Otto Klemperer (1885-1973)

[Moonfish]

Otto Klemperer (14 May 1885 – 6 July 1973) was a German conductor and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the leading conductors of the 20th century.[Wikipedia]

I could not find a thread on Klemperer, which I found a bit surprising. After all, it seems as if GMG should honor one of the most famous conductors of the 20th century?  We have experienced a bit of a Klemperer revival over the last few years as EMI/Warner released an array of boxes focused on his legacy.  What are your thoughts about Klemperer as a conductor and his recordings? Any favorite performances? Recommendations? Stories about his life?

A Klemperer discography.

Klemperer in about 1920

[Moonfish]

The great conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) interviewed by John Freeman (1915-2014) in 1961 (From the BBC "Face to Face" TV series).

https://www.youtube.com/v/aoozdhcrIK8

[TheGSMoeller]

Nice thread, Peter. I like the idea of having more threads dedicated to the performers.

Klemperer arranged the strings on stage with the violins seperated, that's one reason I've always enjoyed listening to his recordings, it adds a little more depth to his already detailed performance. With good headphones on this arrangement is highly effective.
My favorite from Klemperer is the Mozart set I purchased last year, a little heavy at times, but like I mentioned above its very detailed with tremendous playing, and in good sound. It's a set I truly treasure.


[asin]B00A4AHZZO[/asin]

[aukhawk]

Any favorite performances?

I particularly like his Beethowen Pastoral Symphony (Philharmonia Orchestra) and his Mahler 7 (New Philh.) - both are of course 'late' recordings and both feature exceptionally slow tempi in places.

[Moonfish]

I particularly like his Beethowen Pastoral Symphony (Philharmonia Orchestra) and his Mahler 7 (New Philh.) - both are of course 'late' recordings and both feature exceptionally slow tempi in places.

Aukhawk, are you referring to this 1957 recording of the 6th?

https://www.youtube.com/v/0D0dJJRY0qU

[Moonfish]

I like the idea of having more threads dedicated to the performers.

I completely agree with you there Greg!        I find it fascinating to focus on not only the recordings, but the life and times as well as the careers of the artists. 

Do you like Klemperer's Bruckner recordings? I came across Bruckner's 6th a couple of hours ago and thought about you!   

[TheGSMoeller]

I completely agree with you there Greg!        I find it fascinating to focus on not only the recordings, but the life and times as well as the careers of the artists. 

Do you like Klemperer's Bruckner recordings? I came across Bruckner's 6th a couple of hours ago and thought about you!   

His 6th is very good, often cited as one of the greatest 6ths available. I do think he rushed through the Adagio too quickly, but otherwise its very good.
It made the final four of the blind comparison, 

[Jo498]

I probably have to get the Mozart set eventually, although I do not really want it because I already have 2-3 single discs with the pieces most important to me. Of the newish cheap boxes I only bought the "romantic symphonies" because of everything else I had almost all recordings I really wanted. Some of the (late) recordings can be too slow and stodgy and at least at this stage he was not really the man for lighter or humourous pieces but I generally like his work a lot. (And some of his earlier recordings before his health deteriorated are very fast; I think the ca. 1950 recording of Mahler's 2nd symphony is one of the fastest on records.)
As someone wrote because of the divided violins and the special care for the woodwinds the recordings have almost always tremendous clarity for the vintage.

Favorites include:
Mozart symphonies 25, 31, 34 and 36
Haydn 102 and 104
Beethoven Fidelio and Missa solemnis
Schubert b minor symphony
Mendelssohn's Italian symphony
Brahms' 1st symphony and German Requiem
Bruckner's 4th, 6th and 7th
Mahler's 2nd, 9th and especially the Lied von der Erde with Wunderlich/Ludwig

[prémont]

I particularly like his Beethowen Pastoral Symphony (Philharmonia Orchestra) ...

I much prefer his Pastoral Symphony with the Vienna Symphony orchestra on Vox to the Philharmonia version. The Vox is mono, but the piece benefits very much from the more rural sound of the Viennese instruments.

