#1: from THE TELEGRAPH (UK)
Carlos Kleiber
The Telegraph
12:02AM BST 21 Jul 2004
Carlos Kleiber, who died on July 13 aged 74, was one of the greatest conductors of the past half-century, yet he never held a major permanent appointment.
He deliberately restricted his repertory to relatively few works, demanded an exceptionally large number of rehearsals and was notoriously liable to cancel an engagement at short notice.
He was extremely selective about where he worked, accepting only when his exacting demands were met. Consequently his appearances were rare and became much-prized events. He also commanded huge fees whenever he did mount the podium.
Herbert von Karajan, who admired him greatly, once remarked: “Carlos has a genius for conducting, but he doesn’t enjoy doing it. He tells me, ‘I conduct only when I’m hungry.’ And it’s true. He has a deep-freeze. He fills it up and cooks for himself and when it gets down to a certain level, then he thinks ‘Now I might do a concert.’”
Part of this reticence could be explained by his being the son of a great conductor, Erich Kleiber, who was chief conductor of the Berlin Staatsoper for over a decade until he resigned in 1934 because he refused to implement the Nazis’ cultural policies.
Erich Kleiber had conducted the world premiere of Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1925 and at Covent Garden in the 1950s conducted memorable performances of Wozzeck and of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” He died in January 1956.
It was no coincidence that the operas in which Carlos Kleiber excelled were those in which his father had also excelled. It was with “Rosenkavalier” that he made his Covent Garden debut in 1974 (after having demanded to be put up at an hotel with a swimming pool).
When he was introduced to the orchestra and told that some of them, including the leader, had played in this opera under his father, his face clouded over. The critics almost unanimously declared that his interpretation was every bit as good as his father’s had been.
“The problem with Carlos,” a record producer said, “is that once Erich was dead, he saw the entire musical world as a surrogate. When he cancels a concert, he is killing his father, when he conducts a great performance, he is identifying with him.”
Erich Kleiber had in fact tried to dissuade his son from following a musical career and for a time Carlos studied Chemistry in Zurich. But at the age of 20 he devoted himself seriously to music - even though Erich made deprecating remarks in public and private about his son’s musical pretensions.
A former administrator of La Scala, Milan, recalled how Erich had humiliated Carlos by saying he did not think he would ever be able to conduct Viennese waltzes with the right rhythm. “Needless to say, Carlos sought to conduct “Der Rosenkavalier” at the earliest opportunity and proved his father wrong.”
The only other Strauss opera he conducted was “Elektra.” He conducted only two by Verdi (“Otello” and “La Traviata”; he walked out of a Hamburg “Falstaff”), none by Mozart, two by Puccini (“La Boheme” and “Madama Butterfly”), Johann Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” Weber’s “Der Freischutz,” Berg’s “Wozzeck,” Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and Bizet’s “Carmen.” He would conduct only three Beethoven symphonies, Nos. 4, 5 and 7.
Difficult and demanding as he may have been, performers invariably found Kleiber helpful and approachable. He was venerated not only by other conductors (a rare enough phenomenon) but by singers and orchestral players.
Bram Gay, a former orchestral manager at Covent Garden, said of him in Otello: “I have never encountered such an intellect at work. How many conductors have told us what is in the Shakespeare which the librettist Boito omits and where exactly we must remember this because it is important to Verdi?
“Working with him is an electric experience. The orchestra is never relaxed. The better the work goes, the greater the tension because the more fragile the creation. An evening with him is one of the great lifetime opportunities for self-realisation.”
The Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, regarded as one of the supreme singers of the role of Otello, said of Kleiber: “He has assimilated the score to such a degree that he can read through the notes to uncover all the drama and feeling of the music, everything the composer imagined. It seems so natural and simple, yet even with all the preparation it sounds spontaneous.
“Every night is a different experience. He never repeats. With one hand he can give the idea of a big long line beaten in four, while with the other he is beating in twelve with total independence. With him in charge, I just feel that the music and I are absolutely as one.”
The English conductor Mark Elder described Kleiber as “head and shoulders above the rest of us, the best conductor in the world. He has this tightly drawn temperament which gives him the extraordinary ability to impart trust to an orchestra. He makes them feel they can do it.”
Kleiber would often say to an orchestra before a performance: “Let’s do it a bit differently tonight.” On another occasion, while conducting Act 1 of “Der Rosenkavalier” and wanting a special inward quality during the Marschallin’s monologue, he said: “Only those with psychic tendencies please play this chord.”
He would also send the orchestral musicians little notes, which became known as Kleibergrams. An example: “This bit I think could be more forceful. Many thanks and kind regards. Yours, C. Kleiber.” Although he conducted opera in London more than in most cities except Munich, Kleiber conducted only one concert there.
On June 9 1981, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at the Festival Hall as a last-minute replacement for the ailing Karl Bohm. The programme included Schubert’s Third and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphonies. Next morning the reviews were acrimoniously hostile.
The Daily Telegraph’s critic called the concert “a disastrously unhappy affair, bewildering in its coarseness and insensitivity”, while the Guardian spoke of “exaggerations and idiosyncrasies”. Kleiber vowed never to conduct a London concert again - and never did.
He walked out of a proposed recording of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto with the pianist Michelangeli, who was himself not exactly lacking in temperament, because one of the cellists asked Michelangeli: “Maestro, what speed would you like?” Kleiber was on the aircraft back to Munich in no time at all.
In spite of the small number of works he conducted, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the whole repertory. “He knows every goddam piece,” an American concert manager said. When Sir Peter Jonas was manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Kleiber told him he would like to conduct “The Mikado.”
Jonas persuaded him in 1983 to conduct the first of the “Two English Idylls” by the English composer George Butterworth (who was killed in action in 1916), music he could not possibly have encountered before.
A critic wrote: “A brief Tristan-like phrase in the strings did not go unremarked; at one stroke the piece became darker, more complex and emotionally deeper.”
Kleiber never gave a press interview, never hired a media agent and conducted all his own negotiations for contracts. He spoke fluent German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Slovenian. Tall, slim and muscular, on the rostrum he had the physical grace of a dancer.
Despite these assets, the glamour often associated with a conductor’s life held no appeal for him; he preferred to stay at home in Munich. He once told Leonard Bernstein: “I want to grow in a garden. I want to have the sun. I want to eat and drink and sleep and make love and that’s it.”
Carlos Kleiber was born in Berlin on July 3 1930. His mother was American. When his father resigned from the Staatsoper, the family moved to Buenos Aires, where Erich Kleiber conducted at the Colon and Carlos attended schools in Argentina and Chile.
As a child he learnt the piano, composed and sang and played the timpani. After studying Chemistry in Zurich from 1949 to 1950, he returned to Argentina to complete his musical training.
In 1951 he was a repetiteur in a Munich theatre and made his conducting debut in Potsdam in 1954 under the pseudonym Karl Keller. After a spell as coach at the Vienna Volksoper, he moved in 1956 to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf as repetiteur, becoming assistant conductor in 1958.
He was at Zurich Opera from 1964 to 1966 and then became chief conductor at Stuttgart Opera from 1966 to 1968, the last full-time post he held. After that he had a guest contract with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich for 10 years.
