Washington Post on Carlos Kleiber

**Walter Boot Legge** · 21.07.2004, 10:43

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
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 Zurich 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."

**Walter Boot Legge** · 22.07.2004, 02:45

Carlos Kleiber (Filed: 21/07/2004)
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.
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 Freischutz. 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.

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