Severe damage has been done to Klemperer\u2019s 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 \u2018Triumph Against All Odds\u2019 denouement in the shape of Klemperer\u2019s remarkable partnership with the Philharmonia Orchestra after World War II.<\/p>
With Klemperer\u2019s 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 \u2018dissolve\u2019 flashback to the days when \u2018it all seemed to be going so well<\/i>\u2019.<\/p> When was Otto Klemperer born?<\/h2>
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<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s orbit at the Vienna Court Opera in the early years of the 20th century.<\/p> 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. \u2018He was so kind and helpful to young people,\u2019 was Klemperer\u2019s verdict on Mahler, \u2018although to the older generation he often seemed bad-tempered, and that\u2019s why they hated him.\u2019<\/p> Klemperer worked his way through a range of conducting posts at German opera houses through and well beyond the years of World War I<\/a><\/strong>, the young firebrand\u2019s 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\u2019s new status as a republic.<\/p> As resident conductor, Klemperer was let loose to make a statement about contemporary opera through multiple performances, fully preparing productions and bedding them in. \u2018We gave only ten operas in nine months,\u2019 he recalled, \u2018repeating the performances very often. Here opera and drama were truly united.\u2019 Stravinsky<\/a><\/strong>, Schoenberg<\/a><\/strong>, Hindemith<\/a><\/strong>, Jan\u00e1\u010dek<\/a><\/strong> and Kurt Weill<\/a><\/strong> were among the composers whose work was showcased, along with new takes on classic 18th- and 19th-century operas.<\/p> The 1920s and early \u201930s provide us with our first experience of Klemperer on disc. For anyone weaned on his late-life readings of Beethoven \u2013 craggily monumental and \u2018conservative\u2019 in tempo \u2013 his Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra recordings of Richard Strauss\u2019s Don Juan<\/i><\/a><\/strong> or \u2018F\u00eates\u2019 from the Nocturnes<\/i><\/a><\/strong> of Claude Debussy<\/a><\/strong> may come as something of a shock, given their rhythmic drive and sense of heady excitement.<\/p> As our screenplay would doubtless play up, it was all going too <\/i>well. The Kroll Opera experiment fell victim as early as 1931 to financial problems and a backlash from influential conservative cultural opinion. The company\u2019s closure was a body blow to Klemperer, to whom it was perhaps at least some comfort that the Kroll Opera\u2019s adventurous artistic legacy would have a significant influence around the opera world.<\/p> Worse was to come. In 1933, Klemperer fled Germany with his wife, the operatic soprano<\/a><\/strong> 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\u2019s rabid intolerance of Jewish blood.<\/p> As happened with many 20th-century musical \u00e9migr\u00e9s (think also of Rachmaninov<\/a><\/strong>, Korngold<\/a><\/strong>, Stravinsky and Schoenberg), the US offered refuge and a fresh start. Orchestral concerts, formerly a lesser priority, now became Klemperer\u2019s 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).<\/p>
![\"Otto](\"https:\/\/c02.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2024\/12\/Untitled-design-2024-12-06T093649.801.jpg\")
The early Klemperer: rhythmic drive, heady excitement<\/h2>
Fleeing Nazi Germany<\/h2>