Kleiber made his British debut at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 conducting the Bavarian State Opera in “Wozzeck.” For his first Munich performances of this opera, he had 34 rehearsals. (For a Covent Garden “Boheme” in 1979 he had 17, six of them for orchestra alone.)
His Vienna State Opera debut was in 1973 in “Tristan und Isolde,” which he also conducted at Bayreuth the following year. It was the only Wagner opera he conducted.
His Covent Garden and La Scala debuts were both in 1974 in “Der Rosenkavalier.” He returned to Covent Garden in 1977 for Strauss’s “Elektra” with Birgit Nilsson. His first American engagement was with San Francisco Opera in “Otello” in 1977. [ed.: this is not true.]
He first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1982 (he was the orchestra’s first choice to succeed Karajan, but he declined the post).
In 1988 he made his New York Metropolitan debut in “La Boheme” with a cast including Pavarotti, Mirella Freni and Thomas Hampson. He returned the following year for “La Traviata” and in 1990 came back to Covent Garden for four performances of “Otello” with Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli.
On the last night Domingo was ill and the English tenor Jeffrey Lawton took his place. In September 1990 he conducted “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Met in New York with Felicity Lott, Anne-Sofie von Otter and Barbara Bonney (which is preserved from a 1994 Vienna performance on video and DVD).
His recordings are as few as one might expect: Beethoven’s 4th, 5th and 7th symphonies, Brahms’s 4th, Schubert’s 3rd and 8th, Vienna New Year’s Day concerts and Dvorak’s piano concerto with the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter.
Of the recording of Beethoven’s 5th, one critic wrote: “It was as if Homer had come back to recite the Iliad.” The operas are Tristan (made in 1982 with Margaret Price as Isolde), “Die Fledermaus,” “La Traviata” and “Der Freischuetz.” A “Wozzeck” recording in Dresden was arranged but on the first morning he walked out without explanation.
Born a German, Kleiber became an Argentine citizen. In 1980 he took Austrian citizenship. With his Yugoslav wife Stanka, a former dancer, he had a son and daughter.
#2: from THE INDEPENDENT (UK)
Carlos Kleiber: controversial operatic conductor of originality and passion
By Elizabeth Forbes
WEDNESDAY 21 JULY 2004
Carlos Kleiber was one of the finest operatic conductors of the second half of the 20th century.
Unlike his father, the Viennese-born conductor Erich Kleiber, whose wide musical sympathies ranged from Haydn and Mozart to Krenek and Milhaud, Carlos had a very limited repertory, which basically contained one Wagner opera, two Verdi, one Johann Strauss, two Richard Strauss, one Puccini and one Berg, all of them popular works. His career was controversial, partly because of the huge number of orchestral rehearsals that he demanded, and partly because of his habit of cancelling performances at very short notice. However, his musical gifts were such that few opera-lovers complained.
Adjectives such as incandescent, passionate, stimulating and shattering were heaped on his performances, which could turn the most hackneyed score into something entirely new, both in detail and in its overall conception.
Carlos Kleiber was born in 1930 in Berlin, where his father was General Music Director of the State Opera. In 1934 Erich resigned, and he and his family left Germany. Their base became Buenos Aires for the duration of the Second World War. Carlos began his musical studies there in 1950, though his father did not want him to take up a musical career. But, after a short interlude studying chemistry in Zurich, Carlos went back to music.
His first job in 1953 was at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich, followed by a spell at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf/Duisberg. In 1964 he went to the Zurich Opera for two years, after which he became a freelance. He conducted “Wozzeck” when the Württemberg State Opera from Stuttgart visited the 1966 Edinburgh Festival.
Erich Kleiber had conducted the premiere of “Wozzeck” in Berlin in 1925, and also the first British performance at Covent Garden in 1952. Carlos shared his father’s love of Berg’s opera and conducted it several times in Stuttgart as well as in Munich at the Bavarian State Opera, to which he was a frequent visitor from 1968. He also conducted “Der Rosenkavalier” in Munich, usually at the summer festival. He made his début at the Vienna State Opera in 1973 conducting “Tristan und Isolde” and the following year conducted Wagner’s opera at Bayreuth. To hear Carlos Kleiber conduct Tristan was to realise that those adjectives incandescent and passionate were indeed applicable to his performance.
Kleiber made his début at Covent Garden in 1974 with “Der Rosenkavalier.” There was no sentimentality in his reading, but plenty of genuine feeling, while he managed to makes the waltz tunes sound utterly Viennese, but without schmaltz. Two years later he conducted “Der Rosenkavalier” at La Scala, Milan, with a similar great success. He was given the honour of opening the 1976/77 season at La Scala conducting a new production of “Otello,” directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Placido Domingo in the title role. Kleiber’s storm music at the opening of Verdi’s opera was possibly the loudest ever heard, but the love duet for Otello and Desdemona at the end of the first act was a miracle of delicacy and tenderness.
He returned to Covent Garden for “Elektra” in 1977, and the adjective this time was shattering. The same year he made his San Francisco début with “Otello” and conducted Verdi’s opera in Munich. [ed.: Carlos never conducted in San Francisco.] In 1978 he returned to La Scala for “Tristan und Isolde” and in Vienna he conducted a new production of “Carmen.” Bizet’s opera was not really on Kleiber’s “short list”, but on this occasion it was very successful. As always with extremely well-known scores, he made the music sound new and original.
The same transformation was achieved at La Scala in 1979, when Kleiber conducted “La Bohème,” with Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo. The roistering of the Bohemians in Act I was exceptionally loud, but, after the arrival of Mimi, delicacy and tenderness (as in “Otello”) took over.
Kleiber conducted “La Bohème” at Covent Garden the same year. He insisted on 14 orchestral rehearsals, so that a revival of “Der Rosenkavalier” (with another conductor) had to be cancelled. But the resulting freshness and beauty that the orchestra brought to Puccini made those rehearsals worthwhile. He was back at Covent Garden in 1980 for “Otello” with Domingo, but he withdrew completely from the new production of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” which he should have conducted.
After performances of “La Bohème” with Mirella Freni and Pavarotti in Munich, in 1985 he conducted a new production by Zeffirelli of “La Traviata” in Florence, repeating Verdi’s opera in Munich the same year. A sparkling New Year’s Eve performance of “Die Fledermaus” conducted by Kleiber in Munich was relayed on BBC Television on New Year’s Day 1987.
In January 1988 Kleiber made his very belated début at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, conducting “La Bohème” with Pavarotti and Freni, which was greeted with cheers and a standing ovation. He returned the following year for “La Traviata” and in 1990 for “Otello” and “Der Rosenkavalier.” The same year he made a final visit to London for “Otello” with Domingo.
Kleiber recorded most of the operas in his basic repertoire, as well as Weber’s “Der Freischuetz.” Even on disc his totally personal style of conducting comes across.
Carlos Kleiber, conductor: born Berlin 3 July 1930; married (one son, one daughter); died 13 July 2004.
#3: from THE GUARDIAN (UK)
Obituary: Carlos Kleiber, mercurial master of the conductor’s art
Alan Blyth
Wednesday 21 July 2004, 08.32 EDT
One of the most exciting, yet eccentric, conductors of the last 50 years, Carlos Kleiber, who has died aged 74, led performances of symphonic music and opera that will never be forgotten by those who heard them. Happily, he also caught much of the vitality of his live readings in the recording studio. He was one interpreter for whose conducting the epithet “unique” was appropriate.
