo two major operations in quick succession. But again his superhuman will triumphed and within three months he was conducting a Beethoven cycle with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and concerts with the Philharrnonia in London. During a studio performance of Don Giovanni in May 1955, at the first entry of the trombones (Shaw's "sound of dreadful joy to all musicians") Klemperer suddenly rose unaided to his full height and conducted the remainder of the performance standing.

Settled, with a home in Zurich, appreciated and esteemed in London and Amsterdam as no "foreign" conductor had ever been, it seemed that Klemperer had achieved the security and serenity that had eluded him throughout his embattled career. No season had looked rosier than 1958/59. He was due to conduct for the first time at the Leeds Triennial Festival; he was to give a series of twenty-one concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra – a conspectus of his mastery from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms to Bruckner and Mahler; he was to conduct Tristan und Isolde in a new production by Wieland Wagner at the Holland Festival and, to crown the year, to conduct for the first time in Bayreuth – Die Meistersinger. But misfortune had not finished with him. Recuperating from a mild attack of bronchitis he fell asleep while smoking in bed. Waking in smouldering bedclothes he clutched at the nearest liquid which, it was later discovered, had been spirits of camphor. Only those who knew the awful will with which he had overcome previous afflictions believed he could survive the burns and shock. For nine months the outcome was uncertain. Then, with some wounds still unhealed, he travelled against all advice to Holland to prepare Tristan. After a week of rehearsals which Wieland Wagner told me "showed me for the first time how Wagner could sound" Klemperer collapsed and was taken back to Switzerland for further skin-graftings and treatment. At last, in September 1959, he conducted again; two concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Lucerne Festival. To honour his return I appointed him principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra for life.

Klemperer was already musical head of the Hamburg Opera before he conducted in 1911 his first important orchestral concert. The Symphony was Mahler's Fourth. In 1911 he conducted the "Eroica" in Mannheim, but it was not until 1919 when he took over the concerts of the Cologne Opera Orchestra that his fame as a symphonic conductor was firmly established. His programmes of the period show the catholicism of his taste and the interest in contemporary music which made him a storm-centre until he was forced to leave Germany. In those years he was the most active champion of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Webern and Janacek, Hindemith and Bartók, Weill and Krenek. Even today there is no man of his generation and comparable eminence so deeply interested and well-informed of contemporary musical trends.

"Incomparable" is a word frequently used to describe Klemperer's art: the man himself is incomparable. He is a giant whose towering frame, powerful physique and relentless will have withstood adversity like an ancient oak. The man and the artist are a twin manifestation of an uncompromising, daemonic will and integrity unchanged by age, adversity and suffering. He is a man of few but trenchant words whose mordant wit seems a bizarre amalgam of Swift and Groucho Marx, but is, in fact, laconic expression of a basic truth.

It is his obsession with truth that makes him the great interpreter. For Klemperer the score is Holy Writ and his obedience to the composer's text is the very antithesis of the artifices by which too many conductors intrude their own personalities between the composer and the listener. Klemperer departs from the detail of the text only when he is convinced that either the manuscript does not exactly convey what the composer really wanted, or when subsequent development in the structure or carrying power of present-day instruments automatically leads to a misinterpretation of the composer's intentions. Earlier in his career he used in turn the Wagner, Mahler and Weingartner retouchings of the scoring of the problematic passages in the Beethoven symphonies. After more than half a century of wrestling with these problems the only luxuries he now indulges in the nine Beethoven symphonies are the doubling of the piccolo in the last movement of the Fifth Symphony and the doubling of the woodwind parts in the tuttis of the second and fourth movements of the Ninth. Otherwise the adjustments are in dynamic markings to make clear the span and detail of musical architecture.

The logical corollary of Klemperer's preoccupation with the composer's text, his long practical experience of conveying his will and intentions by Spartan economy of word and gesture is the extraordinary suggestive power he radiates. He does not ask more of the orchestral musician than that he should play exactly what he sees in the notes in front of him, with meticulous attention to detail of note values, rhythm, phrasing, intonation, dynamics, beauty and intensity of tone.

By some inexplicable alchemy, deceptively undemonstrative, Klemperer restores to the clumsy hieroglyphics we call musical notation – black shapes on white paper – the incandescent glow they had in the composer's mind in the ecstatic agony of creation.

Search for more articles about Otto Klemperer in the Gramophone Archive.