The Klemperer mystery

«Atrocious novelty; / Nothing to the ears, everything for the view! ”Baudelaire wrote in his poem” Parisian dream “, reflecting the transfer of senses that had occurred in the city, where the eye displaced the organ of the sacred. That is why the blind, who in the Middle Ages had been depositaries of God, in The flowers of evil They are already just a troop of drunk. In our current virtual world and hypertecnifieddeafness has only intensified. We live surrounded by a constant bombardment of images that have largely lost their meaning and that are often accompanied by noise and jaleo. The word itself has become a banner that only transports information and advertising, slogans.

Start, therefore, in this habitat a new section dedicated to the so -called classical music – although worse it would be called “serious” or “cultured” – it might seem an absurd and useless company. However, as the Prince of Denmark would say, there is method in my Madness. Romanian great director and philosopher Sergiu Celibidache considered that the recording kill the essence of music because the microphone was not able to capture all the nuances of living sound. The album, he said, is a photograph of something that cannot be photographed. The execution of a Sonata or a symphony is an ephemeral exercise that opens a time parallel to one’s own, whose nature transforms at the end. Our linear and biological time suffers an enigmatic alteration with that end that does not end. A true audition is inseparable from the space in which music is born, develops and dies.

Anyway – and without taking Celibidache’s reason – we agree that we can and must open listening spaces in this delusional world that we have created. And that technology, with all its dangers, can also be an ally, even if it is only to intuit what true art is, such as prisoners in Plato’s cave. After a century of record industry, in which the enjoyment of music went from establishing a unique and privileged experience – at the beginning the scores used to be interpreted only once, during the occasion for which they had been composed – to be a collective and private entertainment , now Internet has put the totality of the music preserved in all existing versions available to everyone.

Not even the most obsessive melomania could compare the large nightclub of his house with him Alef musical that is now glimpsed on the different digital platforms. Today’s fan, in addition to enjoying all the news, can compare canonical versions in new editions, recover lost recordings, contrast the way in which this or that director address a movement of a certain symphony, jump from one century to another , listen to interviews with soloists and composers, watch videos of essays, documentaries, concerts. The audition in the era of technical reproducibility is a kind of island of Prospero of the thousand wonders. We know that the truth is outside of it, in the experience of sound, but as long as the exile we can have fun remembering. Because that’s A recording: a memory. Also the printing press, on the other hand, generalized an individual and silent reading that even created new genres and a cultural galaxy that now gives way to another, touch and still incipient, need of ear.

The purpose of this new section lies, therefore, in guiding the Internet user interested in the infinite digital shelves, commenting Reissues of classics, new composers, comparing versions, recommending sites, sharingultimately, the passions of a Lego listeneras Juan Benet called fans without musical degree that however we insist on saying ours about more enigmatic, universal, persistent and incorruptible art. The language in which all languages ​​end, according to Rilke.

As an inaugural concert, we propose the anthology that the Warner label has just published, The Great Symphoniesby German director Otto Klemperer (1885-1973). Klemperer Maybe he is the best director, among the old schoolto understand symphonic music. His style has often been qualified as “granitic”, “imperial” or “inexpressive”, for his total rejection of sentimentality, in the antipodes of his colleague and rival Bruno Walter, a disciple like him by Gustav Mahler. (Klemperer was defined as “immoralist” against the “moralistic” Walter). But in reality it is something more complex thing.

“Klemperer was not a study director, but came from another era, just the one that Celibidache longed for and claimed”

The figure of Klemperer crosses the entire twentieth century. During his youth, it was One of the most requested European directorstogether with Wilhelm Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber or Arturo Toscanini. As head of the Kroll opera in Berlin, in full cultural effervescence of the Weimar Republic, it promotes the revolutionary work of Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith or Kurt Weill, assuming the postulates of the Neue Sachlichkeitthe «New objectivity»a school that reacted against the dictates of the Tardorromanticism. As a Jew, he had to leave Germany with the arrival of Hitler, being forced to first emigrate to Eastern Europe and then to the United States, where he worked in different orchestras without ever feeling too much comfortable in the country.

Klemperer was a complex personality. Depressive and bipolar, during the postwar period he suffered madness attacks and was successfully operated on a brain tumor that left him a slight hemiplegia. From then on, his particular way of speaking with his mouth crooked and an atrocious English became a kind of common cartoon in the musical world, where on the other hand it was a Respected and feared figure. When it seemed that his career was going to languish, in the 1950s, producer Walter Legge, head of EMI, hired him as head of the newly created Philharmonia orchestra in London. Legge made the decision after listening to Klemperer Direct a mozart symphony and stay, in his own words, “ecstatic.”

The Klemperer who has remained in his discography is the result of that collaboration. For about twenty years, until his retirement in 1971, Klemperer worked thoroughly with Philharmonia –What later, when Legge became independent, it was renamed “New Philharmonia”, even under the direction of the old teacher – in what has been described as to Long Indian Summera long and spectacular autumn farewell. Klemperer was not a study director, but came from another era, precisely the one that Celibidache longed for and claimed, prior to technical manipulation. That is why his recordings are today a treasure, he preserves it in amber of a missing musical conception.

There has often been spoken of «Mystery Klemperer». Where does that special sound, always contained, accurate, but at the same time fluid and lyrical? The anthology to which we refer, The Great Symphoniesit contains a sample of its best art. There are the Jupiter of Mozart, the 95 of Haydn, the “New World” of Dvorak, Schubert’s unfin The fantastic of Berlioz, Bruckner’s eighth and Mahler’s novena. And they are all Perfect.

The Tempi of Klemperer They are always broad, slow before slow, the right thing for music to breathe. Often your hand invests the trends and where they all accelerate – for example, in a scherzo– He slows down. And where the most complacent and emotional are roaming – almost always in a adage-, He accelerates, but without losing his pulse. The result is a unique, inimitable phrase, with a single breathing that never breaks,Lgo that no director has ever achieved with so much moderationtension and accuracy. Under his baton, for example, the wonderful final movement of Mahler’s novena strips of all ornamental adhesion and becomes a powerful inner regret, more attentive to the truth than to beauty.

Klemperer opens the ear to another dimension that is not exactly transcendental or earthly, halfway between Furtwängler and Toscanini. His read by Brahms, for example, has no paragon. No one has managed to balance the principle of the fourth with so much property. One can listen to him one and a thousand times without understanding how he does it. The same thing happens with his Mozart, with his Beethoven – except from beginning to end -, with the fifth of Tchaikovsky, with the third of Mendelssohn and with Bruckner’s fabulous eighth. Klemperer also also privileges wood, which many directors tend to blur under metals and strings, something that gives their versions a very characteristic and recognizable clarity.

Klemperer’s recordings are both a memory of what music was before its technical transformation and the test of the survival miracle thanks to the same.