Everybody has some things to regret: everybody, every human being. But generally it was all right.

Having endured devastating blows of fate that would have felled most people half his age, Otto Klemperer, who died 50 years ago this June, was 75 when he gave that characteristically succinct answer to his interlocutor John Freeman in a rare interview that aired on BBC Television’s seminal series Face to Face in January 1961 (it was subsequently issued in the complete Face to Face edition on BBCDVD 2908).  ‘Generally it was all right’ was his disarming overview of protracted unfazed survival way against the odds: acute mental and physical illnesses, life threatening accidents, traumatic domiciliary displacements, and dangerous disruptions to his controversial but strikingly brilliant conducting career – all these had been dogging him for decades. They included physical disasters: a brain tumour and stroke in 1939 leaving him partially paralysed with restricted movements and impaired speech, and falls and other misfortunes such as setting himself alight after falling asleep smoking his pipe in bed and suffering third degree burns – this when he was 73 years old. There was a clinical manic-depressive illness since his youth that had on occasions, most especially in manic phases, brought him public scandal and even once, though wholly unjustifiably, imprisonment. And, at the height of a spectacularly successful opera and concert career in Germany, he had lost his home and profession when in 1933, as a Jewish musician and also a proponent of radical artistic and social concepts, the Nazi Party’s rise to power threatened his existence and he was obliged to spend the best part of the following two decades in insecure exile with a controversial reputation and an often erratic professional life. Yet ‘generally it was all right’.  

Anthony Tunstall - Principal horn, ROH

Otto Klemperer’s selfless resolve was a conspicuous mirror of his inexorable artistic consciousness. From his earliest days as a fanatical dynamic perfectionist up to his late years as an iconic figure of wisdom and control, he pursued his goal of the utmost fidelity to the letter of the composer’s score, eschewing personal subjectivity in interpretation and cutting a stringently un-flamboyant figure on the concert platform and in the opera house pit – but, vitally, exuding an intense charisma of leadership and intention that galvanised orchestras, singers and audiences alike. There were those who could not go along with his draconian musical objectivity, preferring a more flexible personal approach in tempi and phrasing, but even they conceded the compelling unanimity of response and powerful dramatic impact he attained, which only diminished in his final few years. I first experienced this at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden on the February 27, 1961 when I was in the audience for the second night of his run of performances conducting his own new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with Jon Vickers, Sena Jurinac, Hans Hotter, and Gottlob Frick among the magnificent cast. Hotter recalling the occasion in his autobiography referred to Dr Klemperer’s ‘absolute loyalty to the score and an imperturbable determination to have the work interpreted in accordance with his ideas’. 

The capacity audience of which I was a member heard the fruits of that insistence in the electrifying intensity and exceptional ensemble precision that is preserved in Testament’s discs of the opening night from three days earlier (SBT 21328). As I was privileged to be in a box, thanks to the devoted support of my parents who had been treating me to opera at Covent Garden since 1958, I was also able to see how Otto Klemperer conveyed his communication to all the performers – orchestra, solo singers and chorus. Catching my first view of him, here was an imposingly tall and dignified but substantially disabled man slowly making his way with one heavy crutch through the orchestra to take his place on a high chair at the front of the pit. He was receiving a huge ovation, which he acknowledged very brusquely, briefly and unsmilingly, even as it still increased: already his presence was palpable. Then, the opening of the Overture: a shaky but grippingly rhythmic beat, a vividly energetic connection to the players through transfixing eye-contact – and an immediate incisive life-force in the sound and attack. That is how he came across just in the first half minute or so and even from a distance – closer up and facing him directly, the baritone Victor Godfrey, who sang one of the two solo Prisoners, recalled his very first impression to me:

‘Klemperer was a completely unknown quotient. Of course he had very much made his name in the concert scene with the Philharmonia Orchestra, but operatically we didn’t know what was going to happen, and his entrance into the Royal Opera House on the very first day was absolutely electric. We had been told he had suffered a stroke, he had had very serious bed burns, and we expected really a cripple or an invalid, and this enormous man came in on the arm of his daughter Lotte – and when he stood up from his chair and he raised his arms, and he indicated he wanted a performance, you gave the performance.’

