Erich Kleiber was once considered one of the twentieth century's greatest conductors. Kleiber crafted a global reputation during twelve astonishing years at the Berlin Staatsoper and elsewhere between 1923 and 1935. Bullheaded and brilliant, he premiered new modernist work from all across Europe, welcoming both arguments and praise. He was beloved by musicians, singers, and stagehands—less so by orchestra administrators, who found him impossible to manage. He demanded, and got, astronomical fees and burdensome rehearsal schedules. Audiences worshiped him. He was a sought-after visitor on the world's best-known stages, from Mexico City to New York to Milan to Moscow. He worked with and transformed great performers, including Birgit Nilsson and a young Maria Callas. A 1929 photo, famous at the time, captured the era's star orchestral and opera conductors, popularly referred to as the “Big Five”: the diminutive Kleiber stands in the center, dark eyes staring, flanked by Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
But while these other four conductors have gone down as central figures in the history of twentieth-century art music, Kleiber is now largely forgotten, a curiosity for musical devotees. There are many potential reasons for his lack of prominence. Save the Staatsoper, most of his career was itinerant; he never developed a long-term artistic relationship with another ensemble. He distrusted art-music culture in the United States as mechanical and slapdash; the prominence of North American ensembles in global art music by the 1950s meant that this choice had long-term consequences. He was slower than his contemporaries to embrace long-form recording technology and thus left behind relatively fewer recordings. And his name has perhaps been eclipsed by the genius of his son Carlos Kleiber, regarded by his peers as the most influential conductor in history.Footnote 1
But Kleiber's tumultuous transnational life is worth remembering, for reasons that go well beyond the musical. First, Kleiber's life illustrates “migration as a master narrative” in German history and beyond it.Footnote 2 Most of Kleiber's life was lived in what his biographer mournfully called “vagabondage.” His first two decades played out back and forth between Habsburg Prague and Vienna. After finishing his musical studies, Kleiber began the standard art-music series of apprenticeships and assistant director positions in cities and towns all over German-speaking central Europe, hoping to gradually improve his standing and land in a major capital-city theater. His twelve years in Berlin were followed by lucrative stints as a touring conductor. Kleiber complained about this, but nevertheless made a life from it. His mental map seems to have been populated mainly by grand urban theaters, lovely homes or apartments, elegant vacation destinations, and natural settings in which he could take his preferred long walks to contemplate music. At his level of talent and prestige—and much like the world of art music more generally—Kleiber's life was naturally trans-, supra-, or subnational, sometimes all three at once.Footnote 3 As Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine have noted, “musical ‘Germanness’ can appear in unexpected places … It can appear between cultural geographies and can help to make new ones.”Footnote 4
Second, those factors—his talent, which granted him both prestige and privilege, and his easy mobility—contributed to Kleiber's political obtuseness. To his mind, the great stages were city-states of their own accord, over which he by rights would benevolently rule. That the theaters happened inconveniently to be located within countries, or affected by those countries’ economies or politics, was utterly immaterial to him. His only consistent political concern was his own artistic autonomy. To maintain it, Kleiber repeatedly proved willing to negotiate with authoritarians. He tried to ignore or work within Nazism for two years, and later promised Goebbels good behavior in exchange for a Nazi-coordinated position in Buenos Aires. After the war, he allowed himself to be charmed and reassured by East German leaders who offered him the helm at his beloved Staatsoper, working with them for several years before abandoning the effort. (Kleiber, of course, was far from the only prominent conductor willing to make these kinds of accommodations, as the vast literature on Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan makes clear.) Certainly Kleiber used his prominence to help friends and colleagues escape Nazi Europe and to negotiate better conditions for East German musicians after the war. Still, one of the larger themes clarified by an examination of Kleiber's life is his privileged apolitical pliability. Kleiber was always an émigré, not a refugee; he left when he chose to, not because he had to.
