Otto Klemperer, and Mozart

I've mentioned my musical “phases” before. At the moment I seem to have entered a new Mozart phase, and he is the composer whose music is played often chez moi. My favourite Mozart symphony is the 40^th in G minor, and Mozart symphonies on disc pose a bit of a problem for me: I don't like orchestral music in less than good sound (unless there are very special reasons). I don't like big-band Mozart, 19^th century style. I don't like “authentic” Mozart played by augmented “period” chamber groups conducted by faceless figures, and all this limits my choices somewhat. So I have fallen back happily on an eight CD box of Mozart's symphonies, overtures and serenades with Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia, the box being part of EMI's swan song before it was taken over by the Americans.

As I've mentioned before, Klemperer is my kind of conductor, particularly in Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and Mahler; and Mozart. He was keen on lean choirs and orchestras in 18^th century music even before they became fashionable. His predilection for forward woodwind suits Mozart's music down the ground, as does his insistence on clarity of texture, divided first and second violins, and overall musical structure. And, as always with Klemperer, there is an avoidance of personal interpretive interjections. I am happy with Klemperer's Mozart, and happy he left us so many first class recordings post the early 1950s. Especially good are the three CDs re-mastered in "Hybrid SACD" sound of the last six symphonies, another swan song from EMI.

I only saw him once in person conducting in London. A tall, gaunt somewhat forbidding figure, conducting while seated (at that late stage of his tempestuous career). But if ever there were a survivor, it was Otto Klemperer. Suffering all his life from bi-polar moods, his story and fate were like that of so many in Europe in the first half of the 20^th century. Born in 1885 in the German city of Breslau, his birth city was given permanently to the Poles after 1945. Building a highly successful career in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s – with good help from Gustav Mahler – Klemperer as a Jew had to flee Germany in the mid- 1930s. He ended up in America, like many others at the same time, but there he had a difficult life given his uncompromising character (and difficult medical history, including a botched brain operation that left him partly paralysed thereafter). His American period ended with the US authorities refusing to renew his passport since, during the McCarthy era, he was regarded as being far too far left wing to be safe. Ironically, the Germans then came to the rescue and gave Otto a new German passport. Returning to Europe in the early 1950s, he found life hard until he was “discovered” by Walter Legge and given a whole new career as a star conductor and conductor of the Philharmonia orchestra of the time. “Remarkable, since Legge was not a German, nor even Jewish”, Klemperer remarked caustically. He died in Zürich in 1973 at the grand old age of 88, still conducting right until the end. Happily, for us, his recorded legacy is enormous and much of it is in perfectly acceptable sound since the EMI recording team of that era was top-notch. For me, the two greatest conductors of the 20^th century in the mainstream German repertoire were Wilhelm Furtwängler and Otto Klemperer. There is no one the equal of those two around at the moment.