At the same time, he was an enfant terrible of the musical world. Primarily a recluse, he could only be persuaded into the public arena, at least during the last 20 years, by the combination of a momentous event, long rehearsal times and a huge fee. He took 34 rehearsals for his first performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” in Munich, and 17 for a Covent Garden “La Bohème.” That other great German conductor Herbert von Karajan once commented: “He only conducts when the fridge is empty.”
An undoubted perfectionist, Kleiber agreed to appear only when and where he felt like it. He was prone to cancel his appearances in a quite cavalier fashion, and refused to be tied to any one orchestra or opera house.
No wonder, when he did appear, the man whom the New York Times once described as “the most venerated conductor since Arturo Toscanini” commanded attention and sold-out houses. The critic Harvey Sachs commented in the magazine Atlantic: “The intensely emotional elements in his music-making usually function in perfect accord with his questioning intelligence and magnificent grasp of musical architecture.”
The son of an equally celebrated conductor, Erich Kleiber, Carlos was born in Berlin, but raised in Argentina after his family had fled the Nazis. He composed and sang from an early age, learnt the piano and the timpani, and, in 1949, went to the Technische Hochschule, in Zurich, to study chemistry.
However, his musical talent could not be denied, and he returned to Buenos Aires the following year to complete his musical training, before going back to Europe in 1951 to work in Munich’s Theater am Gärtnerplatz as a coach. He made his conducting debut at Potsdam in 1954, under the pseudonym Karl Keller.
Kleiber held, successively, posts with the Vienna Volksoper, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Zurich Opera and the Stuttgart Opera in the 1950s and 60s. From 1968 to 1978, he had a guest contract at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he conducted some of his most notable performances, among them the famous Otto Schenk production of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which is preserved on video. It is one of the most convincing stagings of the work ever heard or seen.
Kleiber first appeared in Britain with the Stuttgart Opera at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966. He first conducted at Covent Garden (“Der Rosenkavalier”) in 1974, creating something of a sensation. His later appearances, in charge of arrestingly immediate accounts of “Elektra,” “La Bohème” and “Otello,” were acclaimed as events of theatrical and music significance quite out of the ordinary. He made his debuts at La Scala (“Der Rosenkavalier”) in 1974, and at the New York Metropolitan, conducting “La Bohème,” in 1988.
Another of Kleiber’s most important engagements was at the Bayreuth Festival, from 1974 to 1976, conducting “Tristan und Isolde.” No one who was present, as I was, will ever forget the frisson of those incandescent performances.
At the same time, Kleiber gained increasing fame on the concert podium, conducting all the major orchestras with unflagging energy and success. London heard him all too seldom, but his few appearances with the London Symphony Orchestra were red-letter occasions. However, on what proved to be his last appearance at the Royal Festival Hall, with the LSO, the reviews were so unfavourable that he refused to conduct an orchestra in London again.
He was revered in Munich and Vienna. In the latter city, he conducted the new year’s concert in 1989, an event happily preserved on video. There, you can revel in his graceful, smiling, relaxed - yet, paradoxically, closely controlled - way with the music of the Viennese waltz-kings. His manner of conducting combined a wonderful control of flow, rhythm and movement with an uncanny ability to know when to create tension and when to release it. He conveyed this to his musicians with a rare fluency of movement and a rich palette of nuance as regards phrasing.
Kleiber was said to have been haunted by the ghost of his father, who discouraged his son from making a career as a conductor. It must have been something of a love-hate relationship, as Carlos restricted his repertory almost entirely to works tackled by his father. He also used his father’s heavily annotated scores as a guide to his own interpretations, so it is no wonder that, where evidence exists on record - as in the case of Beethoven’s fifth symphony - their readings are so alike.
Kleiber’s discography is small but select. In the operatic field, besides the video of “Der Rosenkavalier,” there is a later production of the same opera from the Vienna State Opera, though less well cast than the Munich one. In audio, only his accounts of “La Traviata” (with Ileana Cotrubas as the eloquent Violetta), fizzing “Die Fledermaus” (one on video, one on CD), “Tristan und Isolde” (with the somewhat surprising - but successful - choice of Margaret Price as the heroine) and “Der Freischütz” are all admirable.
There is also an off-the-air performance of the fabulous Bayreuth Tristan to confirm the reputation of that reading. Sadly, attempts to record “La Bohème” and “Wozzeck” proved abortive because of Kleiber’s wilful behaviour, which led Deutsche Grammophon to lose patience with its star conductor.
Among his symphonic recordings, the Beethoven fifth, coupled with an equally electrifying seventh, are magnificent, as is his version of the Brahms fourth. Some Mozart and Schubert complete the all-too-short list.
For all Kleiber’s notable work, there will be a lingering regret that such a natural and brilliant talent did not achieve even more. Yet perhaps it is in the nature of wayward geniuses to prove elusive when it comes to ultimate accomplishment. Enough was done, however, to ensure his place in a pantheon of great conductors.
He is survived by a son and a daughter, his wife having predeceased him.
· Carlos Kleiber, conductor, born July 3 1930; died July 13 2004
#4: from THE INDEPENDENT (UK)
‘Now I’ll Never Hear the Greatest Conductor of the Age’: A Lament for Carlos Kleiber
By Philip Hensher
23 July 2004
Sometimes, the death of a famous person, when you hear of it, seems like a personal bereavement. This can be so with artists, writers, actors, whose work enters into your private thoughts with such intimacy, it feels as if you are closely acquainted with the mind behind it. When Lucia Popp died at a tragically young age, I found myself in tears, unwilling to accept that her wonderful, aching, tender voice from now on existed only in digital form.
And when I heard that Carlos Kleiber had died, I felt very much the same; the feeling complicated by an odd sort of guilt that I never heard the greatest conductor of the age in a live performance, and now never will.
Admittedly, it was very hard to get to hear Kleiber conduct. He led an exceptionally odd professional life; he never had many pieces in his repertoire, and they grew fewer and fewer as he grew older. Half a dozen operas, oddly assorted - “Fledermaus,” “Tristan,” “Wozzeck” and “La Boheme” - a dozen concert pieces, and that was about it. His appearances were very rare indeed, and whenever he did conduct a concert, the difficulties of getting a ticket were all but insuperable; even so, there was always the high likelihood that he would cancel, often for no stated reason.
His was a career surrounded by rumour and reminiscence. I know that once, in Zurich in 1964, he conducted Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” that greatest of all ballet scores, and have been told by someone who knew someone who had been there that it was incomparable, scented and luxuriant. Unless a recording ever surfaces, that is going to remain the Tchaikovsky of our dreams, and a very few old memories. Much of his career remains as tantalizing as that.
So most of us have had to make do with the recordings. But those on their own justify him as the greatest of conductors. The astonishing “Fledermaus,” infusing sumptuous Viennese grace with a marvellous lyric fury; or there is the “Traviata,” pulling untold fine- spun lyricism from lines you thought you knew too well to have to listen to. The refinements of the details are extraordinary: the Violetta’s
microphone is placed right up against her mouth, so that at the most exuberant moments of coloratura you are always conscious of the deep desperate gulps for breath of the consumptive.