[Mookalafalas]

I'm an avid collector of Klemperer. A fascinating man, great musician, and key historical figure, IMO.  He was also brilliantly recorded.  Unlike Furtwangler, where you have to hear the performance through the bad sound, sometimes with Klemp I wonder if I am over-valuing the performance due to the fantastically rich and detailed recordings (or, is he in some way responsible for this through his decisions as a conductor? In vol 1 of his bio, it mentions his making some controversial changes in the Beethoven scores so as to "un-clog" the sound in places. This is when he was a young man, and there are no recordings of these. I cannot afford the second volume, so don't know if he continued the practice in his later career).  I hope there are a lot more posts in this thread. A lot of things to talk about.

[Leo K.]

Thanks Moonfish for creating this thread!

I've been on a Klemp kick for weeks since I began to study his recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

I've collected most of the new boxes and have been enjoying hearing his Berlioz, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann and Mendelssohn so far!

Otto Klemperer - Behind every great conductor
By Norman Lebrecht / July 30, 2003


   
I wonder whether any young woman today would do what Lotte did, and give up her life for the sake of her father and his art. Lotte was the only daughter of Otto Klemperer, the conductor who, more than any other, made Berlin a byword for musical modernism in the 1920s and London a benchmark for orchestral excellence in the 1960s.

He could not have achieved these transformat ions unaided. Klemperer suffered from a severe form of cyclothymic illness which, in manic phases, provoked arrest and disgrace, and in depressive mood, brought him close to self-destruction. Without a responsible relative in constant attendance, Klemperer could not have fulfilled his invaluable musical duties. Even now, 30 years after his death, every British orchestra contains players whose standards were set by Klemperer, and whose eyes glisten at the mention of his name.

The first to look after him was his long-suffering wife, Johanna - long-suffering because when Klemperer was on a high he was beset by satyriasis, recklessly pursuing every woman within arm's reach. Gustav Mahler's daughter, Anna, once found herself chased by him around a dining table. Knowing that he had been close to both her parents, she breathlessly sought to preserve dignity and friendship. "Dr Klemperer," she gasped, "in Bach's B-minor mass, rehearsal figure 48, is that top note F or F-sharp?" Klemperer stopped as if stunned and delivered a magisterial analysis of the work. Music was the only interest that could override his furious compulsions.

Johanna saw him through the glory years at Berlin's Kroll Opera, where he presented popular classics in radical reconstructions, along with new operas by Weill and Janaek, to an audience comprised of factory and office workers. What Klemperer did at the Kroll remains a utopian model for 21st century opera houses. It was, inevitably, anathema to the Nazis.

The family left Germany a month after Hitler seized power. Lotte was nine and a comfort to her father in the bewilderment of exile. "Dr Klemperer," said an orchestral administrator in Los Angeles, "you and I have become such good friends that from now on I'm gonna call you 'Otto'." "You may call," growled Klemperer, "but I vill not come."

In 1939 he underwent surgery for a brain tumour and emerged with one side of his face paralysed, his tongue atrophied and his behaviour even more erratic. Johanna refused to commit him to a mental institution, but Klemperer walked out on her, saying he needed a year's freedom. He went careering around the country with the wife of the Utah Symphony music director, Maurice Abravanel, leaving a trail of unpaid bills. Reported missing on the front page of the New York Times, he was arrested and displayed in the next day's papers behind bars. Released on bail, he faced a mob of reporters, with Lotte acting as mediator and interpreter. She was 17 and had already been thrust into her life's mission.

Most American orchestras, scandalised by Klemperer's conduct, crossed him off their books. After a concert in Los Angeles, he went walkabout and was found beaten up in a gutter. A 1947 tour of Europe was peppered with madcap incidents, winding up in Budapest where Klemperer took charge of the State Opera and Lotte flirted with communism until they were nudged out.

Back in America, he was blacklisted for serving on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and refused a passport extension. In November 1954, he was holed up, flat broke, in a fleapit New York hotel when a young agent, chancing his luck, asked him to conduct a concert in Portland, Oregon. Klemperer balked at travelling 3,000 miles for a single gig, but Lotte and the agent fell "half in love" and she persuaded her father to take the date. It marked a turning point in post-war musical destiny.

