A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”
Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.
“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.
“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . . have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.”
Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.
Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him.
Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”)
Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.
“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”
Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.
“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”
A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.
(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)
Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).