He seemed always to understand a piece so well that you might have been hearing it for the first time. After his Beethoven Five and Seven, and the superlative 1989 concert of Viennese waltzes - that aching throb on the second beat of every bar! - every other rendering seemed wrong, or wilful, or mistaken in its reading. Greatest of all, and something I always thought might well be the greatest recording of
any piece of music ever made, was the “Tristan” recording, with the beautiful lyric power of Margaret Price, and the Leipzig orchestra in full possession of the vast architectural spans of the piece. Wagner thought that a perfect performance of “Tristan” might send its listeners mad; this one comes so close, it is not advisable to listen to it too often.
But all Kleiber was, surely, was a man standing in front of an orchestra, keeping time with his hands? How on earth does his unmistakable superiority to almost anyone else manifest itself? The art of the conductor is not a very well understood one, even by quite musical people. Certainly, it is such a demanding task to ensure that an orchestra plays all the notes in tune, at the right time, to balance the sound, and to keep them at the tempo requested by the composer, that a conductor who can reliably do that and no more will always be in demand.
There is something beyond that, however, and here we move into something like metaphysics. A great conductor can infuse an orchestra with a sort of communal intelligence; perhaps by innate authority, by evident commitment and a sort of conspicuous confidence which is immediately apparent through his gestures. But there is something stranger, which every orchestral player always knows. It is a sense of rightness, of a natural response to the music. An orchestra will always sense when it is being asked to play against the tendency of the music, or when a piece has an overall awkwardness.
What Kleiber had, supremely, was that sense of naturalness, and even in a musical structure as vast and complex as Tristan, everything moved as it should, developing and growing with exact, considered intelligence. Sometimes you hear a performance where one huge climax succeeds another; in Kleiber, every one was exactly placed, and as soon as the prelude began, you knew that the idea of the third act, topping everything, was already in his mind.
It is so extraordinary, and so unusual a skill that I doubt we will ever see anything to match it in our lifetimes. There are not very many really superb conductors, though there are some; in my view, there was only one who could plausibly be described as a genius. Of course, one dreams of those lost performances; of course, one fantasies about pieces he might have transformed - what would a Kleiber “Lulu” have been like? But in this small body of preserved work, there is evidence of true greatness at work.
And now I’m going to pour a glass of champagne to his memory, and put
on the last act of “La Traviata.”
#5: from THE NEW YORK TIMES (USA)
Carlos Kleiber Is Dead at 74; Music’s Perfectionist Recluse
By JOHN ROCKWELL
©The New York Times
July 20, 2004 (Correction Appended)
Carlos Kleiber, a gifted Austrian conductor whose reclusiveness made him legendary, died last Tuesday at 74 after a long illness, a family member told The Associated Press.
According to the Slovenian news agency S.T.A., The Associated Press reported, he was buried on Saturday in Konjsica in the Zasavje region of eastern Slovenia, next to his wife, a Slovenian, who died in December.
Unlike some conductors, Mr. Kleiber was equally convincing in concert works and opera. A fabled perfectionist, he demanded long hours of rehearsal as his reputation grew and allowed him to obtain such concessions. But he made all that work pay off in performances that blended exactitude with impassioned spontaneity.
On hearing of his death, Heinz Fischer, the president of Austria, wrote in a statement that Mr. Kleiber was ‘‘one of the most important conductors of the 20th century,’‘ and paid special tribute to his still-famous appearances conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the traditional Viennese New Year’s Concert. Ioan Holender, the director of the Vienna State Opera, said that ‘‘the greatest living conductor has left us.’‘
Yet his greatness did not neatly reflect any conventional national school of conducting. Mr. Kleiber hardly fit the mold of the German Kapellmeister producing performances of solid, idiomatic competence. A sure master of the core Germanic repertory, he had an arresting streak that served non-German music well, too. Paradoxically, his performances, full of unmannered but sophisticated attention to detail, seemed honest expressions of the composer’s intent but were still suffused with interpretive individuality.
Much of Mr. Kleiber’s musical personality can perhaps be traced to his unusual upbringing. The author Thomas Mann hoped to leaven Germanic sobriety with Latin passion, naming one character Tonio Kröger and a son Golo Mann. A similar juxtaposition existed in the names Carlos and Kleiber.
Mr. Kleiber’s father was the noted Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber, who was music director of the Berlin State Opera from 1925 to 1934. While in Berlin, in 1925, Erich Kleiber conducted the world premiere of Berg’s opera ‘‘Wozzeck,’‘ which later became one of his son’s specialties.
Erich Kleiber and his family emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1935. He was not Jewish, but opposed Hitler on political and moral grounds and, as a modernist, was inimical to the Nazis.
The young Kleiber began his music studies in 1950 and made his debut as a conductor in La Plata, Argentina, in 1952. After the family’s return to Germany, and a stint of studying chemistry in Zurich at his father’s insistence, Carlos Kleiber began his climb up the German musical ladder, with positions in Munich, Potsdam, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, and Duisburg, Zurich and Stuttgart. From 1968 he appeared regularly at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, his musical base until 1988 and his residence until his death. He led Wagner’s ‘‘Tristan und Isolde’‘ at the Bayreuth Festival from 1974 to 1976, and appeared regularly at the Vienna State Opera, the Royal Opera in London and La Scala in Milan.
Mr. Kleiber made his North American debut at the San Francisco Opera in 1977, but did not appear at the Metropolitan Opera in New York until 1988, conducting Puccini’s ‘‘Bohème.’‘ [ed.: CK never conducted in San Francisco.] Donal Henahan, reviewing that debut for The New York Times, wrote that ‘‘his fluid, highly detailed conducting style put one in mind of Herbert von Karajan at times,’‘and that it ‘‘was a Puccini performance, in the pit and on the stage, that kept the listener enthralled.’‘
Mr. Kleiber appeared sparingly with symphony orchestras, but his concert appearances were events. He did not make his Berlin Philharmonic debut until 1982, but periodically conducted it, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Vienna Philharmonic.
By the 1970’s Mr. Kleiber’s repertory had shrunk to a few works in which he specialized. Among operas he conducted ‘‘Tristan,’‘ ‘‘La Bohème,’‘ Bizet’s ‘‘Carmen,’‘ Strauss’s ‘‘Elektra’‘ and ‘‘Der Rosenkavalier’‘ and Verdi’s ‘‘Traviata’‘ and ‘‘Otello.’‘ His symphonic repertory included the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies of Beethoven, the Second and Fourth of Brahms, the 94th of Haydn and the 33rd and 36th of Mozart. He did them so well that it made his admirers regret all the more that he did not take on a wider range of music.
His recorded legacy is similarly limited, not counting a wide variety of pirated live performances that flicker on and off the market, often duplicating music he also recorded officially. On major labels his recordings include ‘‘Tristan,’‘ ‘‘La Traviata,’‘ Weber’s ‘‘Freischütz’‘ and Johann Strauss Jr.‘s ‘‘Fledermaus’‘; several of his core-repertory symphonies; and the 1989 and 1992 Vienna New Year’s Concerts. There are also several DVD’s of Mr. Kleiber conducting concerts and operas.