Basil Tschaikov - Philharmonia clarinettist and Chairman

It had been Walter Legge, EMI’s Head of Artists and Repertoire and the founder and owner of the Philharmonia Orchestra, who had brought Otto Klemperer to London to begin what was to be a long and acclaimed Indian Summer of concerts and recordings that began in earnest in 1954 and continued with tremendous success until the conductor’s retirement in 1971 – although by then he and Legge had irreparably fallen out. That had happened in 1964 when Legge decided to disband the Orchestra and Klemperer threw all his weight and support behind the players when they reformed themselves into a self-governing collective as the New Philharmonia Orchestra, electing him as their Honorary President. Legge disowned Klemperer as a betrayer– an unwarrantable act of delusion, but in his mind indivisible from what he saw as the conductor’s breach of loyalty after he had created the opportunity and conditions for him to begin a new hugely rewarding phase of his career. It was very unfortunate that Legge’s misplaced vanity invoked such inappropriate resentment towards the Maestro, as he had indeed set up the circumstances for Klemperer to reach the zenith of his life and career after more than two decades of harrowing troubles. His initiative certainly harvested one of the most famous legacies in recording history that, as mentioned above, continued beyond Legge’s time both as the Philharmonia’s owner/director and also the Head of Artists and Repertoire at EMI, from which he resigned in the same year as his disbandment of his Orchestra. 

The entire Klemperer EMI heritage plus some never before released recordings is being made available in this commemoration year by Warner Classics with two mammoth box sets. The first, coming out in June to mark the 50th anniversary of Klemperer’s death, has 95cds consisting of his orchestral, concerto and chamber recordings as well as several previously unissued recordings of some of his compositions (a few of the latter have been available on Archiphon, but some of the items here are appearing for the first time). The set includes the recordings he made for Parlophone in the late 1920s and there is also a Bonus CD documentary tracing the Maestro’s life and career with recollections from people who experienced him from as early as the 1920s right up to his final years. So it is that we can hear the truly tremendous differences between his earlier and later recordings, and also between the earlier and later Klemperer as a man. The Parlophone discs reveal why he had made such a powerful impact during his time as the Music Director of the Kroll-Oper (the Kroll Opera House in Berlin), which had been reconstituted as a radically experimental theatre under new management. While his vigorous leadership oversaw a watershed in audacious new concepts both of opera interpretation and stage direction, his performances there and also elsewhere in concert repertoire had been widely remarked upon for their intensely fiery drama, characterised by the incisively rhythmic attacks, breakneck extremes of speed, and meticulously precise details he obtained from the orchestra. He was also a pioneer of contemporary and at the time avant-garde music performance, and, as we glean from the documentary, he was in those days a fearsome character in rehearsal, driving the musicians ferociously for his demands and insisting on many long sessions that were more numerous than the norm. 

Gareth Morris - Philharmonia Principal Flute and Chairman

Some of those dramatic and fleet-footed musical traits were still in evidence for a time in the early days of Klemperer’s celebrated Philharmonia era, but by then he was generally a far more moderately tempered musician and indeed he made his greatest international fame now with a very different kind of music making: focussing especially on the great 18th and 19th century classics, he brought them far more measured tempi, considerably less volatility, and a magisterial command and control of structure and form that won him an enormous following. His rehearsals had also become a great deal more concise and economical, though still very demanding, as can be heard in the second Warner Classics box set which has 29CDs consisting of his opera and oratorio recordings, a documentary, and rehearsal and listening playback sessions for his Don Giovanni recording – and the rehearsals include recently discovered additional material to that which had been previously issued with the 2013 Klemperer Edition release. This second box set will appear on October 27, fortuitously commemorating the exact date 59 years earlier when Klemperer had conducted the New Philharmonia’s inaugural gala concert with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall – an event I attended, and to this day I clearly recall how razor-sharp alert the Maestro’s gestures were despite the restricted and shaky movements of his hands that had been his handicap ever since his stroke back in 1939. His eyes vividly told the orchestra, the chorus and the solo singers everything that he wanted, as the recording of the television relay on EuroArts 8024265548 reveals, and one couldn’t escape their penetrating power. Among the many contributors to both documentaries who bear that out is Carlos Villa, who succeeded Hugh Bean as the New Philharmonia Orchestra’s concertmaster in 1968, and he recalls how

‘His eyes told you everything.  He didn’t say much at rehearsals, just a few instructions, but when he looked at you, it was so vivid and clear and strong that you knew exactly what he wanted. Of course his beat was shaky because of his infirmity, but it was very rhythmic, and his eyes were everywhere in the orchestra – that’s how he obtained the concentration from everyone.’