In Portland, Klemperer ripped an epochal Beethoven Seventh out of the unbelieving fingers of provincial musicians, most of whom had never played it before. The agent, Ronald Wilford, made his name overnight and went on to become the mightiest commercial force in musical America. Klemperer was given a passport and flew to London, where the producer Walter Legge wanted him to conduct the Philharmonia, EMI's recording band.

In a city awash with orchestras-that played just about as well as required and seldom better, Klemperer fired the Philharmonia with an unEnglish excess of aspiration and self-belief. He conceived each work as a structural integrity, revealing its contours from the opening bars and giving musicians and listeners alike an extraordinary confidence in their comprehension of the work. Every concert seemed to have been programmed as an act of human necessity. At the end of his inaugural Beethoven cycle, the jubilation was so exuberant that the London County Council commissioned a bust of Klemperer from Jacob Epstein for the Royal Festival Hall, where it stands to this day.

He continued to court disaster, suffering near-fatal burns when his pipe caught fire in bed and he tried to extinguish it with a whisky flask. In the public eye he was brutally forthright, never more so than on John Freeman's Face To Face television programme. With London musicians he was alternately rough-tongued and paternal, handing out cigarettes to the ones who pleased him. When Legge disbanded the Philharmonia in 1964, Klemperer gave his allegiance to the players, investing them with his own rugged independence and securing the orchestra's survival.

None of this could have come about without Lotte's devotion. Her tongue could be as rough as his when dealing with the fixers of the record industry, but she had the charm and wit to ease most vicissitudes, never presuming to control his life. One morning, bringing the old man his breakfast tray, she found him in bed with a young woman. "This is my daughter, Lotte," grunted Klemperer by way of introduction, "and you - what did you say your name was?"

To feminists, Lotte's must appear a wasted life, a voluntary form of child sacrifice that postmodern times have made redundant. She died this month, aged 79, at her home outside Zurich, unknown beyond the backstage of concert halls and with few tributes to mark her passing.

Intellectual, attractive and formidably capable, Lotte could have made a very different life for herself. When I asked once whether she had ever considered it, she politely ignored my impertinence.

She had made a calculated career choice to be her father's helper, a role that was no less valid in her eyes than the heady ascent of women politicians, artists and CEOs. In 1954, Lotte wrote that her parents' plight had "made me resentful, furious and ... ambitious". By facilitating her father's fulfilment, her achievement will resonate for ever on record and in our concert life. The Philharmonia will soon announce a musical tribute in memory of Lotte Klemperer.

[Leo K.]

Some years ago I wrote this review of Klemperer's 1971 account of Mahler's 2nd.

Anne Finley, soprano
Alfreda Hodgson, contralto
New Philharmonia Chorus & Orchestra
Otto Klemperer, cond.
Recording: Royal Festival Hall, London, 16 May 1971

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gl-7MBjzTvM

released on Arkadia in the early 90s:



This performance is a kind dissection or surgery, as if Mahler is having an operation.  It is as if the score is being scrutinized for any last shred of possible meaning and subjectivity and cut out like a disease and placed under a microscope for study.  The interpetation is more from the viewpoint of Klemperer (with scapel in hand) rather than Mahler, but I find this a very moving performance...focused and strong, and very dark at the beginning, which largely persists until the Urlicht movement, which shines like the sun with the appearance of a human voice.  Klemperer's view with the Andante is perhaps the saddest of any recording I've encountered.  Klemperer seems to magnify the 'disease' under his microscope here and there is no cure.  The way the music fades at the end of the Andante, the way the strings somehow disappear is not unlike the 9th Symphony Adagio or the last bars of Das Lied Von der Erde.  The Scherzo makes me feel we have been left outside the operating room, with only a window to look into to witness a precedure unknown in our experience.