In his later years, he refused any formal connection to musical institutions. After a string of cancellations, he became an almost total recluse in the last decade of his life, at least insofar as interviews and public appearances were concerned. As such he was like a conductorial equivalent of Rossini and Sibelius, both of whom stopped composing long before their deaths. Karajan once joked that Mr. Kleiber conducted only when his freezer was empty.
Mr. Kleiber was always something of an eccentric. Twice in the last three years he was falsely reported to have died. Martin Engstroem, senior executive producer at Mr. Kleiber’s record label, Deutsche Grammophon, said last night that he had received an e-mail message from the conductor just last week giving no sign of serious illness, but added that Mr. Kleiber had been sad and lonely since his wife’s death.
Mr. Kleiber is survived by a son, Marko, and a daughter, Lillian, both of Munich; and a sister, Veronica, of Milan.
CORRECTION: July 21, 2004, Wednesday The obituary of the Austrian conductor Carlos Kleiber yesterday misstated the year of his American debut and the group with which he performed. It was in 1978 with the Chicago Symphony, not 1977 with the San Francisco Opera.
#6: from THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE (USA)
Passion for music guided Kleiber’s life
By John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune music critic.
July 27, 2004
Carlos Kleiber’s legendary career flew in the face of every rule held sacred in the international big leagues of conducting.
A genius of the baton whose extreme reclusiveness only added to his enormous mystique, Kleiber died July 13, at 74, universally mourned as practically the last of his breed. Only Carlo Maria Giulini, 90, long since retired from the podium, survives him among the great old-school maestros.
Kleiber never sought a glamorous global presence. He shunned all offers of permanent affiliations with symphony orchestras and opera companies, including an invitation to succeed Herbert von Karajan at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the world’s top podium post.
He conducted only whenever and wherever he felt like it. He gave no interviews, shunned media puffery, employed no manager and made very few recordings. He conducted only when his freezer was bare, or so Karajan famously claimed.
Apparently Kleiber needed to fill the deep-freeze only infrequently. He largely retired from conducting after 1994 and directed only two concerts each in 1996 and 1997. His last appearances were in 1999 when he led the Bavarian Radio Symphony in a pair of Beethoven symphonies in Spain and Italy. Then he flew back to his family at their secluded suburban home near Munich to resume his Garbo-esque existence.
A genuine passion
There was, in fact, only one guiding force in his life — music — and he gave himself to it with almost supernal passion and intensity. Every concert and opera performance he conducted was a genuine event, and not simply because he conducted so seldom. His painstaking preparation, his abhorrence of routine, his fanatical musical idealism made it so.
“Difficult” was the word most commonly used to describe the Berlin-born Austrian conductor, who was the son of another famous conducting Kleiber, Erich.
But Carlos Kleiber was only difficult to those who failed to understand who he really was — a completely free spirit. The man who refused engagements if the conditions weren’t right, who walked out on rehearsals and recording sessions if he didn’t get what he wanted, who gave managers ulcers and drove opera directors to exasperation was sending out a message: “I am doing my utmost to meet the music 1,000 percent. You must go the same distance with me.”
If a Kleiber performance was like nobody else’s, he was a seemingly paradoxical interpreter. Few conductors were as closely bound to the score’s details yet so wondrously free of their tyranny. He took what was printed on the page and made poetry out of it. Having fully assimilated the music down to the minutest detail, he was free in the performance to let the music take wing spontaneously. This unpredictability was an essential feature of his art, the reason why every Kleiber performance felt fresh and different. You felt you were hearing familiar music through reawakened ears.
Peter Jonas, the outgoing general director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the former artistic administrator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who persuaded Kleiber, a close friend, to make his U.S. debut with the CSO in 1978, told me this about him at the time of his second and final concerts with the orchestra, back in 1983:
“Carlos has this great kind of inhibition, combined with a desire to scrupulously seek some kind of perfection,” he said. “The hassles, the demands, the non-signing of contracts, these are all part of an effort to create a framework in which he can make truly sincere artistic statements — on his terms. He is not concerned with amassing great wealth or a power base — his ego doesn’t function that way. In fact, he has very little ego to speak of.”
No one lucky enough to have heard Kleiber’s concerts at Orchestra Hall is likely to ever forget them. They turned out to be the only symphonic concerts he would ever conduct in America. Before coming to Chicago to direct Mozart’s Symphony No. 33 and the Brahms Second Symphony in 1983, he sent meticulously detailed instructions to the orchestra librarians as to bowings and dynamic markings. These instructions were written in the form of “Kleibergrams,” typical of the handwritten notes he liked to prepare for musicians before and after rehearsals wherever he appeared.
Attached to these instructions was a postscript addressed to Jonas: “You know how diffident, apprehensive, shy, kind and peaceful I am, but I assure you I will leave the Windy City on the spot if the librarians do a bad job with the material. — C.K.”
A revelation
Both series of Kleiber programs here were revelations, to the orchestra members as much as to the audience. Without doing anything out of the ordinary, without distorting the composer’s intentions, Kleiber made utterly fresh pieces out of those Germanic warhorses, the Beethoven Fifth Symphony and Brahms’ Second. In my Tribune review of the 1978 concert, I called his Beethoven “one of the most electrifyingly kinetic Fifths” I had ever heard. In the Brahms, “the warmth of his phrasing was always combined with a firm sense of underlying pulse, so that the lyrical content carried with it a feeling of marvelous expectancy. A stirring coda to the season.”
Yet, for all his questioning intelligence and masterly control of musical architecture, Kleiber in rehearsal often worried he would not be able to convey his mental image of a score properly to the performers. “Is it going all right? Is my beat not clear enough? Forgive me, but it’s not quite right yet, is it?” he once asked a CSO musician during a rehearsal break. In Chicago, as in other cities where Kleiber conducted, musicians learned to take his fretting only half-seriously. They knew of his insecurities but they also knew his beat and gestures were absolutely right for the flowing, buoyant, infinitely shaded musical line he sought and usually did achieve.
More than once Kleiber’s pungent, self-deprecating sense of humor rescued a CSO rehearsal that had become bogged down in minutiae. He was a shrewd enough psychologist to know when being disarming to musicians could work to the advantage of the finished performance.
Jonas said it best: “You get a strong moral sense with Kleiber. He does what he thinks is right artistically, regardless of obstacles or what anybody else thinks. It is a way of working that is absolutely his own. If there’s just one person left who can make music this way, it’s good for us all.”
Now that person has left the building. And the music world has suffered an immense loss.
#7: from THE WASHINGTON POST (USA)
Gifted, Eccentric Conductor Carlos Kleiber Dies at 74
By Matt Schudel
©Washington Post
Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page B06
Carlos Kleiber, a conductor whose brilliant interpretations of opera and a limited symphonic repertoire were surpassed only by his eccentric, often baffling behavior, died July 13 under a typical shroud of secrecy.
Word of his death was not received until he had been buried in Slovenia, beside his wife, Stanka, who died in December. Mr. Kleiber, 74, lived in Munich, but neither the place of his death nor its cause was disclosed. News reports indicated only that he had had a “long illness.”
Widely considered among the most gifted conductors of the past four decades, along with Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti, Mr. Kleiber performed only rarely and was known for canceling appearances at the last minute. Except for a five-year stint leading the Bavarian Opera from 1968 to 1973, he never accepted a permanent musical post, preferring to choose when, where and whether he would step onto the podium.
