Otto Nossan Klemperer (German: [ˌɔto ˈklɛmpəʁɐ] ; 14 May 1885 – 6 July 1973) was a German composer and conductor, originally based in Germany, and then the United States, Hungary and finally, Great Britain. He began his career as an opera conductor, but he was later better known as a conductor of symphonic music.
A protégé of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, from 1907 Klemperer was appointed to a succession of increasingly senior conductorships in opera houses in and around Germany. Between 1927 and 1931 he was director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, where he presented new works and avant-garde productions of classics. He was from a Jewish family, and the rise of the Nazis caused him to leave Germany in 1933. Shortly afterwards he was appointed chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and guest-conducted other American orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and later the Pittsburgh Symphony, which he reorganised as a permanent ensemble.
In 1939 Klemperer was diagnosed with a brain tumour. An operation to remove it was successful, but left him lame and partly paralysed on his right side. Throughout his life he had bipolar disorder, and after the operation he went through an intense manic phase of the illness and then a long spell of severe depression. His career was seriously disrupted and did not fully recover until the mid-1940s. He served as the musical director of the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest from 1947 to 1950.
Klemperer's later career centred on London. In 1951 he began an association with the Philharmonia Orchestra. By that time better known for his readings of the core German symphonic repertoire than for experimental modern music, he gave concerts and made almost 200 recordings with the Philharmonia and its successor, the New Philharmonia, until his retirement in 1972. His approach to Mozart was not universally liked, being thought of by some as heavy, but he became widely considered the most authoritative interpreter of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.
Otto Nossan Klemperer was born on 14 May 1885 in Breslau, Province of Silesia, in what was then the Imperial German state of Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). He was the second child and only son of Nathan Klemperer and his wife Ida, née Nathan. The family name had originally been Klopper, but was changed to Klemperer in 1787 in response to a decree by the Austrian emperor Joseph II aimed at assimilating Jews into Christian society. Nathan Klemperer was originally from Josefov, the ghetto in the Bohemian city of Prague; Ida was from a more prosperous Sephardic Jewish family in Hamburg. Both parents were musical: Nathan sang and Ida played the piano.
When Klemperer was four the family moved from Breslau to Hamburg, where Nathan earned a modest living in commercial posts and his wife gave piano lessons. It was decided quite early in Klemperer's life that he would become a professional musician, and when he was about five he started piano lessons with his mother. At the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt he studied the piano with James Kwast and theory with Ivan Knorr. Kwast moved to Berlin, first to the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in 1902 and then to the Stern Conservatory in 1905. Klemperer followed him at each move, and later credited him with the whole basis of his musical development. Among Klemperer's other teachers was Hans Pfitzner, with whom he studied composition and conducting.
In 1905, Klemperer met Gustav Mahler at a rehearsal of the latter's Second Symphony in Berlin. Oskar Fried conducted, and Klemperer was given charge of the off-stage orchestra. He later made a piano arrangement (now lost) of the symphony, which he played to the composer in 1907 when visiting Vienna. In the interim he made his public debut as a conductor in May 1906, taking over from Fried after the first night of the fifty-performance run of Max Reinhardt's production of Orpheus in the Underworld at the New Theatre, Berlin.
Mahler wrote a short testimonial, recommending Klemperer, on a small card which Klemperer kept for the rest of his life. On the strength of Mahler's endorsement, Klemperer was appointed chorus master and assistant conductor at the New German Theatre in Prague in 1907.
From Prague, Klemperer moved to be assistant conductor at the Hamburg State Opera (1910–1912), where the sopranos Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann made their joint débuts under his direction. His first chief conductorship was at Barmen (1912–1913), after which he moved to the much larger Strasbourg Opera (1914–1917) as deputy to Pfitzner. From 1917 to 1924 he was chief conductor of the Cologne Opera. During his Cologne years he married Johanna Geisler, a singer in the opera company, in 1919. She was a Christian, and he had converted from Judaism. He remained a practising Roman Catholic until 1967, when he left the faith and returned to Judaism. The couple had two children: Werner, who became an actor, and Lotte, who became her father's assistant and eventually, his caregiver. Johanna continued her operatic career, sometimes in performances conducted by her husband. She retired from singing by the mid-1930s. The couple remained close and mutually supportive until her death in 1956.
In 1923, Klemperer turned down an invitation from the Berlin State Opera to succeed Leo Blech as musical director; he declined the post, because he did not believe he would be given enough artistic authority over productions. The following year, he became conductor at the Prussian State Theatre in Wiesbaden (1924–1927), a smaller theatre than others in which he had worked, but one where he had the control he sought over stagings. There he conducted new, and often modernistic, productions of a range of operas from The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Fidelio and Lohengrin to Elektra and The Soldier's Tale. He found his tenure there rewarding and fulfilling, later describing it as the happiest of his career.
Klemperer visited Russia in 1924, conducting there during a six-week stay; he returned each year until 1936. In 1926 he made his American début, succeeding Eugene Goossens as guest conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra. In his eight-week engagement with the orchestra he gave Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Janáček's Sinfonietta, in their first performances in the US.
In 1927, a new opera company was established in Berlin to complement the State Opera, highlighting new works and innovative productions. The company, officially Staatsoper am Platz der Republik, was better known as the Kroll Opera. Leo Kestenberg, the influential head of the Prussian Ministry of Culture, proposed Klemperer as its first director. Klemperer was offered a ten-year contract and accepted it on condition that he would be allowed to conduct orchestral concerts in the theatre, and that he could employ his chosen design and stage experts.
Klemperer's biographer Peter Heyworth describes the conductor's tenure at the Kroll as "of crucial significance in his career and the development of opera in the first half of the 20th century". In both concert and operatic performances, Klemperer introduced much new music. Asked later which were the most important of the operas he introduced there, he listed:
In Heyworth's view, the modern approach to production at the Kroll − contrasting with conventional representational settings and costumes − exemplified in "a drastically stylised production" of Der fliegende Holländer in 1929 was "a decisive forerunner of Wieland Wagner's innovations at Bayreuth". The production divided critical opinion, which ranged from "A new outrage to a German masterpiece ... grotesque" to "an unusual and magnificent performance ... a fresh wind has blown tinsel and cobwebs away".
In 1929, Klemperer made his British début, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the first London performance of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony. The British music critics gave the symphony a lukewarm reception, but Klemperer was widely praised for "the power of a dominating personality", "masterful control" and as "a great orchestral commander". A leading critic called for the BBC to give Klemperer a long-term appointment in London.