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Published: Friday, 06 December 2024 at 10:53 AM
Otto Klemperer: he fled the Nazis, suffered mental illness – and was one of the great conductors
Do you scowl, as I do, at the phrase ‘Based on a True Story’? So, the movie or TV company warmed to a real-life narrative sufficiently to want to bring it to the screen, but only if ‘enhanced’ by made-up stuff? Well, if any musical life-story offers more than enough by way of unvarnished, gripping truth to satisfy even the pickiest screenwriter, it’s the one navigated by conductor Otto Klemperer.
The action would get under way (I reckon) in 1941, with Klemperer observed sneaking out of the New York psychiatric institution where he’s long been held as a patient. He’s been suffering from severe bipolar-related depression (a lifelong affliction), possibly triggered by the removal of a life-threatening brain tumour in 1939. A frantic search ensues. Klemperer is found, safe, two days later in New Jersey.
Severe damage has been done to Klemperer’s career. His contract as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra is cancelled. Precious little other high-level work is on offer. The scene is being set for, eventually, a ‘Triumph Against All Odds’ denouement in the shape of Klemperer’s remarkable partnership with the Philharmonia Orchestra after World War II.
With Klemperer’s struggles both with lifelong medical issues and professional setbacks, any movie-maker could keep the threat of imminent disaster in the dramatic equation as the plot unfolds. To start the gradual build-up of tension, though, requires a ‘dissolve’ flashback to the days when ‘it all seemed to be going so well’.
When was Otto Klemperer born?
Born into a musical family (in 1885, in an area of Prussia now in Poland), the young Otto Klemperer received nothing but encouragement to make music his life. After piano and composition studies, he entered Gustav Mahler’s orbit at the Vienna Court Opera in the early years of the 20th century.
Impressed with his talents, Mahler wrote a testimonial which helped Klemperer gain a foot in the door as a conductor at the New German Theatre in Prague. ‘He was so kind and helpful to young people,’ was Klemperer’s verdict on Mahler, ‘although to the older generation he often seemed bad-tempered, and that’s why they hated him.’
Klemperer worked his way through a range of conducting posts at German opera houses through and well beyond the years of World War I, the young firebrand’s speciality being in championing the newest music, engaging in the whole production process. In 1927, the Prussian Ministry of Culture in Berlin sought to make the Kroll Opera a flagbearer for Germany’s new status as a republic.
As resident conductor, Klemperer was let loose to make a statement about contemporary opera through multiple performances, fully preparing productions and bedding them in. ‘We gave only ten operas in nine months,’ he recalled, ‘repeating the performances very often. Here opera and drama were truly united.’ Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Janáček and Kurt Weill were among the composers whose work was showcased, along with new takes on classic 18th- and 19th-century operas.
The early Klemperer: rhythmic drive, heady excitement
The 1920s and early ’30s provide us with our first experience of Klemperer on disc. For anyone weaned on his late-life readings of Beethoven – craggily monumental and ‘conservative’ in tempo – his Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra recordings of Richard Strauss’s Don Juan or ‘Fêtes’ from the Nocturnes of Claude Debussy may come as something of a shock, given their rhythmic drive and sense of heady excitement.
As our screenplay would doubtless play up, it was all going too well. The Kroll Opera experiment fell victim as early as 1931 to financial problems and a backlash from influential conservative cultural opinion. The company’s closure was a body blow to Klemperer, to whom it was perhaps at least some comfort that the Kroll Opera’s adventurous artistic legacy would have a significant influence around the opera world.
Fleeing Nazi Germany
Worse was to come. In 1933, Klemperer fled Germany with his wife, the operatic soprano Johanna Geisler, and their two children. Klemperer was Jewish by birth, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism (for his marriage in 1919) was no defence against the Nazi Party’s rabid intolerance of Jewish blood.
As happened with many 20th-century musical émigrés (think also of Rachmaninov, Korngold, Stravinsky and Schoenberg), the US offered refuge and a fresh start. Orchestral concerts, formerly a lesser priority, now became Klemperer’s bread and butter. Around his music directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic came opportunities with orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony and the New York Philharmonic (whose players enraged him by backing John Barbirolli to become music director from 1937).
Something of a dramatic fault-line was crossed in repertoire terms, and familiar classical Germanic music became much more the focus – although his championing of Mahler and Bruckner in fact broke new ground for many American concertgoers.
An Indian summer of concerts and recordings
Then the brain tumour and the plunge into manic depression. Again, the need to rebuild his career. Europe beckoned. The appointment in 1947 to Hungarian State Opera as music director led to one of the happiest periods of Klemperer’s career.
However, the artistic freedom he so relished was eventually reined in by Communist party interference. Now began an extended period in which Klemperer held no permanent position. He picked up guest conducting as far afield as Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada and France – but it was to be London, via music producer Walter Legge and his brainchild the Philharmonia Orchestra, which offered Klemperer a famously golden Indian summer in terms not just of memorable concerts but a staggering late harvest of recordings.
