Warner Classics publishes in a remastered edition the EMI, HMV, Electrola and Parlophone recordings of German conductor Otto Klemperer (1885-1973). Associated with an austere image, he was a promoter of modern music, a passionate conductor defined by his life course.
The story of Otto Klemperer accompanies more than six decades of 20th century musical historye century. What we know of the German conductor is however too largely limited to stereo recordings of the septuagenarian and octogenarian gathered in the box that Warner collects today.
It’s in Orpheus in the underworld, by Offenbach, whom Klemperer made his debut in Berlin in 1906, and it was Gustav Mahler, whom he had met when presenting him with his piano reduction of his symphony Resurrectionwho recommended him to the German Theater in Prague, his first job, in 1907. First performance in Prague: The Freischütz (maverick), by Weber. Klemperer negotiates an additional orchestra rehearsal. “It was a success because I had said: ‘No’”, he said. “No”, one of his favorite words!
His last concert dates from 1971 with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In the meantime, a chaotic life unfolded which should have been glorious in his native country, Germany, which then included Breslau (Wroclaw), where he was born, but which mostly took place elsewhere.
the comet
From Prague, Klemperer (still supported by Mahler) goes to Hamburg, where he begins with Lohengrin. “I have never known such success in all my life”, he declared in 1971. “A meteorite fell to us from the sky”, one reads in the press. The composer Paul Dessau testifies that Otto Klemperer, accompanying pianist for the creation of the 8e Symphony by Mahler, in 1910, in Munich, knew the score by heart.
The conductor rebels against the succession of poorly rehearsed performances in German theaters and imposes a sabbatical year on himself to study. In fact, he is manic-depressive and has his first major depression. The giant Klemperer, a chef on a mission wherever he goes, defends Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The kind of compliments that make him happy? “The philosopher Simmel came to see me after a Don Giovanni in Strasbourg and said to me: “You are right, there is something demonic about Mozart that I had never perceived”. »
Klemperer’s way of scrutinizing music is unique. One of his most famous lines was recorded by the BBC in 1960. To the journalist who asked him why his interpretation of the Song of the Earth of Mahler was so different from that of Bruno Walter, he answered: “He is a completely different personality than me. […] He is very accommodating and gentle. Not me. […] He is very romantic. This is not my case at all. Don’t misunderstand me, but he is a moralist. I am an immoralist. Absolutely ! »
We find the source of this positioning in the excellent booklet of the documentary Arthaus Otto Klemperer’s Long Journey Through His Times. Antony Beaumont, editor of Klemperer’s correspondence, refers to Nietzsche: “We already know what word I chose for this fight, the word ‘immoralist’ […] I need these powerful counter-concepts, the luminous intensity of these concepts to shed light on this abyss of dissolution and lies that until now has been called moral. »
Anti Karajan
Nietzsche-Klemperer thus directly offers us a bridge between Don John and the Pastoral Symphony. We take the example of the Pastoralnot so much out of personal convenience for having grown up with this version in a tape recorder, but because it perfectly symbolizes how Klemperer is, too, the anti-Karajan.
Herbert von Karajan’s interpretative system operates on the hedonism born of a carpet of strings. Klemperer, who has always been fascinated by the readability of orchestral polyphony, understands that the presence of woodwinds is essential to convey the rustic side of the Pastoral. Facing him we find here too, symbolically, Bruno Walter, one of the references, overflowing with a benevolent humanity of which Klemperer, the scrutineer, is quite incapable.
We will therefore not expect from the musical journeys made here in the company of Klemperer interpretations ” sexy “. In any event, it is difficult to detach music and individual, and life has not been easy for the conductor whose vision of humanity is intractable: “Man is the worst raptor and murder is his job. Birds of prey only know violence”, we hear about the traumas of the interwar period in the testamentary documentary by Philo Bregstein, edited by Arthaus in 2016. How do you expect Klemperer to make the same music as Walter ?
radical experimenter
Klemperer, in the 1920s, was a recognized musical genius in Germany. Fascinated by creation, he travels, meets Prokofiev and Stravinsky, admires the freshness of Paul Hindemith, whose music displeases Richard Strauss so much, and in 1927, he obtains the direction of the Kroll-Oper in Berlin. The mission: “no routine”. He will take it very seriously. As composer Paul Dessau puts it: “The audience couldn’t sink into their seat; he had to stay awake and think. Klemperer wanted incarnations on stage, for example prisoners chained in Fidelio. At the gratin bourgeois and industrial, it presents Oedipus Rexof Stravinsky! Scandal. He programsCardillac, of Hindemith, From the house of the dead from Janáček.
His stripping of ghost ship in Bayreuth is one provocation too many. Klemperer is in the crosshairs of the rising Nazis, accused of “cultural Bolshevism”. The Kroll-Oper was closed in 1931. Klemperer chose exile in the United States in 1933 (Jewish, he converted to Catholicism in 1919, then returned to his original religion in 1967), where he took the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1939, he had to be operated on for a brain tumor and remained partially paralyzed on the right side. After the war, he returned to Europe via Hungary, which he left for not having had the right to direct Schoenberg there. Again physically diminished by an accident in 1951 at the Montreal airport, he found his musical refuge in London, named “life conductor” of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1959. In the meantime, he set fire to a hotel room in New York falling asleep with his pipe. He will survive, even if to put out the fire, he grabs a bottle of alcohol which he believes to be water, burning himself severely. The accident prevents him from directing Tristan and Isolda at the Met (1958).
caustic humor
The Philharmonia is the orchestra used by the famous producer Walter Legge to “feed” the HMV phonographic catalogue. This explains, from 1954 to 1970, the sudden strong phonographic exposure of Klemperer who, previously, was less than Furtwängler, Karajan or Toscanini. His caustic humor led him to say after the death of Bruno Walter in 1962: “As I was the last of the dinosaurs, I was able to increase my fees. »
This portrait allows us to identify the character we hear making music in this box which does not have the sap it would have had if we had been able to record it more before (we know this from various concerts in the 1950s published by other labels), but which nevertheless responds to Wieland Wagner’s formula: “Ancient Greece, Jewish tradition, medieval Christianity, Germanic romanticism and contemporary realism have made conductor Otto Klemperer a unique artistic phenomenon. »
Contrary to the motoric aggressiveness and the light of George Szell, the aesthetic smoothness of Karajan, the humanist charm of Walter, the eruptions of Furtwängler, Klemperer synthesizes and deploys a kind of intrinsic musical force. It is no coincidence that her favorite score, which accompanied her all her life and almost sent her to the front in 1915, is Fidelio. The operas are the essential part of his legacy which will certainly be the subject of a second box set.
The symphonic legacy covers the traditional repertoire: Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, Bruckner (Symphonies nbone 4 To 9), etc. Of all these, the Mahler recordings (repository Song of the Earth with Ludwig and Wunderlich!) are the most legendary. Basically everything has been regularly reissued, especially in the form of thematic boxes 10 years ago. But everything is collected here and re-mastered by Art Son, who had worked on the Furtwängler legacy previously.
EMI adds two archival CDs from 1929 and a concert of the 9e Symphonyof Beethoven formerly published by Testament, but not the collection of other Klemperer concert documents from Testament, which would have increased the attractiveness by the originality of the box.