Music: Klemperer Comes Back

Dark, fierce-eyed Otto Klemperer has the awe-inspiring, fiery look of an Old Testament prophet. And, like Job, he has been sorely afflicted. Last week, at 61, after years of tragedy, Conductor Klemperer was making a European comeback.

Europeans remembered him as the great pre-Hitler conductor of the Berlin State Opera. Some Americans remembered his six-year success with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but more remembered sensational newspaper headlines about him.

In Leipzig, in 1932, while he was conducting a rehearsal, a railing back of him gave way and he fell over backwards, striking his head severely at the base of the skull. A brain tumor operation in 1939 left him partially paralyzed. Then in 1941 he registered at a Rye, N.Y. sanatorium for a rest. The second day he walked out, and the sanatorium director notified the police, who issued a widely publicized nine-state alarm describing Conductor Klemperer as “dangerous and insane.”

To prove to the world that he was not crazy, Otto Klemperer spent his life earnings hiring a 70-piece orchestra for a performance in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall (TIME, May 15, 1941). The concert was a critical success—but no one would give him a steady job. Four West Coast orchestras let him make guest appearances, but that was all. Conductor Klemperer returned to his Los Angeles home, fretted away five years.

Last April he went back to Europe. In Rome he conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and was cheered. In Milan’s La Scala he was such a success that a repeat concert was scheduled. In Paris he earned bravos with the rarely performed Second Symphony of Bruckner. Last week before an international audience in the Swiss mountain resort of Interlaken, Otto Klemperer conducted the great old 120-piece Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Said Concertgebouw’s Manager Egon Kater: “When Klemperer appears before an orchestra it is like holy devotion, as if the Pope appeared at Saint Peter’s Cathedral in front of a crowd of believers. Klemperer is one of the very few great living conductors; he can be compared only to Toscanini, Bruno Walter and—let us say it without political prejudice—Furtwängler.”*

*Last week Furtwängler was invited by the Russians to return to Berlin as director of the Staatsoper and senior cultural adviser to Russians in Germany. The invitation was opposed by the U.S., which suspects he was a Nazi sympathizer.