A related constant throughout Kleiber's life was his adherence to an identity and affiliations that were territorial and cultural, not political. On the one hand, Kleiber's mental geography was rooted in Vienna, not in Berlin: he would always yearn for his romanticized vision of the Habsburg capital. “I so long to be there,” he wrote of Vienna in 1918. “I shall never know peace until I get there.” He continued his quest for a position in Vienna until the end of his life. Writing from Berlin to his sister Elisabeth, Kleiber explained, “I was asked if I wouldn't take German nationality, but I told them that they would take away the best in me if they did that.”Footnote 5 In 1938, upon moving to Latin America, Kleiber and his family took Argentine citizenship; he alternately referred to himself as “an old Austrian” and “an old Argentinian” in his later correspondence, insisting to his wife in a 1939 letter that “I am not a Pan-European but unconditionally for AUSTRIA REDIVNA, jawohl!!!!!!”Footnote 6
What that meant in practice was somewhat less clear. Kleiber's professed Austrianness was shorthand for an idiosyncratic identity, roughly synonymous with the values and cultural legacy of the central European intelligentsia as it developed from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It was wider than the Habsburg or post-Great-War Austrian state, and emerged from the “Jews and progressive Austrians and Germans,” who crafted it within the slippages between nationalizing states and universalizing cosmopolitan culture.Footnote 7 Its component parts were, first, a somewhat Humboldtian or Goetheian vision of ernste Musik, Bildung and Kultur divorced from place, era, or political power, and second, the duty of German-speakers to discover and convey these universal values through scholarship and high culture to the world. Frederick the Great was as important within Kleiber's mental universe as Franz Josef of Habsburg. Musically speaking, it ranged from Mozart to Schönberg and beyond: Kleiber translated his expansive, iconoclastic musical Heimat into teaching from the podium, asking his audiences to hear Bartók as Beethoven's equal, Revueltas alongside Ravel.Footnote 8 Celia Applegate has noted that “Music surely ought to be regarded as a crucial contributor to cultural citizenship,” and Kleiber's cultural citizenship translated everywhere and nowhere, rooting Kleiber in a musical context rather than a political one. He was a citizen of Beethoven, Berg, and the Staatsoper far more than he ever would be of Austria or Argentina. In Latin America during the Second World War, Kleiber and the central European refugee musicians who worked with him were understood as “Germans.” Few of them carried a passport matching that term. But the terminology mattered less than the music and the culture that music might represent.
A discussion of context and sources will help to situate Kleiber's life and work. He was one of several thousand central European refugee and émigré musicians to find refuge in wartime Latin America, although he was better known, wealthier, and more sought after than the vast majority of his fellow migrants, allowing him choices most of them could not make. Most refugee European musicians across Latin America joined or formed orchestras, and trained local musicians and composers in national conservatories. Many participated in a complex web of cultural-diplomatic entanglements, especially antifascist political organizations. During the war Latin American, North American, and Nazi governmental and private agencies helped them, paid them, and surveilled them. Other refugees focused more narrowly on musical politics. They played Wagner and Beethoven on local stages even as the Nazis claimed these composers; they programmed Mendelssohn on the radio and explained to Latin American listeners why that mattered. They joined Latin American composers in bringing folk motifs and melodies into the classical canon. The refugees became transmitters and translators of different strands of musical modernism across the Atlantic and the Americas, bringing newer twelve-tone and neoromantic approaches to their Latin American students, performing and programming works by other refugees and their generational contemporaries among the Latin American, European, and North American avant-garde. Even when they could establish or reestablish a career, however, the generally straitened circumstances of art music in postwar Latin America complicated the creation of an artistic legacy and ensured that these artists left a relatively light footprint in their new homelands. Their lives were often substantially disrupted by their wartime exile, whereas Kleiber was able to do in Latin America what he had done in Europe, mutatis mutandis.
Source material on Kleiber is strikingly sparse given his preeminence, leaving the historian to write into and around Kleiber's silences. One admiring biography exists, written by John Russell, an art critic at the Times of London and New York Times. The two men were friends. Russell clearly had access to Kleiber's private correspondence while crafting the biography. But much of that is now lost or inaccessible, as is the correspondence of his wife, Ruth Goodrich Kleiber, and his children, Veronika and Carlos. A few letters remain in archives in Argentina, Austria, and Germany.Footnote 9 Where possible, I have used Kleiber's own words; I have done my best to fill in the obvious gaps.
