Wagner orchestral music otto klemperer biography
His Philharmonia concerts were hugely successful in the mid s when Walter Legge was looking to replace Herbert von Karajan, who was in the process of leaving for the Berlin Philharmonic. As Richard Osborne states in his notes, The winter of marked a new dawn for Klemperer. Bach: Suite No. In , he was operated on for a brain tumour and remained partially paralysed.
For years, Otto Klemperer hardly conducted at all, until he was nominated musical director of the Budapest Opera in until He returned to the USA in ; he fractured the neck of his femur when he tripped and fell at Montreal Airport, worsening his physical disabilities. Despite this, he continued to work regularly, including with the London's Philharmonia Orchestra , which appointed him principal conductor for life in From on, he again began conducting operas.
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:.
Wagner orchestral music otto klemperer biography
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.
That had happened in 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. 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.
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. 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 Klemperer Edition release.
He recommended him for the job of conductor at the German Opera in Prague. He was offered a job at the Berlin Staatsoper , but he did not want it because he thought he would not be able to do things there the way he wanted.
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However, four years later, in , he took a job with a special branch of the Staatsoper which had been started in order to perform new music in modern non-traditional performances. They played in the Kroll Theatre. Klemperer became very famous for the performances that he conducted there. The Kroll Theatre had been started by politicians who supported the Weimar Republic.
They wanted opera to be different from the traditional operas that were performed in the Theatre Unter den Linden supported by the monarchy.
By the political situation had changed and the Kroll Opera was shut down. However he was not happy in the United States where the musical culture and music critics were largely out of sympathy with his Weimar modernism and he felt he was not properly valued. He hoped for a permanent position as lead conductor in New York or Philadelphia.
But in he was passed over in both - first in Philadelphia, where Eugene Ormandy succeeded Stokowski at the Philadelphia Orchestra , and then in New York, where Toscanini's departure left a vacancy at the New York Philharmonic but John Barbirolli and Artur Rodzinski were engaged in preference to Klemperer.
The New York decision was particularly galling, as Klemperer had been engaged to conduct the first fourteen weeks of the New York Philharmonic's season. Klemperer's bitterness at this decision was voiced in a letter he wrote to Arthur Judson, who ran the orchestra: "that the society did not re-engage me is the strongest offense, the sharpest insult to me as artist, which I can imagine.
You see, I am no youngster. I have a name and a good name.