Background
Otto Klemperer was born in 1885 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland).
Otto Klemperer was born in 1885 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland).
Klemperer received his first music lessons from his mother and continued studying piano, music theory, composition, and conducting in Frankfurt and Berlin.
At the age of twenty-one Klemperer replaced a colleague at the last minute to conduct the famous Max Rein-hardt production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in Berlin. Later. Klemperer became chorus master and then conductor at the German theater in Prague. He also assisted Gustav Mahler, whom he had met earlier in his career, preparing the world premiere of his Eighth Symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand,” in Berlin.
In 1917 Klemperer was hired for his first major permanent position as music director of the Cologne Opera. Subsequently Klemperer led the opera company in Wiesbaden and then the Kroll Opera in Berlin, a theater devoted to producing new works and a cultural institution that represented the new Weimar Republic. In all these theaters Klemperer presented many German premieres, including works by Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg. At this time he was considered one of the leading German conductors of his generation. In 1923 he refused the position of music director of the Berlin Staatsoper because he felt he would not have sufficient artistic independence.
In 1933 Klemperer’s physical troubles began. Duringa rehearsal in Leipzigtheconductorleaned back and went through the rail on the podium, landing on the base of his skull. Later that year, after the Nazis came to power, he was forced to leave Germany and emigrated to the United States, where he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
In 1939 Klemperer had to undergo an operation for a brain tumor that left him partially paralyzed and for some years he could not conduct. Stories followed, some of which alleging that the maestro had a nervous breakdown and that he had escaped from an asylum. When these stories did not cease, Klemperer put a lot of money into staging a concert in Carnegie Hall, showing the world that he was still the same musician. Somehow lie survived and eventually became the director of the Budapest Opera (1947-1950).
Klemperer left Hungary when the communist regime’s restrictive musical politics started to affect his work. Klemperer’s health was deteriorating and the conductor often lost the memory of his own identity, and was even found wandering in the streets. In 1954 Klemperer began conducting and recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, becoming the orchestra’s principal conductor a year later.
Then aged seventy, a new chapter in Klemperer’s life began. The conductor had his second bloom.
In 1970 Klemperer conducted in Jerusalem and accepted Israeli citizenship. Two years later he retired and resided in Zurich, Switzerland.
Quotes from others about the person
A review of a 1961 Klemperer concert attests to both his ill health and musical prowess: “In an age of well-tailored virtuoso conductors, he stands out like a Michelangelo sculpture among Dresden figurines. He makes his way slowly to the podium, dragging his mighty body, cane in hand. On the podium is a large chair on which he sits after a curt nod to the audience.
He does not use a baton and the score is open before him. Generally he beats time with his fists, a minuscule beat for so tremendous a man. Often no beat is visible at all. . . . His conducting retains its intense drive and vitality. Never has he had much charm.
He is always ultra-serious, pursuing his ends in a straight, uncompromising line. In the big pieces of the repertoire there is nobody exactly like him. Nobody can so convey the size and grandeur of Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner. In a way he is a transfigured Kapellmeister — a non-virtuoso conductor who may even have something of the pedant in him, but whose vision and conception happen to be so big that he and his music emerge monument-size.”
He was married to Johanna Geisler. They had two children: Werner, Lotte.