From Vienna to Berlin
Both sides of Kleiber's family were from southern Germany, but his parents met and married in Prague, then moved to Vienna to look for work. Kleiber was born in Prague in 1890. His father, a music-loving high school teacher, died early; Kleiber's mother, also a devoted amateur musician, died in 1896. Kleiber and his sister moved back to Prague, to be raised by their grandfather, an imperial carriage maker from Marienbad. But only a year later, the grandfather died, and Kleiber and his sister returned to Vienna to live with their aunt. Kleiber attended gymnasium, studied violin, and fell in love with opera. In 1906, at sixteen, he watched Gustav Mahler conduct his own Sixth Symphony, and decided to become a conductor.Footnote 10
Kleiber did his university work in Prague, where he studied philosophy, history, and art history, as well as conducting and composition at the Prague Conservatory. He ingratiated himself as a volunteer at the Deutsches Theater, but was soon hired as Kapellmeister. In 1911, he directed his first performance there. A year later, he dropped out of the conservatory to take a third-director position at what was then the princely court at Darmstadt, making Kleiber Grossherzogliche Hofkapellmeister. Kleiber remained in Darmstadt for seven years, attracting acclaim from his colleagues and the local press. He also socialized with the court's “scholars and litterateurs,” as well as the artists of the Wolfskehl circle. The First World War intruded almost not at all into court life in Darmstadt, until the “Grand-Duke decided that, as the war had not come to his theater, his theater should go to the war,” sending Kleiber and the ensemble to perform in Bucharest and Brussels. Kleiber also stepped in with no notice to run a rehearsal of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, proving himself capable of running rehearsal while sight-reading a completely unfamiliar score. This improved an already promising reputation. Between 1919 and 1923, he took positions in Barmen-Elderfeld, Düsseldorf, and Mannheim, the latter two as first conductor.Footnote 11
In 1923, Kleiber was invited to conduct Beethoven's Fidelio at the Berliner Staatsoper unter den Linden (Berlin State Opera). The Staatsoper musicians loved him; soon he had been hired as Generalmusikdirektor of one of the world's best opera houses, at only thirty-three years old, during a moment of acute political and economic crisis. As Kleiber took up the Staatsoper baton, his biographer recalled, “Five hundred people were arrested for rioting, Jews were beaten to death in poor quarters of the city, the police were said to have opened fire on money-changers, the profiteers’ women walked the town in their high yellow boots, and a good seat at the Staatsoper cost just under four million marks.”Footnote 12 But Kleiber seems to have been insulated entirely from any of these pressures.
Kleiber rapidly demonstrated breathtaking range in the opera house and the concert hall. He gave memorable performances of the standard repertoire—Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss—while adding eccentric programming alongside it, such as pieces by Mozart's father Leopold, or Frederick the Great. Most importantly, Kleiber made his reputation as a crucial element of Berlin's interwar modernist ferment. Kleiber battled on behalf of musical modernism “at the time when it really was a battle,” including atonal, experimental work.Footnote 13 His interpretations, often brilliant, changed musical history. His 1924 revival of Leoš Janáček's opera Jenůfa returned both opus and composer to the canon; he premiered Alban Berg's landmark opera Wozzeck in 1925, Franz Schreker's Der singende Teufel in 1928, and Darius Milhaud's Christophe Colombe in 1930.Footnote 14 Béla Bartók commented that Kleiber's 1928 performance of his piano concerto had allowed him “‘for once’ [to hear] the work as he had hoped to hear it.”Footnote 15 Kleiber's thoroughgoing success in Berlin granted him international prominence and invitations to the world's greatest stages and ensembles: Milan's La Scala, London's Covent Garden, the New York Philharmonic.Footnote 16
In 1926, Kleiber took on a set of concerts at the spectacular Beaux-Arts Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the greatest theaters in the Americas. Kleiber would return to the Colón almost yearly for the next several decades, but his initial reception gave little sign of what would follow. He recalled, “I found when I got there … that I was not regarded as the Generalmusikdirektor from Berlin, or even as a leading figure from the Staatsoper, but as a small, skinny, completely unknown person with a baton in his rucksack who happened to answer to the name of Erich Kleiber.” Buenos Aires audiences were accustomed to prominent European visitors, but mainly to Italian and French operas, not to the central European repertoire. They were equally unused to conductors shooting them cold looks when they chatted during boring operatic passages or arrived late.Footnote 17
But Kleiber soon won Buenos Aires over as he had Berlin. His performances of Beethoven's Missa solemnis in 1928 and 1929 were discussed not just in the local press but in the New York Times.Footnote 18 Kleiber also fell in headlong love with Ruth Goodrich, a young staffer at the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, to whom he proposed a day after meeting her. Kleiber spoke no English at that point; Goodrich did not speak German. Among other methods, Kleiber wooed her by filling her room with white roses.Footnote 19 Their daughter Veronika was born in 1928 and son Karl in 1930 (Karl would later become Carlos when the family moved to Argentina).