Martyn Jones - Philharmonia violinist 

And in two of the four audio files that are accompanying this memoir, you can hear former Philharmonia Orchestra Principal Flute and Chairman Gareth Morris and also former Royal Opera House Orchestra Principal Horn Anthony Tunstall recall their experiences of the vivid communication and powerful control that Klemperer exerted.  

Although the later Klemperer’s conducting was generally less impetuous and, perhaps one might say, more sober than it had been a lot earlier, what had not changed whatsoever was his artistic philosophy. In everything that he did throughout his long career he strove single-mindedly to achieve the best he felt he could for the exact and literal letter of the composer’s score. For him there was no place for any personal artistic licence at all, and to some people this could make his performances sound dry and even unfeeling. He himself said in the interview with John Freeman ‘I am not romantic’, and he had his detractors who wished he could have allowed himself just a modicum of the kind of spontaneous affectionate flexibility that characterised the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwängler or, in a very different way, Sir Thomas Beecham – the latter an artist he greatly admired.  However – he could spring striking surprises. The documentary in the first box set contains an extract from a live concert performance of Strauss’s Don Juan that can be heard complete in Warner Classics’ Philharmonia Orchestra 75th anniversary release (9029534951), and it illustrates compelling differences from Klemperer’s studio recording of the same music with the same orchestra made less than two years later. Indeed, despite Klemperer’s rigorous discipline for authenticity, there were some spontaneous instinctive passages of dramatic accelerandi and torrid crescendi in the Royal Festival, and for me they are riveting. The Orchestra’s second clarinettist and later Chairman Basil Tschaikov remembered how:

‘The difference was enormous. He whipped it up and there were changes of tempo’.

There are some similar kinds of differences between that thrilling Fidelio from Covent Garden on Testament that I mentioned before and the subsequent EMI studio recording that Walter Legge produced the following year – but it is very important to log that the latter became a benchmark performance for the opera in many peoples’ estimation. There is surely space to treasure the sum of Klemperer’s studio and live conducting in the totality of his great recorded heritage. And the aggregation of that complete legacy is most crucially represented by the devoted joint commitment of Musicas.de and Archiphon, which for many years has enabled us to follow the extraordinary stoicism and powerfully remarkable music-making of this towering personality through the turbulent years between his traumas of the 1930s and his new artistic life from the mid 1950s, and indeed also with unique documents of him well into the 1960s. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Otto Klemperer’s death they have this year recently brought out some crucially important releases, one of which is a 16 CD set focussing on his association with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra between 1951 and 1963. This box, issued on Musicas-Archiphon 699030, includes new remasterings of the many studio recordings Klemperer made with Vox before signing on with EMI in 1954, and also there are a host of live performances, which, once again, sometimes have conspicuous differences from the Maestro’s studio recordings made at similar times. Some, though not all, of the earlier recordings, both studio and live, are in many ways a lot closer in character and approach to the impulsive and high speed performances of Klemperer’s earlier years, as indeed much of his music making was until after around the middle part of the 1950s. One of this set’s glories is a 180 pages biographical book in English and German, authoritatively and profoundly informatively written by the expert Dick Bruggeman and richly adorned with photographs and illustrations. 

Also from the same label for this commemorative Klemperer year on Musicas-Archiphon 699029 is an exceptional rarity: the first ever issue of Klemperer conducting the Symphony No 3 by Roy Harris.  He performed it at the 1947 Salzburg Festival with, most surprisingly for that time in this repertoire, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the concert also included a performance of Mahler’s 4th Symphony with some passages of delicate flexibility that may surprise some of this conductor’s critics. 

And what about those darkly troubled and ultimately terrifying times that Klemperer had to endure from 1933 through that decade and in the 1940s? They are viscerally included as part of Philo Bregstein’s indispensable documentary film tracing the Maestro’s entire life, which has been reissued by Musicas.de: entitled Otto Klemperer’s Long Journey Through his Times, there are interviews that include the great conductor himself speaking, with, also, some especially revealing memories of his earlier time as Music Director at the Kroll-Oper. And then there is Musicas-Archiphon’s preservation of many live performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, where he was the Music Director in the second half of the 1930s. They reveal a conductor of intense energy obtaining strongly chiselled and highly disciplined results in a wide repertoire that included Albeniz, Debussy, Gershwin, and Schoenberg’s arrangements of music by Handel and Brahms, as well as more familiar Klemperer territory. Then after the War, when he was the Music Director at the Budapest Opera from 1947 to 1950, there are live performances of The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and Fidelio that will surely surprise those who know his famous studio recordings of these works. He was often so much more abrupt though nevertheless highly dramatic in these performances – and their innate theatricality reminds us of his profound lifelong love of opera. Also there are The Tales of Hoffmann, The Mastersingers, and the notorious Lohengrin – which, in the latter, was when he walked out of the pit after shouting at the audience because their vociferous applause for an encore after Lohengrin’s last act aria ‘Im fernem land’ prevented the performance continuing without a stoppage. In a request inserted into the printed programme he had specifically asked them not to applaud until the ends of Acts, and so when they ignored this it was too much for him – although he did return to conduct the remaining several minutes of the performance. All that can be heard on Archiphon ARC-WU108-10. 

