In the 80s Munich was a blessed place for people who love music, but we were unable to appreciate it. For us it was obvious that Carlos Kleiber was at the music stand of the National theater. His performances of Othello with Price and Varady were elegant, light, dark, fatal. La Boheme with Freni and Pavarotti were a holiday for the opera art, filling and gentle. Three of the few performances with Gruberova such as La Traviata, together with Shikoff, were splendid and heart-rending. And, of course, again and again Der Rosenkavalier with Fassbander, Popp, Jones -- brilliant, well formed, hearty. And the unforgettable "Die Fledermaus" with Otto Schenk -- a splendid entertainment with champagne, where we always ask ourselves in what suite he will appear in the third act.
 

Happy years... Happy, because it is an undeniable fact that Kleiber is a strict artist, a perfectionist, who agreed to work only when and where he liked and felt good. "Mysterious", "eccentric", "capricious" are some of the lighter epithets through which Kleiber is described, who, in spite of his willfulness is considered among "the most valued conductors during the time of Toscanini" (New York Times).
 

The Maestro often postponed his performances and did not give interviews; he hardly makes any records and firmly refuses to be engaged with an orchestra or an opera formation. Kleiber conducted on relatively rare occasions and his repertoire was neither huge nor especially sensational. What then makes him so unique in the conductor"s world? Maybe his sense of lightness, rhythm and movement, or the game of tension and releasing the tension, at which he was so skillful as no one else. Or often his physical grace and gestures emanating unique musicality. The language of his gestures is extremely rich and varied, a language he speaks with a remarkable fluency. With his conducting Kleiber reminds us that the main connection between conductor and orchestra is beyond the purely physical.
 

And yet, something must have been broken. Friends of the musician knew, presumed, and were afraid of what was really happening to Carlos Kleiber. Perhaps the most talented conductor of the generation had withdrawn in a deep loneliness, from which a man cannot (or almost cannot) return to the rough reality of the concert halls and operas. For the last time he conducted Der Rosenkavalier in Japan with the Vienna State Opera, which was on a tour there, and in Sardinia, where he presented Beethoven with one of his favorite orchestras in Munich.

Why had Carlos become such a person? Some might say the reason was the dominant figure of his father; others think his perfectionism, which he already did not consider himself able to satisfy. A third idea is that he simply despised the world. In any case the fact is that Carlos Kleiber grew from a student in chemistry (a decision imposed by his father), through the German Opera in Reihn, the Zurich Opera, the Stuttgart State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, the Bayreuth Temple, to become the greatest and the most difficult -- as well as unfortunately the most silent -- conductor of our time.

When the journalists again search into the inner world of Kleiber, they gladly turn to a quotation of Herbert fon Karajan:

"He is a genius conductor, but conducting gives him no pleasure. He always explains: "I conduct only when I am hungry." And this is true. He has a freezer, which he fills in and lives from that. And when the freezer is almost empty, he says: "Now I will give a concert again." Like a wolf. In spite of that I give all my admiration to him."

Kleiber says to Leonard Bernstein: "I would be pleased to be a vegetable. I want to live in a garden, to bask in the sun, to eat, to drink, to sleep and to love."

The Maestro answered sarcastically to a letter from a concert manager in 1992 in the following way: "The opera and concert contemporaneity leave me lifeless and empty, although maybe in Sudan grows a tenor or a conductor who would not let me fall asleep at his performances."

Did the shadow of his father continue to weigh, Erich Kleiber, the legend of the conductor"s platform who was long ago exceeded in art by his son? He, who celebrated his triumph in the musical metropolises Munich, Bayreuth, Vienna. New York, Milan and London together with his genius and the perfectly prepared in many repetitions orchestra members, with the operas Wozzeck, Othello, La Boheme or Tristan and with the leading orchestras in the world? Or does the highly intelligent, funny-ironic, as well as hungry-for-work maestro despise the whole musical world?

People should subscribe to the opinion of one of his greatest admirers -- the tenor Placido Domingo, who says: "Kleiber is the greatest one; he could be the most booked-up conductor in the world. I wish him, when he returns, to be able to show the same quality as now, but also to have a great desire for the work of a Domingo."

"His genius consists in his ability to read from the musical score what is not written. He was able to imagine the sound heard by the composer." These are thoughts of the Munich violinist Erich Gergele, who played at numerous of Kleiber’s appearances. "In contrast to most of the rest of the conductors, he is not able to produce a gray tone. The music he makes is always blue, red, green -- never gray..."

