Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
On Carlos Kleiber (1930–2004)
By Joseph Kerman
When Carlos Kleiber died this summer, at the age of seventy-four, the obituaries made it clear that the musical world had lost an extraordinary figure. What made him so extraordinary as a musician they did not say, and indeed one can hardly conceive of a pithy characterization of his distinction that would fit into a short notice. In any case there was much else to say. Carlos Kleiber was the son of another major conductor, Erich Kleiber, who left Nazi Germany in protest and settled in Argentina. His repertory was highly and very idiosyncratically constrained, his recordings very few. Very large fees were required to coax him out of the seclusion of his later years. The Compleat Conductor by Gunther Schuller, more than five hundred pages of arduous technical matter by an eminent conductor-composer, breaks into a small paean to Kleiber as a 'virtuoso with a mind,' a 'musician/philosopher' in the great tradition of twentieth-century German conductors headed by Wilhelm Furtwängler.[1]
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