One of the most exciting, yet eccentric, conductors of the last 50 years, Carlos Kleiber, who has died aged 74, led performances of symphonic music and opera that will never be forgotten by those who heard them. Happily, he also caught much of the vitality of his live readings in the recording studio. He was one interpreter for whose conducting the epithet "unique" was appropriate. At the same time, he was an enfant terrible of the musical world. Primarily a recluse, he could only be persuaded into the public arena, at least during the last 20 years, by the combination of a momentous event, long rehearsal times and a huge fee. He took 34 rehearsals for his first performance of Berg"s Wozzeck in Munich, and 17 for a Covent Garden La Bohиme. That other great German conductor Herbert von Karajan once commented: "He only conducts when the fridge is empty." An undoubted perfectionist, Kleiber agreed to appear only when and where he felt like it. He was prone to cancel his appearances in a quite cavalier fashion, and refused to be tied to any one orchestra or opera house. No wonder, when he did appear, the man whom the New York Times once described as "the most venerated conductor since Arturo Toscanini" commanded attention and sold-out houses. The critic Harvey Sachs commented in the magazine Atlantic: "The intensely emotional elements in his music-making usually function in perfect accord with his questioning intelligence and magnificent grasp of musical architecture." The son of an equally celebrated conductor, Erich Kleiber, Carlos was born in Berlin, but raised in Argentina after his family had fled the Nazis. He composed and sang from an early age, learnt the piano and the timpani, and, in 1949, went to the Technische Hochschule, in Zurich, to study chemistry. However, his musical talent could not be denied, and he returned to Buenos Aires the following year to complete his musical training, before going back to Europe in 1951 to work in Munich"s Theater am Gдrtnerplatz as a coach. He made his conducting debut at Potsdam in 1954, under the pseudonym Karl Keller. Kleiber held, successively, posts with the Vienna Volksoper, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Zurich Opera and the Stuttgart Opera in the 1950s and 60s. From 1968 to 1978, he had a guest contract at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he conducted some of his most notable performances, among them the famous Otto Schenk production of Strauss"s Der Rosenkavalier, which is preserved on video. It is one of the most convincing stagings of the work ever heard or seen. Kleiber first appeared in Britain with the Stuttgart Opera at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966. He first conducted at Covent Garden (Der Rosenkavalier) in 1974, creating something of a sensation. His later appearances, in charge of arrestingly immediate accounts of Elektra, La Bohиme and Otello, were acclaimed as events of theatrical and music significance quite out of the ordinary. He made his debuts at La Scala (Der Rosenkavalier) in 1974, and at the New York Metropolitan, conducting La Bohиme, in 1988. Another of Kleiber"s most important engagements was at the Bayreuth Festival, from 1974 to 1976, conducting Tristan und Isolde. No one who was present, as I was, will ever forget the frisson of those incandescent performances. At the same time, Kleiber gained increasing fame on the concert podium, conducting all the major orchestras with unflagging energy and success. London heard him all too seldom, but his few appearances with the London Symphony Orchestra were red-letter occasions. However, on what proved to be his last appearance at the Royal Festival Hall, with the LSO, the reviews were so unfavourable that he refused to conduct an orchestra in London again. He was revered in Munich and Vienna. In the latter city, he conducted the new year"s concert in 1989, an event happily preserved on video. There, you can revel in his graceful, smiling, relaxed - yet, paradoxically, closely controlled - way with the music of the Viennese waltz-kings. His manner of conducting combined a wonderful control of flow, rhythm and movement with an uncanny ability to know when to create tension and when to release it. He conveyed this to his musicians with a rare fluency of movement and a rich palette of nuance as regards phrasing. Kleiber was said to have been haunted by the ghost of his father, who discouraged his son from making a career as a conductor. It must have been something of a love-hate relationship, as Carlos restricted his repertory almost entirely to works tackled by his father. He also used his father"s heavily annotated scores as a guide to his own interpretations, so it is no wonder that, where evidence exists on record - as in the case of Beethoven"s fifth symphony - their readings are so alike. Kleiber"s discography is small but select. In the operatic field, besides the video of Der Rosenkavalier, there is a later production of the same opera from the Vienna State Opera, though less well cast than the Munich one. In audio, only his accounts of La Traviata (with Ileana Cotrubas as the eloquent Violetta), fizzing Die Fledermaus (one on video, one on CD), Tristan und Isolde (with the somewhat surprising - but successful - choice of Margaret Price as the heroine) and Der Freischьtz are all admirable. There is also an off-the-air performance of the fabulous Bayreuth Tristan to confirm the reputation of that reading. Sadly, attempts to record La Bohиme and Wozzeck proved abortive because of Kleiber"s wilful behaviour, which led Deutsche Grammophon to lose patience with its star conductor. Among his symphonic recordings, the Beethoven fifth, coupled with an equally electrifying seventh, are magnificent, as is his version of the Brahms fourth. Some Mozart and Schubert complete the all-too-short list. For all Kleiber"s notable work, there will be a lingering regret that such a natural and brilliant talent did not achieve even more. Yet perhaps it is in the nature of wayward geniuses to prove elusive when it comes to ultimate accomplishment. Enough was done, however, to ensure his place in a pantheon of great conductors. He is survived by a son and a daughter, his wife having predeceased him.


