Carlos Kleiber is an enigma, perhaps even to himself. He was intended for a safer scientific occupation by his father, Erich, who endured a dozen desperate years in South America after leaving the Berlin State Opera in a clash with the Nazis. Contrary to legend, Erich applauded his son"s musical gifts. When a boy was 21 his father told a colleague: "He has got very good ears and at the moment he is studying the timpani - he wants to do it all from a scratch."
The elder Kleiber was and autocratic perfectionist who entered the record books by demanding 34 full orchestra rehearsals for the inaugural Wozzeck. He was forever threatening to walk out if he did not get his way. - "well then I am going back to South America!" - and was inclined to double his fee from one season to the next. "When there is no trouble in the theater, I make it!" he would growl; his American wife, Ruth, had a knack for finding something to raise his temperature. Warning him that the Covent Garden pit was too cold, he refused to rehearse until shown a thermometer in which the mercury rose to a satisfactory level. Administrators were petrified of him but musicians warmly appreciated his concern for their welfare - "always he was on our side", said one player. Post-war morale at Covent Garden shot up on his arrival. In 1950 he was asked to be music director in London and at the Met - and refused both. He briefly returned to East Berlin but could not stomach the Communist regime and resumed his wondering, unable to settle, "an enemy of compromise". Some saw in him the Mahlerian ideal of an artist "who bangs his head against the wall until he makes a hole". 
He was unusually considerate of singers. "Go on tonight and do not worry, all the mistakes tonight are mine" he told them before a first-night curtain. "If anything goes wrong, look at me and it will all come right." Equally, he was utterly unforgiving of slackness and remembered a player"s error with undiminished anger after twenty years. On several public occasions, he subjected his son to scathing outburst of humiliating criticism. He died in 1956, just as Carlos was beginning his apprenticeship in German opera houses. Their complex relationship has overshadowed his son"s entire controversial career. 
Carlos Kleiber advanced quietly through Duisburg and Dusseldorf to Zurich. He became music director at Stuttgart at the age of 36, quit after two years and has never held another post. He shunned approaches from record companies until 1973; he was 57 before he made his Met debut and almost sixty when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic. Having first acquired a rich repertoire, he whittled it down to a bare handful of favorite operas - Wozzeck, Boheme, Otello, Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Fledermaus, Traviata and Tristan - and a similarly limited selection of symphonies. All are works that his father excelled in. 
His conduct became increasingly erratic. Hypersensitive to criticism, he would head for the nearest airport at the slightest hint of dissent, inducing promoters to panic that someone might inadvertently say or write something to offend him. London concert managers have not forgiven the critics whose reviews of a 1980 concert provoked an enduring boycott. When he undertakes an opera, he does not require a new production, but demands three weeks of rehearsal for a hardly perennial like Boheme. The uncertainty that envelopes his every appearance generates high tension among performers, who are then pleasantly surprised to find him unfailingly helpful and approachable, with the most explicit and visible beat of any living conductor. "Don"t worry", he assured Placido Domingo"s late replacement in a celebrated Covent Garden Otello, "I"ll follow you". He can be impossibly intense. "How could he keep that up? It would kill him", say players. Riccardo Chailly remembers his La Scala Otello as "the greatest performance I"ve ever seen in my life". He refused to record the opera because he disliked the available Desdemonas. At this New York Boheme, both orchestra and singers stood in a spontaneous ovation at his first rehearsal break. "I have never seen conducting like this, so supple, so versatile", said one of the players. The chairman of the Metropolitan Opera crept stealthily into his box to watch; if he had been spotted, Kleiber might have walked out. 
He has canceled more recordings than the few he has released. For Wozzeck in Dresden, he insisted that EMI recover all of the orchestral parts that his father prepared for the 1951 British premiere and copy them for the German players. At considerable trouble and expense, the parts were meticulously prepared and driven across Europe. Came the morning of the recording and Carlos Kleiber quit without explanation.
Many of these extreme reactions are his father"s attitudes writ large. The specter of Eric is reflected in his tenderness with musicians and his obduracy with the commercial establishment. It also haunts his performances. Eric Kleiber conducted Beethoven Fifth of Decca that has long been regarded as perhaps the most trenchant on record. Carlos twenty years later performed the symphony for DG in an astonishingly intense account that was arguably finer even than his father"s. Such comparisons infuriate him. An unmistakable ambivalence towards his unsparing parent lies at the root of the Carlos Kleiber conundrum. Old colleagues of Erich are careful to avoid his son, fearing his hair-trigger response. "The problem with Carlos," says a veteran record producer, "is that once Erich was dead, he saw the entire musical world as a surrogate. When he cancels a concert he is killing his father, when he conducts a great performance he is identifying with him."
This perfect conductor has repeatedly professed his hatred for conducting. "I only conduct when I am hungry," he told Herbert von Karajan. "I want to be a vegetable," he told Leonard Bernstein. "I want to grow in a garden, sit in the sun, eat, drink, sleep, make love, and that"s it." He is ferociously protective of his privacy, living on a mountain outside Munich with his Yugoslav wife, Stanka; they have a son and a daughter. He has never given an interview but has amused himself with pseudonymous letters to the press, including an attack in Der Spiegel on Sergiu Celibidache. But his abstracted mien and otherworldly outlook conceal a shrewd business brain and a precise valuation of his own worth. He negotiates his own contracts whenever he makes a record. When the Vienna Philharmonic convinced him to give the 1989 New Year"s Day concert, Kleiber conducted a three-way telephone auction for his tapes with DG, EMI and Sony-owned CBS. Bidding started at DM 300,000 (L 120,000) with Kleiber demanding precise details of each label"s marketing plans. Sony"s enthusiasm pushed the price up to a record half a million Deutschmarks, whereupon Kleiber called the other two bidders and conveyed his regrets. "I hope this won"t affect our relations in future, but Grunter (Breest of Sony) is so keen on this," h4e apologized - and covered himself by granting video rights to DG. Promoted by two major labels, each aiming to outdo the others, his record became an instant best-seller. 
Kleiber is among the foremost living conductors and was the first to be approached by the Berlin Philharmonic, in vain hope rather than expectation, on Karajan"s death. He can be endearingly modest - waving a Tristan score at a passing record producer in Bayreuth with the appeal, "what am I to do with this? Can you give me any insights?" - and has a handful of loyal conductor friends. But the tiny sum of his achievements is disproportionate to his capabilities, and Kleiber still shows no sign of letting the world have more than a glimpse of his genius. He has preserved the gritty independence he inherited from Erich and turned it into a barrier against the extraneous forces that control musical activity. But the price of his resistance has been the burying of his gifts. Unless his attitude undergoes a late upheaval, Carlos Kleiber will, like his father, fail to attain his rightful place in posterity…