The Finale really feels like a narrative epic...a convincing path to light from darkness.  The light, however, is reflected in sorrow.  There are moments when everything breaks down and even sounds like Ives at his most chaotic.  The percussion crescendo is very industrial and primal beyond description...it slowly stirs...the dead are drying to dig from the earth, and the struggle is heard in all it's passion...as if earth is hanging on to the dead.  Towards the end the performance actually reaches into the spiritual, which I didn't expect based on what I've already heard.  The last time I heard such an arresting M2 was when I first heard Scherchen's unique account.  Not everyone will dig this, but for me this is a performance to savor for special occasions.

[Sean]

His Mahler Two is unlistenable, not only are the tempos slow and crackers but he doesn't have the measure of the idiom or the passion. Quite an indication of how a great artist can get something totally wrong.

His Das Lied of course is superb.

[Leo K.]

Just to point out, Klemperer actually did both the fastest and slowest versions of Mahler 2.  His Sydney one from 1950 is 67 minutes; his New Philharmonia one from 1971 takes 98.  The timings for the finale says it all:  27 for the Sydney one, 42 for the New Philharmonia one!

[Leo K.]

(someone posted this anectote on the M-List)

1961, Otto recording Bach's St. Matthew Passion for EMI. All the solo singers and half the chorus are complaining that Klemperer's tempi are too slow for them to sing, they're running out of breath, so they elect Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to talk to him.

DFD: Dr. Klemperer?

OK: Ja, Fischer?

DFD: Last night I had a dream. Bach came to me and said, "I'm glad that you're singing in my St. Matthew Passion, but why so slow?"

OK: You know, it's funny. Last night I had a dream, too. Bach came to me and said, "I'm glad you're recording my St. Matthew Passion, but - who is this Fischer?"

[TheGSMoeller]

(someone posted this anectote on the M-List)

1961, Otto recording Bach's St. Matthew Passion for EMI. All the solo singers and half the chorus are complaining that Klemperer's tempi are too slow for them to sing, they're running out of breath, so they elect Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to talk to him.

DFD: Dr. Klemperer?

OK: Ja, Fischer?

DFD: Last night I had a dream. Bach came to me and said, "I'm glad that you're singing in my St. Matthew Passion, but why so slow?"

OK: You know, it's funny. Last night I had a dream, too. Bach came to me and said, "I'm glad you're recording my St. Matthew Passion, but - who is this Fischer?"

That's funny. Thanks for sharing, Leo.

[Leo K.]

Klemperer's account of Mahler's 7 is in my "M7 Top 4" actually.  It sits alongside Horenstein's, Scherchen's (in Toronto) and Haenchen's accounts.  It is radical, it is a mutant and I love it. I just received this new (EMI Japanese) release, the others I've heard from this "HQ" series are astounding.



I sometimes feel Klemp unconsciously (or through illness) crossed over into the avant garde "conceptual" movement that was real big in the 60's.   Of course, in conceptual art the idea was more important than the actual product or final execution.  Klemp seemed to create 'happenings' or 'performance-art' rather than conventional performances where the musical narrative is more important.  Klemp reminds me of Glenn Gould, another musician who makes me think of conceptual art.  Actually, Charles Ives is another 'conceptual' musician.

[Leo K.]

That's funny. Thanks for sharing, Leo.

Thanks!

Here's another (again...saw this on the M-list):

Harold C. Schonberg in his book The Great Conductors related a couple more Klemperer stories. Once Klemperer actually said "Good" to a player, such a rare event that the orchestra broke into applause. Then Klemp growled, "It was not THAT good."

Another time toward the end of a rehearsal Klemperer was apparently aware only of the music. The concertmaster looked at his watch; he looked again, making a production out of it; finally he nearly waved it under Klemperer's nose. The maestro asked, "Is it going?"

[Sean]

Just to point out, Klemperer actually did both the fastest and slowest versions of Mahler 2.  His Sydney one from 1950 is 67 minutes; his New Philharmonia one from 1971 takes 98.  The timings for the finale says it all:  27 for the Sydney one, 42 for the New Philharmonia one!

Thanks Leo. By the way the Penguin Guide review of this performance is strangely incorrect, even saying the first movement tempo is brisk when it's a big yawn.

[Sean]

Three great performances- Eroica 1962, Don Giovanni, Schubert 5 & 8.

The Eroica first movement is the greatest and probably the greatest possible performance.