This hour-long documentary DVD, which I assume was made for
television, is one of two on Carlos Kleiber to have been released
recently. The other is a film by Eric Schulz, ten or so minutes
longer than this one, and released by Arthaus Musik [101 553
- review].
The director of this C Major production is Georg Wübbolt
and his direction ensures that whilst most of the witnesses
are laudatory not a few are puzzled by Kleiber the man, and
in one instance dismissive of aspects of his personality. Clearly
he was not an easy man. The story of his predilection for ‘Geishas’
was long known, but his appetites in general, not merely the
sexual appetite, seemed to some dilatory or merely capricious.
This documentary hardly resolves the dilemma of Kleiber, who
seems to have been in thrall to the memory of his meticulous
father Erich for much of his life, but it does paint a portrait
of sorts of a man whose complexities were at least partially
fathomable.
One interviewee, possibly significantly a woman, notes with
a certain distaste that ‘he made fools of people, which
wasn’t nice’. The element of caprice was certainly
strong, the demands both unreasonable but in some cases - especially
rehearsal time - not wholly unreasonable. But there was also
a meticulous, almost hyper-sensitive quality too; he would refuse
to conduct the second act of an opera because he feared that
he’d failed in the first act; he had to be reassured,
like a child, cajoled, pushed, almost thrust back on, but often
he simply left anyway, and went home.
Kleiber’s mother was Jewish and the family left Germany
in 1935, after the Nazis took power. They journeyed to South
America where Erich - whom Michael Gielen calls ‘The Commander’
and Wolfgang Sawallisch calls a ‘Dictator’ - was
busy conducting. There is a good amount of film of Erich conducting;
a small, compact man, with hooded unblinking eyes, directing
orchestras with short, unostentatious, businesslike gestures.
He was everything that his son Carlos wasn’t. He was controlled,
prepared, and in charge. Whereas things seemed to be in control
of Carlos, whose stream of consciousness conducting, arms windmilling
in an agony of desire in Rosenkavalier, suggests an out-of-body
compact with the music that his father would never have countenanced.
But Carlos, when not boring orchestras with his finicky explanations,
often poetic in the extreme - nothing is guaranteed to annoy
an orchestral musician more than non-specific verbiage - was
also something that his father was not; he was funny. A rehearsal
extract demonstrates that he could make the musicians laugh,
and ensure collaboration through complicity, not as his father
had done, by bludgeoning the musicians.
We hear from many musicians; Riccardo Muti talks admiringly
of Kleiber, in English; we also hear from Ileana Cotrubas, Peter
Jonas, and Otto Schenck and Kleiber’s doctor Otto Staindl
are also enjoyably encountered. Ioan Holender speaks with a
certain patrician hauteur. Most agree he conducted too little,
but was paid an awful lot. We also hear from Kleiber himself,
in a 1960 NDR radio interview. His letters are read in English
voiceover, not very well, but which nevertheless supplies a
real need since he was had an almost pathological aversion to
journalists, and thus interviews.
Toward the end of his life his repertoire had dwindled to almost
nothing, as had his concert-giving, his fee for one famous one-off
concert in 1996 being a new sports car. He retreated to Slovenia,
birthplace of his ballerina wife, to die alone, his body undiscovered
for a day or so. And yet I’m sure it can be argued, though
this documentary doesn’t seek to argue the case, that
Kleiber achieved his own degree of resolution. His childhood
had been fractured, his first language naturally German (Karl)
but his youth requiring him (Carlos) to be multi-lingual. There
are hints that both his parents killed themselves. Erich denigrated
his early conducting attempts, and Carlos came late to music.
It was something of a small miracle in fact that he achieved
independence from so powerfully centrifugal a force as Erich.
In the end this documentary raises more questions than answers.
Carlos was a sensualist, money-conscious but not apparently
status-obsessed, an indifferent pianist but a master conductor
- one whose need for a singing and expressive narrative sense
in his conducting set him apart. He was so good an opera conductor
not because his repertoire was so small, but because he knew
the score inside out. His tortured sense of inadequacy perhaps
sprang from hearing too often and too loudly the admonishing
words of his ruthless father: the fewer works he conducted,
and the better he knew them, the less often he would hear his
father’s posthumous scorn. Or maybe it was something else
entirely. Until there is a biography perhaps we will never truly
know.
Jonathan Woolf
A documentary directed by Georg Wübbolt, produced by Bernhard
Fleischer 
[58:32] 