He appeared often, if at irregular intervals, at the leading European opera houses in Italy, Germany, Austria and England and was a guest conductor of Europe’s premier orchestras. Despite having studied in New York as a teenager, he conducted in the United States only four times, leading two engagements with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and two with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The son of a renowned conductor, Erich Kleiber, the younger Mr. Kleiber embarked on a musical career against his father’s wishes. He first studied chemistry before turning belatedly if inevitably to conducting, making his European debut in 1954 under an assumed name to avoid bringing shame to his father.
Mr. Kleiber, a tall, slender man of aristocratic bearing, knew the interior architecture of his musical scores intimately, as if he were stripping away years of encrusted tradition to touch the source of the composer’s inspiration.
Conductor Bernard Haitink described Mr. Kleiber as “a genius, an extraordinary man.”
Opera singer Placido Domingo called Mr. Kleiber “a wizard” and said, “In my experience there’s nothing in musical life better than a rehearsal with him.”
His performances of a few select operas, such as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” and Verdi’s “Otello” were regarded as breathtaking by the performers and critics who heard them. His recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms were considered definitive. A writer for Time magazine said his 1975 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth “was as if Homer had come back to recite the Iliad.”
Mr. Kleiber was a reclusive, mercurial man who never gave interviews, sometimes went years without performing and rarely recorded. His engagements quickly sold out, even if he couldn’t be counted on to show up for them. He often canceled at the last moment and once walked out of a recording studio between movements of a symphony, saying he was going for a Sunday drive.
In 1989, he was supposed to conduct five performances of “La Traviata” with the Metropolitan Opera, but when two of the singers took ill, Mr. Kleiber canceled the engagement after two performances.
He could be alternately sensitive or demeaning toward his fellow musicians. Once, between movements of an opera at La Scala in Milan, the baritone Renato Bruson charged Mr. Kleiber backstage, ready to challenge him to a fistfight.
Mr. Kleiber had an unusually small repertoire for a major conductor, focusing on only a few symphonies, piano concertos and operas, and demanded unusually long rehearsals. Yet he managed to pull the finest efforts from his musicians because he made them believe in the music as much as he did.
He had a poetic way of communicating how passages should be played. In one rehearsal of Mozart’s Symphony No. 33 with the Chicago Symphony, he said a slow section should sound “like a parent tugging a child away from a toy-store window as they walk along the street.”
Mr. Kleiber was born July 3, 1930, in Berlin, where his Viennese father conducted the Berlin State Opera. The elder Kleiber, opposed to the Nazi regime and its restrictions on modern musical works, left Germany in 1935 and moved his family to Buenos Aires.
Carlos Kleiber learned English from his American mother and from English-language schools in Argentina and New York. He studied chemistry at a college in Zurich, but he had begun to compose music at age 9 and by 20 was studying conducting in earnest. “What a pity he is musical,” his father wrote in a letter in 1954.
Mr. Kleiber, who lived most of his adult life in Munich surrounded by thousands of recordings and books, was fluent in six languages and had a strong interest in literature and politics.
Von Karajan, the German conductor, said Mr. Kleiber chose to conduct only when his freezer got empty, and he was often rumored to be retired, only to appear for another round of concerts.
In 1995, he led the Bavarian State Orchestra in a concert in exchange for a $100,000 Audi sports car, a deal made over a handshake because Mr. Kleiber didn’t like written contracts.
He gave his final performances in Spain in 1999, leading the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in performances of Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, plus the overture to Johann Strauss Jr.‘s “Die Fledermaus.”
#8: from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES (USA)
Carlos Kleiber, 74; Brilliant, Reclusive Conductor
Los Angeles Times Obituaries
July 20, 2004|Mark Swed | Times Staff Writer
Carlos Kleiber, a conductor of tremendous mystique who had the uncanny ability to animate the smallest details in a piece of music yet whose personal elusiveness made him one of the most enigmatic stars of the classical music world, has died. He was 74.
Kleiber died July 13 after a long illness, a relative who did not want to be named told the Associated Press, and was buried Saturday in Konjusica, Slovenia, next to his wife, who was Slovenian and died in December. No information was released on where Kleiber died or the cause of death.
Even in an art form that relies to a considerable degree on conjuring — the conductor using the power of communication through eyes, body gestures and words to convey to other musicians the essence of sound — Kleiber was a remarkable magician. A performance by him was like that of no other conductor.
His eyes had a glint that all but hypnotized orchestra musician and audience member alike. His gestures were so precise that they seemed to etch melodies out of thin air. It was as if every fiber in his body was translated into single-minded musical impulse, which he conveyed with a dancer’s grace. But just to make sure the players knew what he meant, he loved to send them individual “Kleibergrams” after rehearsals with reminders.
“He is a wizard,” Placido Domingo, the tenor and Los Angeles Opera general director who sang often with Kleiber, told the Guardian in London in 1987. “He has assimilated the score to such a degree that he can read through the notes to uncover all the drama and feeling of the music, everything the composer imagined.”
But the sheer intensity of Kleiber’s music making, his compulsive perfectionism and his appearing to live the music he conducted also came at a price. He might be able to get a small, obscure oboe solo in an opera such as Verdi’s “Otello” to express as much depth of feeling as a character in the opera, but in so doing, he worked constantly on the edge.
That meant he couldn’t be bothered with the ancillary aspects of performing or fame, which gave him the reputation for being difficult. He had a near-phobia of the limelight. He refused requests for interviews. He insisted that he not be introduced to anyone he didn’t want to meet.
He demanded double or triple the typical number of rehearsals. And he never announced what he would conduct in advance, deciding on repertory when he showed up for rehearsals. That, however, wasn’t as great a problem as it might seem, since, despite what was said to be a vast knowledge of the repertory, he only conducted a handful of symphonies, concertos and operas.
But even when all conditions were met — and orchestras and opera companies were willing to do just about anything to entice Kleiber onto their podia — he could still refuse. Or walk out. Or cancel.
Still, every performance was an occasion and nearly every one of his small number of recordings, such as those of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies and Verdi’s “La Traviata,” is considered a classic.
The son of the famed Austrian conductor, Erich Kleiber, Carlos Kleiber was born in Berlin on July 3, 1930. To escape the war in Europe, the Kleibers emigrated to Buenos Aires where Erich Kleiber conducted at the Teatro Colon. But he discouraged his son from pursuing a career in music, despite a natural talent.
The young musician did, in fact, have thoughts about going into chemistry but he eventually rebelled against his domineering father and slowly worked his way up in small opera houses in Germany. Fighting under the yoke of his father, he used the pseudonym Karl Keller when he made his conducting debut in Potsdam in 1954. But his father continued to publicly criticize his son, saying he would never get the rhythms right in Viennese waltzes.
In 1958, two years after his father died, Kleiber got his first conducting post at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf. In 1964, he moved on to Switzerland at the Zurich Opera for two years, then returned to Germany and conducted opera in Stuttgart for two years.
For the next 10 years, he had a guest contract with the Staatsoper in Munich and his international career blossomed while he conducted celebrated performances of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in Vienna and at the Bayreuth Festival, and Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier” and “Elektra” at Covent Garden in London.