"Unvarnished Symphonies" by Michael Walsh and  Franz Spelman

Conductor Carlos Kleiber makes old works sound fresh

His concentration is so intense that when conducting Strauss"s Der Rosenkavalier at La Scala, he never noticed the earthquake that rattled the giant chandelier. He suffers from such crippling stage fright that he vomited onto the score of Wagner"s Tristan und Isolde during a performance in Stuttgart. He is such a perfectionist that he demanded, and got, 34 rehearsals for Berg"s Wozzeck in Munich. He is so much the misanthrope that he can terrify performers; "I like it very much," he once told a blushing soprano. "I like it very much if you would not sing any more." Clearly, Carlos Kleiber is no ordinary maestro.

Eccentric, surely; demanding, assuredly. But, above all, brilliant. Like an expert art restorer who clears away centuries of grime to reveal a painting in its native, pristine glory, Kleiber, 52, strips away the varnish from some of music"s most tradition-encrusted masterworks to expose the vital creation still lurking beneath. His infrequent performances have become events in Europe: Tristan at Bayreuth, Wozzeck, Die Fledermaus and La Traviata at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Otello at La Scala. Last week, for only the second time, Kleiber came to the U.S. for a series of three orchestral concerts with the Chicago Symphony.

Kleiber"s performances are broad, expansive and sometimes ferociously radiant. For him the musical line is paramount, colored and heightened with innumerable fine details. In the English Idyll No. 1, a rarely heard pastorale by George Butterworth, a British composer killed in World War I, Kleiber captured the gentle work"s Constable-like air with tenderness and restraint. Yet a brief, Tristan-like phrase in the strings did not go unremarked; at one stroke, the piece became darker, more complex and emotionally deeper.

In the Mozart Symphony No. 33, Kleiber again strove for a seamless quality, but his insistence on lyricism at the expense of rhythmic vitality made the music overly reflective. The Brahms Second Symphony, however, was masterly. Here, the conductor"s quest for the telling detail paid off in a performance of striking subtlety, yet one infused with granitic strength. "Under him, every note comes alive," says Concertmaster Victor Aitay with awe. "That"s why we are here, not to play the Brahms Second Symphony for the 2,000th time, but for the first time."

Probably no other major conductor has built an international reputation on as small an output as Kleiber"s. This is due to his fierce, even frantic, insistence that conditions must be perfect or he will cancel. Unlike most musicians, who thrive on the cheers of the crowds, Kleiber is indifferent to the glamour of performing. He prefers to stay home in suburban Munich with his wife and two children, savoring his large collections of literature and recordings. Interviews are out. Says Peter Jonas, artistic administrator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who handled the delicate negotiations with Kleiber: "He has never worried about his position in society. He is a perfectionist, and he does what he thinks is right, regardless."

As rare as his personal appearances are, Kleiber"s recordings are even rarer. There are only nine releases, comprising four operas, five symphonies and a piano concerto with Soloist Sviatoslav Richter. His most recent album, a Tristan with a vocally splendid Margaret Price as Isolde, is vintage Kleiber: a sharply focused series of violent encounters, whose accumulated tension is finally dissipated only by the glorious release of Isolde"s Liebestod.

The disc that first brought Kleiber widespread renown was his 1975 recording of Beethoven"s Fifth Symphony. With the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic following his baton as if their lives depended on it, which perhaps they did, Kleiber fashioned a performance that unfolded with the clarity of a Euclidean proposition, yet had the intensity of a hammer blow. Hailed as a revelation, it was, more accurately, a literal re-creation of what the composer put down on paper: it was as if Homer had come back to recite the Iliad.

It is rare for children of famous performers to be successful in the same field, but Kleiber appears to have inherited his gifts from his father, Conductor Erich Kleiber. Yet Carlos has achieved his eminence almost in spite of, not because of his father. "What a pity he is "musical," " lamented the elder Kleiber to his wife in 1939. Born in Berlin, but raised in South America when the family exiled itself from Nazi Germany, young Carlos was sent to Switzerland to study chemistry at first. His talent, however, proved irresistible, and in 1954 he made his conducting debut in Potsdam. He worked his way through the ranks of provincial opera houses, stopping in Dьsseldorf, Zurich and Stuttgart. Since 1968 Kleiber has confined his activity to only a handful of major cities.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Kleiber in Chicago was affable, even humorous in rehearsals, often illustrating his musical goals with an apt visual image (an adroit polyglot, he speaks six languages). Requesting a brief ritard in the Mozart, he told the musicians that the passage should go "like a parent tugging a child away from a toy-store window as they walk along the street." After the first run-through of the Brahms finale, Kleiber turned to the sea of sober faces before him, put down his baton and inquired, "Don"t you ever smile?" The next reading had just the quality of exultation he was seeking.

Such an unorthodox approach was not universally admired. Some players found Kleiber difficult to follow, his beat unclear. "He has a rather poor communication technique with the baton," complained a cellist. But it is part of his method not to beat time relentlessly; any traffic cop can do that. Rather, Kleiber strives for a chamber music ideal, in which each member of the ensemble must listen to his colleagues. "He is leading the players to a conception, rather than simply giving a beat to follow," notes Jonas. Alas, those conceptions from Kleiber are far too few in number. All the more reason, then, to prize them for the marvelous moments they are and to wish, however futilely, that music could be like this more often.

By Michael Walsh. Reported by Franz Spelman/Munich, 1983.