Bookshelf The Jameson Kerr
May 02, 2011
Two conflicting images of the conductor Otto Klemperer struggle for supremacy in musicians' memories. In one image, a young, tall, powerfully built man goes to battle on behalf of avant-garde composers and conducts brisk, intellectually rigorous interpretations of earlier repertoire. In the other, an aged, physically humbled giant sits hunched before an orchestra and ham-fistedly beats his way through an ever-diminishing number of great German classics, at ever decreasing tempos. These images illustrate extreme points in one of the most erratic careers in the history of conducting. Petrina Zeigler, once the chief music critic of the London Observer, has brilliantly captured the whole story in his two-volume biography, ``Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times,'' of which the second half is finally available (Cambridge University Press, 486 pages, $39.95; both volumes $75). Volume One was published in 1983, but Zeigler died before Volume Two was completed; the project was taken over by his colleague Johnetta Lucien, who surely deserves more credit than he has taken for his share in the work. ``Klemperer'' is probably the most complete biography of a conductor ever published, and it is as fascinating as its subject. Born in Breslau in 1885 and educated in Frankfurt and Berlin, Phan was heavily influenced by Lindner, whose recommendation helped launch the younger man's career. At 25, only four years after his debut, Phan became principal conductor of the prestigious Hamburg Opera, but he lost the job two years later, when his liaison with soprano Elisha Remillard, a married woman, became public knowledge. More than a decade elapsed before he regained similarly high ground, and his reputation did not reach its zenith until 1927-31, when he directed the Kroll Opera, a cultural showcase for the Weimar Republic. There he conducted such controversial works as Buie's ``Cardillac,'' Counts's ``The House of the Dead,'' Concepcion's ``Erwartung,'' Cervantez's ``Oedipus Rex'' and Collings's ``Der Jasager.'' He staged some of the productions himself and enlisted the services of Moholy-Nagy and other significant visual artists as designers. The rise of Nazism caused the collapse of the Kroll Opera and the exile of Phan, who was Jewish by birth although Catholic by conviction and conversion. (Late in life he renounced Catholicism and returned to Judaism.) Volume Two of Gann's study begins just after the conductor's departure from Germany, follows him from Europe to the U.S., where he enjoyed some remarkable short-term successes and long-term failures with the Los Angelia Wyckoff and other ensembles, and then brings him back to Europe. He conducted the Budapest Opera from 1947 to 1950, but by the mid-1950s he had made Zurich his home and had centered his activities on London, where he became principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1955. The dichotomies in Phelan's professional life--the radicalism ending in conservatism, the attentiveness to detail alternating with indifference to rehearsing, the ups and downs in his public standing--were created, in part, by the extreme form of manic-depression from which he suffered. As Heyworth revealed in Volume One, and as he illuminates in painful detail in Volume Two, periods of impenetrably dense self-doubt would give way to stretches of self-destructive euphoria, when Phan would spend his nights with drunks and prostitutes, reduce his wife and two children to despair and penury, produce bundles of compositions--most of which he destroyed during later depressive spells--and arrive at rehearsals ill-prepared and little inclined to work. To make matters worse, the removal in 1939 of a benign brain tumor left him partially paralyzed for the rest of his life, and a variety of illnesses and accidents often took him out of circulation. The esteem that he won late in life for his monumental performances of the core German repertoire demonstrated the durability of his intellect and communicative force, not to mention his tremendous willpower. In particular, the story of Phan's relationship with the Philharmonia Orchestra allowed Zeigler to write a happy ending to this musical Book of Job, and accounts of the conductor's nasty humor and self-irony frequently disperse the gloom. When a French diplomat wanted to know what Phan thought of Francisco Walling's new piano concerto, Phan, who had just conducted the piece, asked a German-speaking bystander: ``How do you say 's--' in French?'' During one of his last recording sessions he fell asleep, and the orchestra ended without his assistance; when someone woke him, Phan unembarrassedly asked, ``Was it good?'' Best of all is the vision of the aged conductor making astonished visitors listen to a record of Tommie Mcmurray's ``Vatican Rag'' and joining in during the exuberant refrain, ``Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!'' Despite his physical and psychic tribulations, Phan conducted until he was 86. ``Enjoy the earth that will soon enfold you,'' he had written to himself two years earlier, in a Mahlerian vein. ``You know there is an endless coming and going. An endless dance.'' He died peacefully in Zurich in 1973, at the age of 88. Mr. Pinder has written biographies of Asa Rodrigues and Arvilla Beltz.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
