When Otto Klemperer Came to Town

On Oct. 14, 1933, the great German conductor Otto Klemperer stepped off the train in Los Angeles and into a world unlike any he had ever imagined. He had not been here before but was eager to flee the Nazis and had hastily signed a contract to become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony were not available, so he took what he could get.

What he got was a 14-year-old orchestra that had already fallen upon hard times, thanks principally to the Depression. Along with it, he also got a city that little resembled the Berlin he had just left.

We can only imagine the culture shock for the serious 6-foot-4 conductor who had been a prodigy of Mahler and who had headed Berlin’s avant-garde Kroll Opera. Suddenly he was being wined and dined by Hollywood, stepping out with the likes of Eddie Cantor. He was being asked about his favorite films--hemming and hawing, he told this paper that, well, he liked “The Mother,” an intense Soviet silent.

Los Angeles and Angelenos bewildered him. He didn’t drive, and he missed urban intellectual life. Initially, he moved into the West Adams mansion of William Andrews Clark, the Philharmonic’s founder and principal funder. Clark’s hospitality, Klemperer figured, would save him the cost of a hotel at least until he could move his wife and children out of Germany. But he couldn’t quite get used to Clark’s penchant for breakfast in the nude.

Still, Klemperer did adapt. He and his family eventually settled down, and he remained the Philharmonic’s music director until 1939, managing, during that time, to put the orchestra on the musical map.

It was only later, after the war, when he resumed his conducting career in Europe, that Klemperer became the icon he is today. I remember seeing him during the early ‘70s in London rehearsing Beethoven symphonies, an old man seated on a stool with a pipe in his mouth. He didn’t say much. The performances were slow and stony. He was revered as the last representative of a profound German tradition.

Things had to have been much different in L.A., where the orchestra musicians called him Klempie, which he hated. And Klemperer, younger and livelier, could even be a bit wild as both conductor and even in his personal life, since he suffered from manic depression.

Until recently, we had little recorded evidence of his L.A. conducting, but three new historical compact disc releases from Europe span Klemperer’s years in Los Angeles.

The first of two discs on the German label Archiphon contains a national broadcast the Philharmonic made from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on New Year’s Day, 1934, only three months after Klemperer had begun working with the orchestra. The hourlong program includes a Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that will surprise anyone who knows Klemperer’s weighty late Beethoven recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Here there is a fierce intensity that comes through despite some very curious playing; the strings, in particular, are terribly out of tune. But the orchestra did contain some fine first-desk players and there is a certain virtuosity to the ensemble, however messy the intonation. It could follow fast tempos, and more important it could play as if the music mattered. So the performance remains, despite all its flaws, riveting.

The second disc of this set includes performances from 1938, when the Philharmonic was a much more secure orchestra. Of special interest here is the world premiere of Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor. Klemperer had a difficult relationship with Schoenberg--or at least Schoenberg thought so: He was unhappy that the conductor, who had studied with him, didn’t program more of his music. The Brahms orchestration is a rambunctious affair that has only caught on in recent years. Klemperer handles it with fabulous verve, and the Philharmonic sounds (from what one can tell--be warned, some of these recordings are pretty rough) surprisingly like the superb ensemble of today.

The recording that best demonstrates just what Klemperer could accomplish with the orchestra (and in more reasonable sound) is the new Symposium release, which includes the complete national broadcast from New Year’s Day, 1938. The highlight here is a performance of Mozart’s “Linz” that is simply one of the most exhilarating to be found anywhere.

As a further example of just how much verve Klemperer had in him and how smooth and slick the Philharmonic could sound, there is a fast and maniacally cheerful “Die Fledermaus” Overture from a concert Klemperer, returning as guest conductor, gave on Feb. 11, 1945, which is captured on the Grammofono 2000 release.

Illuminating as these recordings are in their chronicling of the Philharmonic’s development under Klemperer, they also tell another interesting tale: that of the way the orchestra--and Los Angeles--changed the conductor. As so many other emigres have learned (Esa-Pekka Salonen, for example), to survive in the entertainment capital of the world, you have to entertain. Klemperer couldn’t keep up the exclusive diet of heavy German fare that he had thrived on in Berlin. He had to lighten up, and he did.

These discs are peppered with performances of composers he was never well-known for performing. There is his only Verdi recording, a quite colorful and idiomatic performance of the overture to “I Vespri Siciliani.” There is, wonder of wonders, a performance of Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2 (on both the Symposium and Archiphon discs) that opened a Hollywood Bowl Gershwin memorial in 1938, a month after the composer’s death. It is somber, and the orchestration isn’t good, but it does swing in its own way.

There are performances of Berlioz (an idiomatic performance of the “Benvenuto Cellini” Overture), Debussy (a nicely sensuous and well-played “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”), Ambroise Thomas (a perfectly agreeable performance of the overture to “Mignon”) and Liszt (a properly thunderous “Totentanz” with Bernardo Segall as piano soloist). There are even three excerpts from “La Boheme,” sung by Lucrezia Bori and Joseph Bentonelli, with a nicely sweet and clear accompaniment from Klemperer.

Two performances are painful. One is an orchestrated version of Corelli’s “La Folia” with Joseph Szigeti as the soloist. Szigeti was one of the century’s most interesting violinists, but his intonation was not always reliable, and this caught him on a bad night.

The other unsettling recording is of Strauss’ “Till Eulenspeigel’s Merry Pranks,” from the 1938 New Year’s Day broadcast. This is one instance where Klemperer was pushed into conducting music for all the wrong reasons. He had for some years boycotted Strauss because of the composer’s Nazi acquiescence. But Strauss was just too popular to avoid. Klemperer bowed to pressure to perform him, but his heart most clearly was not in it.

Still, these discs prove that Klemperer did leave his heart in much of what he gave to L.A. It is a legacy that helped make music here what it is today, and that helped make the conductor a more well-rounded musician. And besides that, these recordings (which include some hilarious examples of the broadcast announcers of the day, one of whom confuses Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with his Sixth) are a hugely entertaining return to another era, one in which our orchestra was more consequential than you might think.