Discographic Indian summers came to two of the 20th century’s greatest conductors: Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer. Of the two, it was Klemperer’s late efflorescence that bestowed the greatest posthumous blessing, given that Toscanini would have been remembered whether he made his long series of RCA Victor recordings with the NBC Symphony or not. Toscanini started recording late in life (his first discs with the La Scala Orchestra, made even before the advent of microphones, date from his 50s), but he was already a legend by the time he made history in the tinder-dry studio in Rockefeller Center that nowadays hosts Saturday Night Live. His stature was greatly enhanced by all those RCA Victor recordings with the NBC Symphony, and they—together with their originating broadcasts—made him a household name throughout America. But had his recorded legacy stopped with the small but wonderful series with the New York Philharmonic in the 1930s, he would have retained his place on conductorial Olympus.
Klemperer’s situation was different. By the time Walter Legge got Klemperer in front of London’s stellar Philharmonia Orchestra in the mid-1950s, Klemperer was close to being a spent force, washed up and thrown out. Oh, he still made appearances with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, chief amongst them Amsterdam’s lordly Concertgebouw and the Vienna Philharmonic, but he was a once-in-a-while kind of guy, a conductor that most institutions hired with their hearts in their throat. Klemperer was unreliable, to say the least, and unpredictable to an astonishing degree. Part of that stemmed from his severe bipolar disorder; when he was in the manic phase (which could last for years) his behavior was destructive not only to himself but to everyone around him. He could be nearly impossible to work with during his depressed phases. But even between the two, when he was more or less on an even keel, he had a fearsome temper and some glaring holes in his moral foundation. To me one of the more telling episodes had to do with a small-scale orchestra organized by the WPA in depression-wracked New York. The orchestral librarian put the conductor’s score for the wrong Bach Brandenburg concerto on the conductor’s podium. Hardly an earthshattering error. But Klemperer erupted into a rage (this during a concert, mind you) and threw the score into the orchestra, striking a musician’s cello. It was a childish tantrum, almost inconceivable in a supposedly grown-up man, but not all that atypical. Klemperer, archetype of the waspish and tyrannical German conductor, could be mind-numbingly rude to players of even the finest orchestras. He also had a host of medical issues, some of them severe. A 1940 operation to remove a brain tumor rendered his right side partly paralyzed and probably exacerbated the extremes of his manic depression. He had a bladder tumor as well as bouts of urinary tract infections. From the 1950s on he usually conducted sitting down and got around in a wheelchair. He was amazingly accident prone. People fall down sometimes, but when Klemperer took a spill, like as not he wound up with a broken hip. He seemed to be always falling, tripping, running into things, getting into scrapes. And then there was the icing on the cake later in his life, when he fell asleep smoking in bed, set the bed on fire, and then tried to douse the flames with a bottle of spirits of camphor that had been left on his bedside table after a back massage. That one almost killed him, required multiple skin grafts, and left a man with a more than passing resemblance to Viktor Frankenstein’s snip-n-sew concoction even more forbidding.
Through it all he persevered somehow, even after he became persona non grata in a number of the world’s finest orchestras, even through times of near-destitution, even while many of his colleagues considered him insane and unemployable. He stood second to none in his ability to shoot himself in the foot. When Toscanini announced his retirement from the New York Philharmonic in the mid-1930s, Klemperer was in the United States at the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and in almost every way the ideal successor. The Philharmonic’s head honcho Arthur Judson was Klemperer’s manager. It should have been a slam-dunk. But Klemperer chose to pick a nasty, pointless, and utterly inconsiderate fight with Judson regarding repertory choices for some of his guest appearances with the Philharmonic, and in the aftermath destroyed not only his chances of becoming music director but ever conducting the Philharmonic again under any circumstances. It was the sort of blunder that would have been breathtaking in a callous teenager who, trying to land an after-school job at McDonald’s, mouthed off rudely to the manager and was sent packing.
But Klemperer was a whale of a musician and a magnificent conductor who could pull an orchestra together under his compelling vision and far-reaching interpretative insight. Time and again near-disastrous contretemps with angry and offended orchestras were turned around into memorable music-making. Considered purely as a musician, Klemperer was a bonafide giant. But he had only himself to blame for his being relegated to mostly second-rate orchestras and minor recording labels from the 1940s onwards. Had Walter Legge not stepped in, Klemperer’s faded star would have almost certainly gutted to extinction.
But Legge did step in, and Klemperer wound up at the head of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, where he, the Philharmonia, and EMI graced posterity with a long series of recordings that have stood the test of time beautifully and continue to represent a stratospherically high standard of music-making and recording. Klemperer’s Beethoven series remains a touchstone, as does his Brahms cycle. Some of his recordings are legendary for various reasons—the titanic, glacially-paced St. Matthew Passion with its all-star lineup of vocalists, his rock-solid foundational German Requiem, his exquisitely paced renditions of Bruckner. Klemperer was a ranking Mozartean of his generation and while his Mozart interpretations are definitely of an older school, big-band rather than HIP, he had a great deal to offer in those symphonies, overtures, and serenades that he bequeathed to posterity. All of his Mozart recordings are not only worth hearing, but worth hearing multiple times to dig into the precision, insight, and warmth of the man’s conceptions. There is nothing small about these performances, nothing slipshod. And the Brahms symphony recordings, never out of print, well…there’s just something so damn right about them. The other night I revisited the iconic 1957 recording of the Fourth and thought oh yeah, baby: that’s the way you play the Brahms Fourth, every jot and tittle of it.
Quite the Indian summer. He enjoyed about fifteen some-odd years of discographic glory, there in London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall or the relatively posh studios on Abbey Road. He made himself one of the immortals, a household name for anybody with a record player and enough taste to distinguish hawks from handsaws. Klemperer and the Philharmonia: one of the great pairings in music history, with all of us the happy beneficiaries.
EMI is re-releasing their entire Klemperer discography in handsome boxed sets. Already out are Beethoven, Mozart, Bruckner, as well as collections of Romantic symphonies and concertos. Still to come (within a few months) is Bach and other Baroque composers, 20th century music, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Mahler, and the four Mozart opera albums. Not to be missed.