Back in Germany, Kleiber's career ran into political obstacles. From the late 1920s on, the German radical right claimed that Kleiber and Goodrich, both practicing Catholics, were Jewish. The Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter likened Kleiber's performance at Bayreuth to Judas defaming a “German temple.”Footnote 20 Kleiber's repeated efforts to jump from Berlin to the Vienna Staatsoper—part of his lifelong dream of a permanent position in Vienna—were thwarted by similar rumors. Both in 1928 and again in 1934, rumors flew that Kleiber was Jewish—or, alternatively and ironically, that he was a Nazi. Both such accusations, depending on the situation and the accuser, could serve to block Kleiber or any other musician from a job. In a 1934 letter to Alban Berg, Kleiber admitted that he appreciated the Nazi goal of awakening German greatness, but that he
was never a member of the N.S.D.A.P. … never as well had the intention of becoming one!!! Despite repeated requests! … I always sympathized with the national movement—but now I can no longer follow it into the realm of the “race question”—because I am in possession of an artistic conscience, thank God.Footnote 21
Kleiber's commitment to “degenerate” modern music may have in fact been the deciding factor in Vienna. In Berlin, it brought him into increasingly direct conflict with Nazism: specifically, with Josef Goebbels, who had full control over German musical and theatrical work by September 1933, and with Hermann Göring, whose position as minister-president and Minister of the Interior of Prussia gave him authority over Berlin stages. Both Göring and Staatsoper general director Wilhelm Furtwängler had tried to talk Kleiber out of a scheduled performance of Berg's Suite from Lulu on November 30, 1934.Footnote 22 In fact, Göring met with and pressured Ruth Goodrich, who explained that for Kleiber, being able to direct the Berg suite was a “matter of life and death.” Goodrich secured Göring's reluctant approval, but recalled that while Göring had kept her waiting in the hallway, “a nurse … went by with two young lions on a leash, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”Footnote 23 The metaphor—something about absurdity and leashed savagery—practically writes itself.
Kleiber's time in Berlin was almost over. New York Times reporter and critic Herbert Peyser wrote that the Lulu Suite performance was hailed as a resounding success, despite the regime's resistance, threats of demonstrations, and the forced resignation of the lead soprano just a few days before the premiere.Footnote 24 Within a week after Lulu, when Kleiber had made some noise about leaving the Staatsoper immediately, the “Nazi secret police” confiscated his passport and confined him to his room for an undisclosed amount of time.Footnote 25 The regime also threatened his family, and the possibility of financial penalty. So Kleiber fulfilled his Staatsoper contract, which continued through January 1935, ending with two performances of Tannhäuser.Footnote 26 The Nazis tried several times to lure Kleiber back, but he insisted that the condition for his return would be that his first concert feature the work of the banned composer Felix Mendelssohn.Footnote 27
Kleiber had unknowingly embarked on the second half of his career, returning to the steady migration that had marked his first decades. His biography and scraps of correspondence do not mention the Nuremberg Laws, the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Kristallnacht: no one seems concerned about where the family might land. Kleiber's world remained musical rather than political. The Kleiber family moved first to Austria, near Salzburg, and later to Geneva and Lugano in Switzerland. Between 1935 and 1938 he maintained a full schedule as a sought-after visiting conductor, avoiding the Nazi Reich; he crisscrossed Europe and continued his visits to the Teatro Colón in 1937 and 1938.Footnote 28 In fact, it was during one of these visits that the former President Alvear helped him exchange his Austrian citizenship for Argentine citizenship.Footnote 29
But the expansion of Nazi influence across Europe did touch Kleiber somewhat. A stint conducting Wagner in Amsterdam was canceled, the claimed reason being that “an avowed enemy of National Socialism” ought not to conduct Wagner. When Mussolini enacted race laws barring Italian Jews from Kleiber's planned performance of Fidelio at La Scala, Kleiber canceled the performance and sought tranquility in Roquebrunn Cap-Martin on the Côte d'Azur, also a favored vacation haunt of Coco Chanel, Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, various Rothschilds, and Salvador Dalí. His sister sent a postcard with a reproduction of a painting of the Turkish siege of Vienna; despite the French Riviera outside his window, Kleiber wrote back grimly, “There's a modern one too, alas!”Footnote 30
Wartime Work in Latin America
