Hans Knappertsbusch has always stood apart from other great German conductors of the 20th century, a dark horse among his more glamorous (and consistent) colleagues. Non-conformist by nature, he preferred to cut his own path, even when doing so risked making matters more difficult for himself. “Kna,” as he is affectionately called by his admirers, was an unrepentant monarchist in the midst of Weimar democracy, an open skeptic of the Nazis during the Third Reich, a stubbornly persistent adherent of the bowdlerized Bruckner of Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe; his surface bearing concealing an inner courtly gentlemanliness.
In 1975, a decade after the conductor’s death, the German music critic Karl Schumann said of him: “I have never come across an artist who so impressed, so fascinated me as Hans Knappertsbusch.” Had his studio discography been all that was bequeathed to posterity, there would be little there to corroborate this generous assessment. Like others of his time and place, Knappertsbusch trusted the instincts of the moment to guide him through a performance. “Gentlemen, you know the piece, I know the piece—see you tonight,” became something of his signature phrase to orchestras before shrugging off the rehearsals he notoriously disdained. Such a spontaneous approach could potentially ignite fireworks in the concert hall. In the recording studio, however, which requires at least a degree of calculation and planning, his carefree attitude of Bavarian gemütlichkeit often worked against him. His listless Meistersinger on Decca, which would cost him the honor of leading the label’s flagship stereo Ring cycle, immediately comes to mind.
Fortunately for his posthumous legacy, a significant and seemingly ever-growing discography of live performances have survived as a bracing rejoinder to his studio work. With the gritty, sonorous power Knappertsbusch drew from orchestras being particularly well suited to Wagner, it is natural that his work in Bayreuth’s orchestra pit has become his best known. Two officially approved traversals of Parsifal have become milestones for any serious record collecting Wagnerite, but perhaps even more remarkable is his Götterdämmerung from Bayreuth’s postwar inauguration; a rendering of such volcanic impetuosity that it leaves the listener second guessing John Culshaw’s later decision to ditch Knappertsbusch in favor of the young Georg Solti.
He could be no less compelling on the concert podium, even when startlingly fallible. Eyebrows may find themselves twitching at Henri Büsser’s review of a Knappertsbusch engagement in Paris from 1956 wherein his “sobriety and precision”—neither of them qualities typically associated with this conductor—are singled out for praise. Germany, where Virgil Thomson noted conductors had traditionally cultivated a “rough” sound that contrasted markedly with American expectations of ensemble synchronization, had its tastes reshaped after World War II by the ascendance of younger conductors such as Rudolf Kempe and Herbert von Karajan (with Erich Kleiber as spiritual godfather) whose sleek exactitude owed more to Arturo Toscanini than to their own elder compatriots. Borne from an aesthetic outlook steeped in the waning, twilit Romanticism of late Wilhelmine Germany, Knappertsbusch’s postwar recordings—especially his late ones for Westminster—can sound as though the shadow of the 20th century had never darkened his existence, so thoroughly and comparatively remote did his style remain against the rapid changes of the 1950s and 1960s.
In his overview of the Salzburg Festival during the NSDAP period, Andreas Novak pithily captured the essence of Knapperstbusch’s character when he referred to him as a “gruff humanist.” As tends to occur with strong-willed individualists, their singular vision can clash against the narrow concerns of more mundane folk. As Arthur Vogel, the music section chief of the American occupation government in Bavaria noted, “the same character of independence and pride” which had kept him aloof from the Nazis also made him difficult to work with and “reluctant to give up even a small part of his Teutonic, heavily Wagnerian bias.” Solti, who took the reins of the Bavarian State Opera from Knappertsbusch in 1946, would long chafe with resentment over the “hysterical screams of approval” that greeted his elder colleague whenever he approached the podium. “Coexisting with him was terribly difficult for me,” he recalled nearly half a century later.
A few years before, Knappertsbusch ran afoul of a detractor with far more capacity to derail his career than any young conducting upstart.
“He with his blond hair and blue eyes was certainly a German, but unfortunately he believed that even with no ear he could with his temperament still produce good music,” Adolf Hitler privately opined. “To attend the [Bavarian State] Opera when he was conducting was a real punishment.” (Despite this and a temporary ban on performance, Knappertsbusch’s name was included among those exempt from compulsory military mobilization in the Gottbegnadeten-Liste.)
Just a little over a decade after the war’s end, Knappertsbusch drifted into his Indian summer, with he and the Munich Philharmonic (whom he maintained a close relationship with in his final decade) each settling into comfortable conservatism. On October 18, 1956 they stood before an audience in Ascona, Switzerland, which sits along the shores of Lake Maggiore, less than 5 miles from the Italian border. Whatever expectations the audience in the Aule delle Scuole may have had for conductor and orchestra on that date were likely confounded by the ruggedly idiosyncratic performances on this disc.
In his treatise on conducting, Wagner bemoaned the condescension which musicians of his time took towards Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8: “[They] came to regard the entire symphony as a sort of accidental hors d’oeuvre of [the composer’s] muse—who after the exertions of the [Symphony No. 7] had chosen ‘to take things rather easily.’” As befits a noted Bayreuthian, Knappertsbusch’s interpretation carefully heeds the advice Wagner dispenses for conductors tackling the score. Far from being the lightweight “silly symphony” it often is depicted as, he dispatches the humor of the Beethoven Eighth with savage delivery, investing it with a sardonic tone that pointedly heightens the score’s deceptive sophistication. His pacing is deliberate; the cumulative effect massive, weighty, nearly crushing.
Cut from the same cloth is his expansive reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2. Its pastoral opening movement, which emerges as if drawn out in a single breath, stands as one of the most remarkable performances in Knappertsbusch’s discography. Each note, played for its full value, tells. A bewitching illusion of having vanished the music’s pulse is cast over the listener, with the conductor coaxing a stream of Wagnerian unendliche Melodie unfettered by bar lines. Momentary instrumental lapses—and there are a number of them—are conquered by the sheer charisma of Knappertsbusch’s direction.
Another officer (and musical academic) attached with the postwar Allied occupation of Bavaria, John Evarts, ruefully noted in his diary the “outrageous liberties” that Knappertsbusch took upon his return to the podium after a brief ban imposed by the Military Government. “[His] admirers were wildly enthusiastic about the eye-and-ear-full [sic] which they received.” Judging from the results on display in this recording at least, Kna’s supporters had ample reason for their unrestrained acclaim.
(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion as liner notes in a forthcoming Knappertsbusch release.)
Uncompromising, occasionally uncouth: Hans Knappertsbusch at the podium (circa late 1950s).