Kleiber made his American debut conducting Verdi’s “Otello” at the San Francisco Opera in 1977 [ed.: CK never conducted in San Francisco], and he appeared several times at the Metropolitan Opera in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But the only American orchestra he ever conducted was the Chicago Symphony.
Twice, however, he nearly came to Los Angeles, Ernest Fleischmann, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, recalled Monday. In the mid-‘70s, after agreeing in principle to make his American debut in Los Angeles, Kleiber then decided he didn’t want to make the trip from Munich.
The next time, in the ’80s, Kleiber told then-Philharmonic music director Carlo Maria Giulini that he would conduct in Los Angeles for two weeks if he were given a house here for three months and a school was found for his children. Kleiber said that Fleischmann should call if that could be managed, and he gave Giulini the phone number.
“I made all the arrangements he asked for,” Fleischmann said, “and I called him at the number he had given to Giulini. ‘Mr. Fleischmann, where did you get this number?’ he answered. ‘It’s private.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”
As time went on Kleiber became increasingly reclusive, but even at the best of times, Fleischmann’s experience wasn’t unique. The conductor Herbert von Karajan once said of Kleiber that he “has a genius for conducting, but he doesn’t enjoy doing it. He tells me, ‘I conduct only when I am hungry.’ And it is true. He has a deep-freeze. He fills it up, and cooks for himself, and when it gets down to a certain level, then he thinks, ‘Now I might do a concert.’ “
By 1994, Kleiber all but quit conducting, apparently needing to fill the deep-freeze only every year or two. His last appearance was in 1999, when he led the Bavarian Radio Symphony at a festival on the Canary Islands.
“He was the last of the great old-school ‘maestro’ type of conductors,” Fleischmann said. “His performances were revelations. He got orchestras to play absolutely above themselves.”
In keeping with Kleiber’s reclusive ways, no information about survivors was released.
#9: from GRAMOPHONE (UK)
Carlos Kleiber - Obituary (October 2004)
by Jon Tolansky
Although Carlos Kleiber performed notoriously infrequently, at least in recent decades, and never gave an interview, his magnetic personality, extraordinary virtuosity and vibrant performances fascinated and captivated music lovers around the world. Even those who felt there was excessive nervous energy and caprice in his conducting marvelled at the remarkable technical results. No wonder the death of such a unique musician has saddened so many.
Born in 1930 in Germany (as an Austrian citizen), Carlos Kleiber was the son of Erich Kleiber, one of the most influential conductors of the earlier part of the century. He initially discouraged his son from following in his footsteps, but in due course Carlos disregarded his advice and embarked on a career which evolved gradually in the traditional, now almost defunct way – learning the craft as a repetiteur and then conductor in provincial opera houses. He made his debut in Potsdam in 1954 and then joined the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf three years later. In 1964 he went to the Zurich Opera, and was still relatively little-known when, in 1966, he became First Kapellmeister at the Wurttemberg State Theatre in Stuttgart. It was here, during the next three years, that he began to attract international attention. But before long he decided he only wanted to conduct a small select repertoire as an occasional guest – where and when he wanted. There was a 10-year arrangement with the Bavarian State Opera from 1968 but even there his appearances were infrequent.
Demand for the elusive Kleiber grew substantially, and by the time he made his debuts at Vienna in 1973, and Bayreuth, Covent Garden and La Scala in 1974, he was one of the most sought-after of all conductors – ever. He was the first choice of the Berlin Philharmonic to succeed Herbert von Karajan but he was not interested. By now he was only rarely to be seen in the opera house and concert hall, his performances almost invariably selling out well in advance.
Karajan once joked that Kleiber only conducted when his freezer was empty – though on one rare return to the podium several years ago he was lured back by the fee of an Audi car. As for recordings, there is just a small handful of discs and videos and a few pirate issues, virtually all of them collectors’ treasured items. One especially prized recording is a recently issued DVD of a rehearsal in 1970, which vividly shows what an inspirational perfectionist he was, a character trait recalled by Ileana Cotrubas, who sang Violetta and Mimi with him. ‘He ate and breathed music, and, unlike so many celebrity conductors, he came to every single rehearsal. He insisted on having so many rehearsals because he needed the time to get to know the artists and become familiar with the emotional impact of a performer in his or her role. It was important both for him and us to have this mutual knowledge. When the performance came I had the feeling that we could fly – everything felt so natural.’
Margaret Price, Kleiber’s Desdemona at Covent Garden in 1980, and who also performed and recorded Isolde with him, found him ‘so meticulous: he sent me a score that was absolutely riddled with markings that he wanted me to think about and do for him. When I then went to Munich to rehearse with him, he was astonished that I had actually taken in everything that he had specifically asked for, and he was very pleased and happy. But at the same time he wanted me to give my own individual interpretation. He was not like some conductors who rehearse over and over again and expect you to perform exactly the way they have rehearsed. Although he was so specific, he also gave you a lot of freedom and wanted that in performance.’
Orchestral musicians who played for Kleiber were riveted by his approach. Former Covent Garden principal trombone Harold Nash recalls: ‘His intellect was astonishing, and then with that to have the musical taste, the extraordinary technique and the crazy personality that changed so dramatically from bar to bar – you could see the face change when the chord changed!’ I experienced the instantaneous effect of that the first time I played for Kleiber, in “La Bohème” at Covent Garden. In the opening minute of the first rehearsal the orchestra sounded so exceptionally flexible, vibrant and yet precise, before he had said a word. Then, when he went into detail, although he was so demanding he was captivating: ‘He painted such vivid pictures, both in words and with his baton, and everything fell so perfectly into place,’ comments former ROH percussionist Ronald McCrea. He also recalls that: ‘On occasion he could be temperamental – I remember he was going to walk out once because he felt the chorus wasn’t taking what he was saying seriously. But on the whole he was so charming and so amazingly entertaining.’
Kleiber was extremely vulnerable and often self-doubting. When disparaged in three newspapers after a London Symphony Orchestra concert that he, the orchestra and the audience were thrilled with, he was so wounded he vowed never to conduct in London again. This same delicate fragility led to his total retreat from media attention. ‘He was not a recluse, but he was a very private person,’ adds Margaret Price, who saw him every week in the local baker shop in Munich when she lived there, near his home. ‘He had his own way of working, he would study ad nauseam and he did not get involved in parties or receptions and the like. He did not want that at all.’
‘He was an introvert,’ adds Ileana Cotrubas. ‘If you wanted just to touch a tiny part of his private life he was like a snail who immediately goes into his shell and will only come out later’. He was also disarmingly humble. On one occasion in between rehearsals, he asked me if I had ever played for Leopold Stokowski. When I replied that I indeed had on a number of occasions, he was excited and asked: ‘Please tell me – how did he get that amazing sound from the orchestra, what did he do?’ He would never know how many scores of music lovers and musicians asked me the very same question about Carlos Kleiber.
#10: from MUSIC WEB INTERNATIONAL (UK)
MUSIC WEB INTERNATIONAL
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/July04/Kleiber_Obit.htm#ixzz2PoAC8xRV
by Marc Bridle
CARLOS KLEIBER (1930-2004)
The death of Carlos Kleiber at the age of 74 (and characteristically, his death on 13th July took almost a week to become public) ends perhaps the most infuriating career of any of the great conductors of the last century. His last public concert – with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1999 – came some years after his last studio recording; and of all the great conductors he had by far the most limited repertoire. Like Sergiu Celibidache – whom Kleiber recalls in many ways – his was a career which was unsatisfactorily incomplete.