The mercurial Legge, head of EMI’s A&R, had snared one Herbert von Karajan to conduct the Philharmonia on a regular basis. However, when in 1954 the Berlin Philharmonic wooed Karajan back to Germany as chief conductor on the death of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Legge turned increasingly to Klemperer.
With Furtwängler gone and Arturo Toscanini retired, there was a gap in the market for an elder statesman able to direct authoritative readings of classical Austrian-German repertoire as a major (if not exclusive) selling-point. After progressively demonstrating that the cap fitted, Klemperer was invited in 1959 to become the Philharmonia’s first principal conductor. The re-invention was complete – from dashing, dynamic champion of all that was new to earnest seeker after the eternal truths hidden in classic repertoire.
Two major mishaps
However, it wouldn’t be Otto Klemperer without mishaps along the way to defer the movie-maker’s climactic triumph. In 1951, for example, Klemperer slipped on ice at Montreal Airport and fractured his femur, resulting in a long period off the podium. In October 1958, the now 73-year-old maestro nodded off while smoking his pipe in bed.
He woke to find the bedclothes alight. In his confusion, he tipped something highly flammable onto the flames instead of water (was it camphor medication for his chest… or whisky??). Imagine that episode in lurid Technicolor. Recovery from severe burns cost him almost a year.
Over the years, Klemperer offered Philharmonia followers his Bach, Mozart (a little uncharacterful for some), magisterial Beethoven, Brahms, plus performances of Mahler and Bruckner which helped give their music a new stature. Mahler’s time had come, he reckoned.
The Philharmonia players adored Klemperer
‘I think after two world wars,’ he said, ‘one feels more the uncertainty, the questioning enshrined in his music. We understand its schizophrenia.’ Often overlooked, though, are Klemperer’s insightful offerings of composers outside his Germanic, Classical-Romantic wheelhouse: the likes of Bartók and Berlioz, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.
The Philharmonia players adored Klemperer. When Legge dissolved the orchestra in 1964, the musicians reformed it as a self-governing entity, The New Philharmonia, and unanimously voted in Klemperer as chief conductor. The recordings continued to flow.
Pianist Sir András Schiff has only accessed Klemperer’s music-making via these and video, but this has been enough to make the maestro ‘one of my musical heroes. Whenever I want to hear a really great piece of music, Klemperer never disappoints. He has no vanity whatsoever, no ego. He lets the composer and the work speak. He doesn’t “interpret”.’
A shaky beat, a gaunt face bled of all expression
The man himself suggested that a key element in his approach was to ensure that his bowing and dynamic markings were inserted into the orchestral parts by the Philharmonia librarian prior to rehearsals. Even so, as someone who vividly recalls as a teenager watching Otto Klemperer conduct Beethoven on BBC television – seated, gaunt face bled of all expression, shaky beat – I’m dying to ask one-time Philharmonia violinist Martyn Jones just how the musical magic was transmitted to the players.
‘Like all the great conductors,’ he says, ‘it was down to pure personality. You only had to glance up and you knew what he wanted. He had the ability to conduct at a slow tempo yet never let the music drag. There are conductors who make you think of someone driving at breakneck speed through beautiful countryside… which is never taken in. With Klemperer, you examined every blade of grass. At his tempos you heard every note and every nuance. If people only listen to his recordings with fresh ears they’ll hear so much more of the music.’
His daughter was vital to keeping the Klemperer show on the road
The litmus test was the electricity generated in the concert hall, says Jones. ‘The standing ovation he received in the Festival Hall, I think for a Mahler performance with us, was like nothing I’d seen before. They went berserk at a Paris concert we gave… simply when he came on.’
The desire to communicate through great music is surely the central reason why Klemperer ploughed on through all the setbacks. Yet the selfless work of his daughter Lotte, as everything from personal secretary to nurse, was vital to keeping the show on the road.
Jones describes her as Klemperer’s ‘total mainstay’. The conductor and musicologist Antony Beaumont expressed the opinion that, ‘The miracle of Otto Klemperer’s late flowering as an international conductor was largely her achievement.’
When did Klemperer die?
That late flowering culminated in Klemperer’s last concert as a conductor – of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms – with his beloved Philharmonia in the Royal Festival Hall on 26 September 1971.
He had no intention of retiring that night. However, this time there was no answer to medical complications. In the embrace once more of the Jewish faith, Klemperer died in Switzerland, where he had long been settled, in July 1973. His obituary in The Times summed up the hallmarks of his conducting as its ‘spacious, perfectly proportioned architecture, strength and intensity and inner radiance of sonority, majesty of line.’
Cue closing credits. But not before a last word from András Schiff. ‘Seeing Klemperer conduct on film makes me wonder what conducting really is about. There’s nothing to “watch”. There’s no choreography.
‘And yet his presence is overwhelming. I’m afraid that in today’s musical world, where most people are not listening but watching, Otto Klemperer would not be making a great career. But in my mind, there’s no question about it. He’s one of the greatest. A shining example of humility and integrity.’