Archiphon has also reissued Klemperer’s extraordinarily fiery and brilliantly articulated yet little known recordings of Mozart symphonies No’s 25 and 36 that he recorded in Vox’s Paris studios in 1946 (ARC-WU174), and in collaboration with Musicas.de it has given us a major historical document preserving the Maestro’s acclaimed concerts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra over a prolonged period, between 1946 and 1961, issued on 699026. With this ensemble he formed an important close bond, actually beginning before his famous Philharmonia days, and although there were some troubles and difficulties, he was often rewarded with outstandingly fine playing from musicians who, as the Philharmonia so notably were to, understood and valued his intentions. The repertoire in this 24CD set, which has been remastered in Hybrid SACD sound, sometimes recalls the adventurousness of Klemperer’s earlier years: as well as the expected composers’ works with which he became so famous in his later years – the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, Strauss and Mahler – there are performances of Bartók, Falla, Hindemith, Janácek, Stravinsky, Henkemans and also his own music.    

It was, however, with the Philharmonia Orchestra and then the New Philharmonia that Otto Klemperer enjoyed the closest and happiest relationship of his artistic life. Even in these later years he could be curmudgeonly and authoritarian, but the Orchestra was devoted to him, as you can hear in the other two audio commentaries from Basil Tschaikov and also former violinist Martyn Jones that accompany this article. In turn, Klemperer was greatly appreciative both of the Philharmonia’s commitment and also their outstanding abilities. ‘This Orchestra is all my joy’ he said in his Face to Face interview, and the mutual personal alchemy was a major ingredient of the performance quality, as Basil Tschaikov explained to me:

‘When he conducted, you were hanging out on the edge of eternity, because the Orchestra actually was having to concentrate and was willing to do so and was willing to fathom out what these things in his beat were. With Klemperer, there was a willingness on the part of the Orchestra to give themselves to him, and this is tremendously important.  It was because the results that you thought that you got were worthwhile, and certainly in the big classical repertoire it was a wonderful experience’.

Especially in that repertoire Otto Klemperer exuded a profound seriousness that was aligned to his deeply cultured preoccupation with the musical and literary works of the great master composers and writers. But….this was only one aspect of his engrossingly absorbing personality. He could be brilliantly witty and disarmingly amusing – devastatingly directly so if you were at the receiving end. Carlos Villa recalled to me what happened when as a soloist he was rehearsing the last movement of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with him:

‘He wanted it quite a lot slower than it is usually played, which made it difficult for me to play, as I had not prepared it at that speed. I asked him: “Dr Klemperer – could this maybe go a little faste”. “Yes, certainly” he said ... ”with another conductor”.’

And the great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau told me that when he sang in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Klemperer the orchestra was playing so loudly that:

‘I stood there like a fish opening my mouth and nobody heard a sound, and I begged him very much to keep the orchestra a little down.  He said “You must give less!!” In a way he was right, because the orchestra is intelligent enough to follow. If they hear that the soloist is not too loud or doesn’t try to be too loud, they play more softly…’   

A charitable but penetratingly discerning evaluation of Dr Klemperer’s humour, which brooked no compromises, just as it was with his music-making. Basil Tschaikov’s recollection of him encapsulates his very essence as man and artist:

‘If I had to find one word for working with Klemperer, it was that he was an honest man – an honest man in every way – with roughness and with some failings, but he was absolutely honest with himself, he was straightforward with people, he would say that black was black and wouldn’t try to make out that it was a bit grey… If it was black it was black, that was it, and if it was white it was white. It was cut and dried. There was no room for ambivalence in his performances or in him as a man – and that’s greatness.’

Which was exemplified when, after all that he had gone through in his life, his answer to John Freeman’s question near the end of his interview ‘Have you had a happy life and are you a happy man today?’ was, after a few seconds of thought, one gently but surely spoken word: ‘Yes’.