Yet, however incomplete it may be there exists a considerable artistic legacy, although a certain blindness to Kleiber’s greatness can have the effect of clouding some of his real achievements. So much, for example, has been written about his recording of Beethoven’s Fifth with the Vienna Philharmonic that it is often overlooked that Kleiber doesn’t actually get the first bar’s four note motif right. Nor is he a persuasive conductor of the Prelude to “Tristan” where Wagner’s tempi are all but sublimated. Yet, forget these technical details and the performances that Kleiber gives us were as musically perfect as any. His conducting technique was so expressive, so flexible, that at times he seemed as if he was improvising. Like Furtwängler no two performances were ever the same and like both his father, Erich, and Fritz Busch, the clarity given to the grand line of a work was seamless. There were few mannerisms – though Kleiber did have a tendency to over-emphasise crescendos to the point of starting them earlier than written – and at times one was less aware of dynamics in a performance of a well known work than with other conductors. Yet, at his best Kleiber was an incandescent re-creator of great music and a conductor of such virtuoso brilliance that it seemed impossible to be excluded from his music-making.
Such greatness – effortless as it was – belied the preparation that Kleiber put into his performances. Rehearsals were intensive and - like Celibidache and Wand – he demanded, and got, the rehearsal time he wanted. It was this search for perfection that made Kleiber so hysterically unreceptive to bad reviews. One of the most notorious of these ‘bad press’ incidents happened in London in 1981 when the LSO persuaded Kleiber to conduct a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh and Schubert’s Ninth (a repeat of a concert Kleiber and the orchestra had given in Milan days before). Edward Greenfield’s negative review ensured Kleiber never conducted an orchestra in London again. Kleiber forbid the BBC to broadcast the concert and the tapes were destroyed. Incidents such as these were few and far between, but it was characteristic of Kleiber to be so vulnerable to negative publicity; he never gave an interview, thus perpetuating the myth of his reclusivity.
Kleiber was born in Berlin on 3rd July 1930 but moved to Argentina soon after when his family left Nazi Germany. Kleiber almost instinctively knew what his vocation would be – to the extent that his father expressed displeasure at the young Carlos’ unfortunate interest in music – and so it was that the young Kleiber took the then conventional route of working his way up through European opera houses, first in Düsseldorf and then in Zurich. Stuttgart played an important part in Kleiber’s operatic life in the mid 1960s, as did Munich later – and his special relationship with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra became a natural extension of operatic Munich. The early 1970s saw his debuts at the Vienna Staatsoper, Bayreuth, La Scala and Covent Garden. It was only in the late 1980s that Kleiber made his debut at The Met, although he had regularly conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra throughout the previous decade. [ed.: not so. CK only conducted twice in Chicago, once in 1978 and the other time in 1983.]
Kleiber never held any post with a symphony orchestra, preferring instead to guest conduct those orchestras who could most meet his demands. The Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and Concertgebouw all secured his services (the Berliners even electing Kleiber to succeed Karajan, only for him to turn down the job.) Kleiber negotiated all his contracts personally – often with a handshake rather than in any written form – and never had any agent to deal with managers on his behalf. This sometimes led to odd payment arrangements – one of his last concerts involving payment in the form of a sport’s car rather than cash.
But it was the sheer sparseness of the concerts that he gave that is astonishing for such an important conductor. Between 1978 (in Chicago) and between that final concert in Cagliari in 1999 Kleiber gave just 157 concerts with eight different symphony orchestras, an average of seven a year. Some works – such as Beethoven’s Sixth – he conducted just once (1983) whilst other works he conducted merely a handful of times - “Ein Heldenleben” (twice) and Butterworth’s “English Idylls” (five times.) Only Beethoven and Brahms were conducted with any regularity. In stark contrast, Kleiber conducted over 520 opera performances over a 35-year period, the majority of those having been with the Bavarian State Opera. At Covent Garden there were fabulous performances of “Elektra” and “Rosenkavalier” and at Bayreuth he conducted “Tristan” for the three years between 1974 and 1976.
That “Elektra,” released some years back on Golden Melodram (a Slovenian label, and Kleiber was buried in Slovenia) still has the capacity to electrify, even though the sound is poor (this was an in-house recording). It’s an important document of Kleiber at the peak of his powers – has Strauss’ score ever sounded more violent and more turbulent than it does in this 1977 performance? It’s also important because it demonstrates those essential characteristics of a Kleiber performance – crystalline textures, subtle dynamics and absolute control at all the pivotal moments. Yet, perversely, the recording demonstrates a constant throughout Kleiber’s operatic career – his inability to cast productions completely successfully. Gwyneth Jones’ Chrysothemis is poorly sung, and a similar problem exists with his casting of her as the Marschallin in both a 1977 Munich production of “Rosenkavalier” and another one in 1979. Marion Lippert in a 1971 “Elektra” from Stuttgart is also uncomfortable as Chysothemis, yet that is slightly offset by a wonderfully sung Klytemnestra from Martha Mödl and a powerful Aegisth sung by Windgassen. When it came to “Tristan” there could also be controversial casting choices: Catarina Ligendza – a regular Isolde for Kleiber at Bayreuth, Vienna and Stuttgart – never really settles into the part but perhaps most controversially was his insistence on Margaret Price as his Isolde for his studio recording of the opera done with the Dresden Staatskapelle. The most sumptuously lyrical Isolde on record, Price is either to your taste or she is not.
One could argue that Kleiber’s judgment when it came to the suitability of releasing some of his live recordings was also defective at times. The recent Beethoven Sixth on Orfeo is extraordinary is some ways (notably for some really beautifully judged orchestral playing) but in others – its extremes of tempi especially – it seems not to represent Kleiber at his best. On the other hand, Kleiber forbid Sony to release a 1983 performance of “Ein Heldenleben” with the Vienna Philharmonic because he was unhappy with it: listen to the performance and one wonders what Kleiber could object to. It is incandescent, and as perfect an example of ‘clock-time’ being meaningless as in any recording of the work I know. At less than 38 minutes it is fast - but it never sounds it – and the architecture of the work has never appeared so convincingly done as it does in this performance.
And that is the colossal scale of Kleiber’s life and death. There exist some of the greatest recorded performances of symphonies and operas anywhere in the catalogue (are there many people who would deny that his “Der Freischütz” is the greatest opera recording ever made?) Kleiber does what every great conductor does – he brings to a work something personal and unique. There is little – if any - Kleiber that remains to be discovered but the legacy we have is as important, and in many ways more important, than some of the legacies of great conductors who performed and recorded with a considerably greater degree of vicissitude than Kleiber did. His death is a significant loss, but given Kleiber’s rejection of music in his last years not one that should be mourned because of what he did not conduct.
END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Yves Jodogne kindly drew my attention to several of the above obituaries. A number of CK obituaries, several of which are included above and the first of which is in Bulgarian, can be found at http://freewebs.com/kleiber/fest_2.htm.
