A Legend in His Own Time - Carlos Kleiber
Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004) was a unique, world-acclaimed conductor
"whose work transcends conventional opinions about taste and
judgment" (David Patrick Stearns). This album serves as a tribute
to the genius of a rarely recorded artist, as Kleiber "strips away
the varnish from some of music's most tradition-encrusted
masterworks to expose the vital creation lurking within" (Time
magazine).
With the passing of Carlos Kleiber on 13 July 2004, the world of
music lost one of its most charismatic and enigmatic figures. He
was known as a conductor who didn't like to conduct: "Only when his
freezer was empty did he deign to pick up the baton, reported
Herbert von Karajan (who, like many of his other colleagues, called
him a "genius" - they were a two-man mutual admiration society). He
lavished his genius on no more than a handful of symphonies by
Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Brahms, and a scarcely
longer list of operas by Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and the Strausses,
Johann and Richard - a fragment of the repertoire conducted by his
equally famous father Erich, another titan, who tried to thwart his
son's musical career (yet Carlos used his annotated scores).
A recluse who spoke six languages fluently but never granted
interviews because he claimed that "when I talk, it's rubbish",
Kleiber would repeatedly leave orchestral musicians notes filled
with polite suggestions (these became known as "Kleibergrams").
Players and singers respected and revered him. "He notices
everything," Plácido Domingo declared. "I try to please him all the
time, not just because I want to please him but because I know he's
right."
Once his career was established, Kleiber refused to accept a
permanent position and even declined the Berliner Philharmoniker's
invitation to become Karajan's successor. He once told Leonard
Bernstein that he wanted to grow old in a sun-drenched garden, only
eating, drinking, sleeping and making love. Much critical ink has
been spilled over the precious few engagements to which he
grudgingly consented - principally with the Wiener Philharmoniker
and Amsterdam Concertgebouw orchestras and at some of the world's
operatic shrines: Vienna, Munich, Bayreuth, London, Milan, and New
York - reviews couched almost exclusively in superlatives bestowed
on few other musicians of the late 20th century. Kleiber was truly
- and for once the tired cliché is apt - a legend in his own
time.
Carlos Kleiber was born in Berlin on 3 July 1930 but grew up in
Argentina after his family (who were not Jewish) fled Nazi Germany
in 1935. Following the war, he studied chemistry in Switzerland,
but an overwhelming love for music led inexorably to his 1954
debut, conducting an operetta in Potsdam, East Germany under a
pseudonym. He served as répétiteur of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in
Düsseldorf from 1956, becoming its conductor two years later, was
at the Zurich Opera from 1964-66 and first Kapellmeister at the
Württembergisches Staatstheater in Stuttgart for three years from
1966. He first appeared at the Vienna State Opera in 1973
conducting Tristan, the work with which he made his Bayreuth debut
the following year, debuted in 1974 at Covent Garden and La Scala
(conducting Der Rosenkavalier, one of his father's specialities);
he made his Berliner Philharmoniker debut in 1982 and his first
appearance at the Met in 1988, though San Francisco was lucky to
hear him as early as 1977 in Otello.
A perfectionist in extremis, Carlos Kleiber disliked recordings -
he once said that "every unproduced record is a good record" - but
those he made have naturally come to occupy a special place in the
medium's history. Deutsche Grammophon had the good fortune to be
the label with which he was associated, a collaboration that began
in 1973, when he agreed to overcome his antipathy to the microphone
and travel to Dresden to record Weber's Freischutzwith the great
Staatskapelle, an orchestra that had enjoyed a close relationship
with his father. London's Daily Telegraph, typifying the praise
showered on it from all quarters, described the new set in terms
that could well be applied to every work this artist touched:
"Kleiber ... brings such vitality, freshness of tone and buoyancy
of rhythm to the orchestral score and his choice of tempi shows
that he has rethought this music ... by discovering how to be
faithful to the composer's spirit without transgressing the
letter."
Subsequent releases over the next several years spread the
appreciation of his phenomenal gifts to an adoring international
public and fellowship of music critics: Beethoven's Fifth from
Vienna in 1975 (about which one reviewer wrote that "it was as if
Homer had come back to recite the Iliad"), Beethoven's Seventh from
Vienna and Johann Strauss's Fledermaus from Munich in 1976, Verdi's
Traviata from Munich in 1977, Schubert's Third and "Unfinished"
from Vienna in 1979, Brahms's Fourth from Vienna in 1981 and,
finally, a return to Dresden for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (which
he had conducted at Bayreuth from 1974-76) in 1982.
It is from those last three studio productions that the
performances collected here have been taken. When Kleiber's
extraordinarily concentrated reading of the "Unfinished", recorded
in the Musikverein's Golden Hall in September 1978, was last
reissued, the English critic Richard Osborne wrote: "The genius of
Kleiber's performance is his willingness to characterize both the
music's profound melancholy and its bustling energy: in other
words, to sense its physical chronology and its spiritual
one."
In December 1979 the German critic Peter Cossé was in the
Musikverein when Kleiber conducted Brahms's Fourth Symphony at the
Wiener Philharmoniker's subscription concerts. "One experienced the
four movements,Ó he wrote, "as a great concentrated Passion of
compositional logic and integrity and, in the same moment, as a
network of emotions and images, whose richness and atmospheric
ambivalence seemed to find a miraculous sense of consolidation or,
more precisely, reconciliation in the final Passacaglia.Ó Coss
happily found that the "fascinating details and solemn splendour of
the interpretation were captured without any loss of tension or
spontaneity" when Deutsche Grammophon recorded it three months
later, between 12-15 March 1980.
And, finally, the Dresden Tristan. Kleiber was dead set against a
live recording, with - as DG's then Head of Production Hans Hirsch
recalled - all its imponderables, such as the dangers of singer
fatigue and inevitable compromise solutions in the final takes that
would disadvantage the orchestra (seated, incidentally, with
violins divided left and right, violas half-left behind the first
fiddles, cellos half-right behind the seconds, and basses in a
reduced half-circle behind the seconds and cellos). Kleiber's
demands were extreme and unprecedented, even for him: 10 full
orchestral rehearsals beginning in August 1980 in Dresden's
Lukaskirche, 20 sessions in October with the whole cast present at
all of them, recording the work in sequence from beginning to end
(with, as is customary, the preludes to Acts I and III left to
last).
Perhaps the only surprise in casting was that of Margaret Price in
a role she was never to sing on stage, but this turned out to be
pure inspiration: the youthful freshness, ardour and lyricism (as
well as flawless German diction) of the Welsh soprano's Isolde, as
Hans Hirsch notes, dovetailed with Kleiber's conception of the
work, and indeed, by general consensus, the part has not been sung
on record before or since with such sheer, unremitting vocal
beauty.
Kleiber's nerves were famously exposed whenever he made music, and,
inevitably, in an undertaking as gruelling for him as committing
Wagner's Tristan to disc, they frayed - sadly - towards the end of
the sessions. In the midst of René Kollo's recording of Tristan's
delirium in Act III, the conductor stormed out, and the passage had
to be synchronized later, though no trace of that would be apparent
to listeners. Presciently, his producer Werner Mayer had let the
tape machines run during rehearsals of the preludes in August.
Carlos Kleiber never entered a recording studio again.
Richard Evidon
8/2004