Kleiber"s conducting warms the heart in spite of all his discipline and transparency. In this lies his uniqueness. He is not satisfied with perfectionism, although he strives for it. Most of all he looks for confessions to the audience.

It seems that every time Kleiber wants to express his non-sentimental but sincere concern for a corresponding work, his admiration goes out to the composition. This is the visionary achievement of the Master. It gives an exciting originality to his interpretations. They are like love letters, addressed without any old fashion to the good old Vienna, and obviously as such they are well spelled out by the audience. Each one of his appearances on the stage is accompanied by superlatives and talk about "the longest and loudest applause for the best and most self-willet conductor in the world." The enthusiastic approval that Kleiber receives after each of his appearances testifies to his unfading ability to present to the music fans unforgettable musical experiences.

His worshipers used to reserve him airplane tickets to Grand Canary or somewhere, where the maestro (as jokers say, "by accident") yet appeared on stage, most often together with the Bavarian State Orchestra or with the wonderful Symphony Orchestra of the Munich Radio. Also rumor has it that high fees and an extreme luxury AUDI automobile were given to him in Ingolstadt and the concert respectively was incomparable.

In Vienna a man can not pronounce titles of operas as Carmen, Tristan und Isolde and Der Rosenkavalier, without automatically mentioning the name of Carlos Kleiber. It will remain in this way for some time, for there were never enough musical enthusiasts who were present when the Magician really appeared on the conductor"s platform and made magic -- elegant, nervous, soaked to the tips of the fingers with extraordinary sensitiveness and supernaturally transmitted over hundreds of musicians.

Due to the legendary unwillingness of Kleiber to make records, each of his records turns into an extraordinary event, into a classic. Thus, he can afford to choose his repertoire and performers, and to work with vigor, promising a unique musical result. A result, eloquently described with the following quotation: "Kleiber is an expert restorer, who removes centuries of laid vagueness and reveals the picture from below in her original beauty and glory. He cleans off thick varnish that covers the masterpieces with tradition, in order to expose publicly the living work, hidden below." (Time).

Records

There are three kinds of musicians in the sound-record world. The first see the disk as a good possibility to present to the audience their musical concepts, and they treat it as a "sound diary" of their creative path. A small group that is close to disappearing harbors an aggressive attitude toward the disc and refuses the musical event to be recorded in this way, considering important the live experience at the concert and relying on the memory of the listeners.

There is also a third category of interpreters, also few in number, who without refusing to record, choose their works with extreme difficulty. The conductor Carlos Kleiber belongs to this group. It is enough to look at his list of records -- he has produced for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, Sony and Orfeo -- in order to be convinced of that. But each of these melamines must have marked the unique value of these audio-documents: around ten titles. This is simultaneously a lot and a few. A lot, if the musical value of these works is estimated and most of all considering that every time the records of Kleiber hit the mark and make the critics talk many times of a work’s "first performance" when these works have passed through the fine sieve of generations of musicians. But yet it is a few in comparison with the records of other conductors, and it is difficult for man to imagine how so many other treasures of the musical and opera art would have shone with new brilliance had Carlos Kleiber only turned his eyes to them.

For example, countless are the records dedicated to the music of Beethoven. For almost a century the most famous conductors and the best orchestras recorded their conception over this inexhaustible plot -- CDs, existing most of all in order to imprint the exact moment, but which also turned to be a specific method for interpretations to be put to the test of the time so that their value and immortality to be verified. Who then in the middle of the 70s could pretend to have brought something new into a sphere so well known and so often studied? What once seemed impossible, actually happened. When in 1974 Carlos Kleiber presented to the music-lovers his record of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a year later the Seventh Symphony, this was not just the appearance of a happy event, but at the same time a turning point in the interpretation of Beethoven.

Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra combine in such a unique way the spontaneous inspiration of a concert performance with the detailed preciseness, achieved in a sound-record studio, as if a contradiction between these two approaches had never existed. Penguin Guide exclaims: the "Fifth Symphony, interpreted by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Kleiber, exceeds all the rest!" If we take whatever part of his work, it would have the role of a standard in the future. In other words, Kleiber is and remains an interpreter, possessing something extraordinary, and his records are a demonstration of his high exigency as a conductor.

