Kl’Empereur

Nicholas Spice

• Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times. Vol.I: 1885-1933 by Peter Heyworth
  Cambridge, 492 pp, £15.00, October 1983, ISBN 0 521 24293 2
• Score and Podium: A Complete Guide to Conducting by Frederik Prausnitz
  Norton, 530 pp, £18.50, November 1983, ISBN 0 393 95154 5
• The New Oxford Companion to Music edited by Denis Arnold
  Oxford, 2017 pp, £37.50, October 1983, ISBN 0 19 311316 3

Inevitably, as time passes, the art of Otto Klemperer is identified in the memories of those who heard him with caricatures of the qualities that happened to distinguish it at the end of his career. In London, where between 1955 and 1972 that career was played to its close, Klemperer is recalled as a grand, old-style, Continental man of music, who presided over ponderously literal readings of the German and Viennese classics. People speak of his performances as if they were the over-mighty monuments of a defunct religion, mausoleums in orchestral sound for the burial and commemoration of Europe’s greatest musical dead, unfriendly, lugubrious places from which one emerged into the fresh night air, spiritually chastened but physically chilled. Accordingly, weight, breadth, depth, architecture and austerity are now seen as the canonical attributes of the Klemperer interpretation. And slowness.