The great unknown

Who was Carlos Kleiber, and why has he been voted the best conductor of all time?

Carlos Kleiber — the name evokes both Hispanic and German spheres — cancelled performances, never gave interviews, claimed he only conducted when the fridge was empty, and told Placido Domingo he’d prefer to devote his time to drinking wine and making love. He only conducted 96 concerts in his life (does Valerie Gergiev notch up more in a year?). Yet, according to Claudio Abbado, Kleiber was the most important conductor of the 20th century. He scarcely even wanted to be ‘a contender’, yet staggeringly, he was recently voted the most inspiring conductor of all time by a BBC survey of 100 conductors. Who was this remarkable man? Why was he so revered by professionals and audiences alike?

Domingo thinks that Carlos was the most musical person he has ever met, feeling a ‘tremendous emptiness at losing a friend and a genius’ on his death (seven years ago this month). Kleiber kept by his bed a book by Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher, which he heavily underlined. He added four exclamation marks to this sentence: ‘The behaviour of the ego is appallingly monotonous.’ Brigitte Fassbaender, a mezzo-soprano who often performed under his baton, reflects that ‘he was lucky enough to be tall and slim: most conductors are small, so they act like sergeant-majors to compensate’.

He called me once from Munich knowing that I was due to conduct Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and enquired whether I had heard Stokowski’s recording of it. He was warm, kind, and devoid of all self-importance. What he found compelling about this interpretation was its ‘wildness’, even though it jeopardised the ensemble. It is this pure explosive feeling that is the hallmark of his own conducting.