Unfortunately there is only one underground record from the debut of the Maestro in Vienna in 1967 with Mahler"s Song of the Earth. There are no records of Wozzeck, nor Elektra, and the operetta Die Fledermaus, on CD, was not with the ideal performers, according to critics. There are also multitudes of underground records of almost everything he conducted. Unfortunately, because of his willfulness, Kleiber legalized hardly ten titles, working predominantly with Deutsche Grammophon. He has three records for this label, serving as real examples of opera records. In Tristan und Isolde (with Margaret Price and Rene Kollo) Wagner is reproduced absolutely precisely -- passion, despair and anguish can be movingly felt. In La Traviata (with Cotrubas, Domingo) you can understand how concentrated this music is and how impressively Kleiber presents it, how wonderfully he succeeds to breathe together with Verdi and the singers. And in 1973, when the record of Der Freischutz of Weber was made (with star cast: Janowitz, Mathis, Adam and Schreier), Carlos Kleiber made it possible to be heard what a storm of sensations can burst forth through music, without the score to be forced. Just on the contrary, he follows it quite precisely, using its resources better that the others. Who could guess that this opera would become number one in sales during the same year? The bosses of the company were forced to include Der Freischutz in the series "The Originals". The same happened with the mentioned Fifth and Seventh Symphonies of Beethoven (1975-76), which were reproduced also in Super Audio CD format. They registered record profits for Deutsche Grammophon. The Third and the Unfinished Symphonies by Schubert, 1979, followed them. But the apogee came in 1981 -- his recording of the Fourth Symphony by Brahms was determined to be the best one for that year, for which Kleiber received the world sound-record musical award. Eight years later (1989), he led the Vienna symphony musicians at the annual New Year"s Eve Concert. No other conductor up to now (including Karajan) celebrated in a more beautiful way the beginning of a New Year. No one before or after that had more excitingly, more Viennese, with more risk, more provokingly, lifted up the vitality and the strength of the Strauss dynasty. In 1992 the Maestro repeated the New Year"s Concert. Philips Classics bought the video rights and did not make a mistake -- it turned to be the most-sold New Year"s Eve Concert until now! Unfortunately the negotiations for Kleiber to lead the world into the twenty-first century, again with a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, failed. He did not conduct after February 1999, after the concerts devoted to Beethoven in Cagliari, Italy.

The son of the conductor Erich Kleiber, who began his solid professional path with operettas and small operas, who celebrated his triumph with the philharmonics in the opera, whose impact on musicians and friends of music almost cannot be described, he himself long refused to practice his profession. He did not conduct too much in his most active period, almost did not authorize CD records, and has always been what people would call difficult. But the moments when he conducted the New Year"s concert, were really incredible. When he took up Tristan und Isolde or Die Fledermaus, one would think they were new works. And when he conducted one of the few symphonies, one would not want to listen to other interpretations for a long time -- because they live, provoke, make you believe that there is something more. Withdrawn, consciously anonymous, unfortunately not reconciled with his former friends, Carlos Kleiber remains an enigma. He could possess the world, but he did not like it. He could have given us more joy, but he did not want to do that. May his freezer be full and in spite of that may our hunger for Carlos Kleiber never be satisfied. We wish that not to him, but to ourselves. I share this with a deep respect and in the sad belief that we will only be able to tell our children that once we experienced it...

Finally, one comment from Alexander Werner about Alban Berg"s case:

I researched about Carlos for many years, got much intimate material and spoke to many people, also relatives and near friends of Carlos. I did not find any hint in the case of Berg. I think its only a rumor. Because many people in Austria did not love Erich Kleiber, they would very much prefer Carlos to be a son of Berg. I also read letters of Erich to his wife from 1926-1929, seemed to be a very happy marriage with her, letters are full of love. And people who knew them well told me how much Ruth Kleiber adored her husband. And Berg felt in love deeply with another woman in that time, Hanna Fuchs, sister of Franz Werfel, new published letters confirm how deep this relation was. As it is discussed in my German Kleiber-Biografie, I think, on pictures especially from the young Erich Kleiber there are similarities to Carlos Kleiber, also in case of pictures of the elder Carlos with Erich. And: Nobody before thought about Carlos’ mother and nobody compared her looking with that of Carlos Kleiber. The similarities in face are obvious. And she was much taller than Erich Kleiber....