Music: Klemperer Returns

Nothing annoys Conductor Otto Klemperer quite so much as applause. He takes his bows almost grudgingly, his craggy face expressionless, his eyes apparently unseeing. To Klemperer, musicmaking is almost a mystic rite upon which an audience should never intrude. Last week Klemperer’s annoyance was severe: in the U.S. for the first time in nine years, he led the Philadelphia Orchestra in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall—and roused the crowd to an ovation the like of which conductors rarely hear.

Now boss of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Klemperer is regarded as the master of the 19th century romantics —Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner. Last week’s concert demonstrated why. Seated on a high wooden chair, his right hand clenched in a fist, Klemperer led the Philadelphia through performances of Beethoven’s Eroica and Pastoral symphonies that were wonders of clarity and searching detail. Under Klemperer, the familiar, voluptuous Philadelphia sound faded away; the orchestra sounded lean and meticulously responsive as it played at tempi more deliberate than any other conductor would dare use (the New York Times’s Harold Schonberg, who likes to clock performances, reported that the Pastoral Symphony took 50 minutes instead of the customary 40).

Reaching for Spirits. Keeping an iron grip on tempo and rhythm, Klemperer forged a reading so scrupulously attentive to the score that it amounted almost to an analysis of Beethoven’s thought. When the old man hobbled from the stage with the help of his heavy cane, the audience had heard Beethoven illuminated as by no other living conductor.

At 77, Klemperer is not always in such form. His reverence for detail sometimes betrays him into concerts that are flat and dull. He has a tendency these days to conduct with perfection rather than passion—falling back on his tremendous knowledge and experience to see him through. Plagued for years by physical disabilities—a brain concussion, a broken thigh bone, an operation for a tumor that left him partly paralyzed—he recently survived burns that kept him in the hospital for nearly a year. Klemperer had been smoking his pipe in bed, woke to find his bedclothes smoldering, reached for the nearest liquid on his bedside table. It happened to be highly flammable spirits of camphor.

Old Black Magic. Since he was made principal conductor of the Philharmonia for life in 1959, Klemperer has mellowed considerably, rarely giving in to the manic moods and deep depressions of his earlier career (he had been known to grab a violin from a player’s hand and smash it over the fiddler’s head). When not conducting, he lives in a Zurich apartment, attended by his daughter Lotte, never grants interviews and goes out only for occasional walks. His recent recordings have been so good that they have furnished him with what amounts to a new career. Although English critics grumble a bit about the blandness of many of Klemperer’s concerts, they are more than willing to put up with the old man. Occasionally, they point out, the old black moods assail him—throwing him into fits of profound depression and prompting performances of exalted feeling.