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Последна промяна: 01.12.2008 10:00
Carlos Kleiber"s rehearsals for Wagner"s "Tristan und Isolde" at La Scala in Milan in the spring of 1978 were fraught and exhausting.
The opera had not been performed there for 13 seasons, and many younger members of the orchestra had never played it.
Kleiber"s demand for 17 full rehearsals had been met.
But instead of allowing the orchestra to read through substantial stretches of the score at the first sessions and going over the details later, he pounced on the inevitable errors from the first minutes of the first rehearsal.
The Scala musicians adored him, having performed other operas with him during the two previous seasons, but in "Tristan" players and conductor seemed at cross-purposes.
During a break, I was stretching my legs in a corridor when I saw Kleiber walking toward me. (Through the intercession of a shared friend, I was one of the lucky few he allowed to observe his rehearsals.)
Although I knew him only slightly, he asked, "Why do I keep trying to conduct?"
My jaw must have dropped, because he continued: "I can"t get them to understand what I want. I shouldn"t be conducting at all."
I began to make a tactful comment about the orchestra"s unfamiliarity with "Tristan"; he saw where I was heading and stopped me short.
"I know, I know," he said. "That"s just the point. I can"t bear to let the errors go uncorrected. It"s bigger than I am."
The production finally gelled, but not until the second or third performance.
Kleiber died on July 13, 2004 at 74, but in keeping with the mystery that surrounded his later years, his death was announced only on the 19th.
He was a tormented man, an almost terrifyingly gifted interpreter whose self-dissatisfaction eventually took the form of self-laceration.
The legends about him made him seem almost psychotic, and one celebrated performer who worked with him often and admired him greatly described him as "deeply sick."
Armchair psychiatrists in the music world have speculated that Kleiber"s career, maybe his entire adult life, was based on a deep-seated Oedipal need to surpass his father, the marvelous Viennese-born conductor Erich Kleiber, in repertory the older man had been closely associated with.
Although there may be some truth here, the fact is that both Kleibers amassed vast repertories early in their careers.
Since Carlos Kleiber was notoriously, perhaps obsessively, secretive, the true story of his psychological relationship to his father has not yet emerged.
What we do know is that he was born in 1930 in Berlin, where his father was the revered music director of the state opera.
Carlos"s mother, Ruth Goodrich, was American; she and Erich Kleiber had met in Buenos Aires while she was working at the United States Embassy and he was conducting at the Teatro Colуn.
The Kleibers left Germany in 1935, because Erich was opposed to the Nazi regime"s racism and antimodernism, and they eventually settled in Argentina, where their son Karl became known as Carlos.
The family was peripatetic, and for a time after the war Carlos attended high school in the Bronx.
Erich Kleiber, like many other musician parents, was leery of having his son enter the family business: an especially daunting path for the child of a famous conductor.
But Carlos"s passion for music and his volcanic talent ultimately broke his father"s resistance.
Kleiber gained most of his conducting experience in Dьsseldorf, Zurich and Munich from the late 1950"s to the early 70"s.
His international career took off during the mid-70"s and stayed at its height through the 80"s.
Overwhelming success greeted him everywhere, but at the same time he began to limit his repertory to some 10 standard operas and not many more symphonic works.
He attributed his attitude to laziness, but his maniacal perfectionism and the sense of desolating frustration that overwhelmed him when his goals were not met must have had something to do with his increasing isolation.
So, apparently, did his dedication to his young son and daughter; he was determined to give them more attention than his father had given him.
Carlos Kleiber: "My father always told me: `Do whatever you want, but don"t try to conduct waltzes. They"re the hardest things in the world." Unfortunately, I didn"t listen to him."
By the early 90"s, Kleiber"s appearances had become rare, and over the next decade, they tailed off completely.
The sense of loss at his death is tempered by the fact that the music world essentially lost him years ago.
Yet Kleiber was not eccentric in the way the reclusive pianist Glenn Gould and the gurulike conductor Sergiu Celibidache were.
His interpretations were straightforward, never gimmicky or exaggerated, neither experimental nor given to deconstruction.
He was simply consumed by the desire to come as close as he could to the composer"s original vision of a piece.
The experiments, the deconstructing and the reconstructing took place in his mind, as part of the process of coming to grips with a work.
If one were to try to reduce his quest to a question, it would be: "What is this work?," not "What can I do with this work?"
Kleiber"s interpretations of even the most overplayed repertory - Beethoven"s Fifth Symphony, "La Traviata" or "Die Fledermaus" - gave listeners the illusion that the works were new, that Kleiber himself had never heard anyone else"s interpretations of them and that he was presenting something fresh and vital for their consideration and delight.
As with major conductors of the past - Wilhelm Furtwдngler, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and, of course, Erich Kleiber - so with Carlos Kleiber: the music"s intellectual, emotional and purely visceral charge almost always came across at the most intense and deepest level imaginable, whether or not one agreed with a specific interpretation.
Listeners often felt that they were hearing not an interpretation but the work itself, the text with no extraneous commentary.
Although this, too, was an illusion, only the greatest interpretive artists have been able to create it.
But unlike those conductors, born in the 19th century, Kleiber seemed more vulnerable than commanding when he stood before an orchestra.
I remember him stopping the Scala orchestra when he was having trouble achieving a certain subtle nuance in one of the "Rosenkavalier" waltzes and saying, sadly: "My father always told me: "Do whatever you want, but don"t try to conduct waltzes. They"re the hardest things in the world." Unfortunately, I didn"t listen to him."
The orchestra felt sorry for him, concentrated hard and played the difficult passage beautifully.
Kleiber also had a modern, unrestrained approach to the purely physical aspect of conducting.
Yet his gestures were calculated not for their effect on the audience or to mime emotions but simply to draw the best possible results from singers and players - to help them give their best.
His way with words was often amusing.
Once, when he was rehearsing the Scala orchestra in the slithery, insinuating passage that leads into Iago"s soliloquy on jealousy in "Otello," he said: "You"re playing this too beautifully. A little bad taste, please!"
Again, the orchestra immediately grasped what he wanted and did it.
Despite his exceptionally high musical standards and the stubbornness with which he insisted on reaching his goals, Kleiber was fundamentally an affable man who would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid hurting the feelings of others.
But when he felt that stage directors, players or singers were thwarting his wishes out of ill will or sluggishness, he could make their lives miserable.
At one opera performance, again at La Scala, he stormed from the podium onto the stage behind the closed curtain at intermission and angrily told the lead baritone that the two would never perform together again.
This so enraged the baritone that a nearby tenor had to keep him from physically assaulting Kleiber.
Kleiber seemed to enjoy life. Fascinating young women (his wife was a Slovenian ballerina) and fast sports cars were particular passions.
But he had no interest in making money by piling up as many engagements as possible.
"Died after a long illness," the newspapers reported, a phrase generally presumed to mean cancer.
But perhaps it was the longer illness of perfectionism - an exceptionally uncommon virus - that really killed Kleiber.
In the end, he acted on his own judgment - "I shouldn"t be conducting at all" - by disappearing, leaving the music world a poorer place...