Kleiber's respectful biographer falls silent regarding the family's move to the Americas, from 1938 to 1948. But the Berlin archives have more to say. Kleiber's return to Buenos Aires's Teatro Colón was arranged by Josef Goebbels, who worried about the portrayal of German culture on important international stages in countries with significant European “colonies.” Nazi cultural leaders were anxious about representation of German greatness on the global stage, especially regarding competition with their Axis allies, the Italians. Argentina's “colony” of Germans was far smaller than its population of Argentine-Italians, many only a generation removed from their homeland.Footnote 31 As part of a short-lived cultural-relations campaign to woo Latin American elites, during the 1930s the Nazis sponsored a succession of odd bedfellows to take up the baton, design stagings, and train singers for the German seasons at the Teatro Colón.Footnote 32
The first was Fritz Busch, formerly of the Dresden Stadtstheater (Municipal Theater). Busch was dunned out of his Dresden post in March 1933, when local Nazis filled the theater, howling and brawling.Footnote 33 Busch brought to Buenos Aires a set of talented colleagues, including the voice instructor (Korrepetitor) Erich W. Engels and the conductor and composer Robert Kinsky. Both were Jewish, as was Engels's wife, the soprano Lydia Kindermann. They came with Goebbels's blessing and funding; Berlin also sent them backdrops and talented singers.Footnote 34 Busch was also able to bring Carl Ebert, the director at the Berlin Städtische Oper/Deutsches Opernhaus (Municipal Opera).Footnote 35 Busch and Ebert were generally recognized as outstanding talents; rumor had it that Hitler hoped to find a way to keep Busch in Berlin. But both had been denounced as ideologically problematic. Nazis who claimed Ebert's work at the Städtische Oper was “culturally absolutely Bolshevik” and “asocial” wrote that “such a man should never again be placed in a leading role in German culture, and should not have a leading role outside Germany, especially in bringing to life the work of Richard Wagner.”Footnote 36 Ironically, Ebert helped stage many Wagner programs at the Colón.Footnote 37 Then Busch publicly condemned the Nazi regime and returned to European posts safely outside Nazi control, first occasional trips to the Glyndebourne Festival in England, later for permanent posts in Denmark and Sweden.Footnote 38 Ebert left as well.
Kleiber replaced Busch as the head of the Colón's German season in 1936, thanks to Nazi approval and funding, and Kleiber's willingness once again to negotiate with Nazism for the good of his career. The old lie that Kleiber was Jewish reemerged, of particular concern to Nazi decision-makers given the presence of so many Jews and refugees in the Colón's staff and ensemble. The aristocratic Nazi ambassador to Argentina, Edmund von Thermann, a devoted high-culture aficionado, wrote Berlin in alarm about Kleiber's supposed “non-Aryan ancestry.”Footnote 39 Meanwhile, Kleiber expressed through interlocutors his willingness “to behave absolutely correctly toward Germany … there is no reason to expect difficulties.”Footnote 40 Kleiber seems largely to have kept his part of this bargain, although his biographer noted that Kleiber helped Jewish colleagues escape Berlin and Vienna, among them violinist Jascha Horenstein and Berlin theater director Josef Gielen.Footnote 41
The Colón was the closest thing Kleiber had to a permanent home during his wartime exile. Kleiber's biographer recorded him telling Erich Eisner and other colleagues that “‘Our work's got into the woodwork here,’” and joking that when he died, he planned to haunt the huge chandelier in the Colón's auditorium.Footnote 42 Buenos Aires, one of the continent's most Europeanized cities, thanks to significant British, French, and German investment and “colonies,” felt familiar to the Kleibers. (As late as 1941, journalist John Gunther reported that “every Argentine of the upper classes thought of Paris as his spiritual home. I have met Argentinians who never read a book in Spanish until they were 20. Everything had to be French.”Footnote 43) The Kleibers had taken Argentine citizenship even before they fled Europe. In Buenos Aires, they lived alongside many other émigrés and refugees in the tony neighborhood of Belgrano; their farm La Fermata in Alta Gracia, near the city of Córdoba, was close to that of the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla.Footnote 44 Kleiber's children Carlos and Veronica were very interested in the city's literary avant-garde. Carlos attended the salon of María Rosa Olivar, who sat on the editorial board of Sur, Latin America's foremost literary journal during the 1930s.Footnote 45 The Kleibers moved frequently to follow Kleiber's work. Composer and pianist Nicolas Slonimsky, who met Ruth Goodrich Kleiber in Chile, wrote of her that “She is a very energetic type of female, and drives her car over the Andes with the children from Buenos Aires, which I think is a little bit too much.”Footnote 46
Despite the European veneer of Buenos Aires's wealthier neighborhoods, mid-century Latin American elites were often ambivalent about Europeanness. The horror and bloodshed of Europe's Great War had cast doubt on the supposed supremacy of European civilization.Footnote 47 After the war and the Mexican Revolution, Latin Americans entered a new period of regional nationalism, rejecting European or North American tutelage and exploring their own cultures for inspiration. Composers viewed Aztec or Native American cultures as the “ur-American” basis on which to build.Footnote 48 Some recently arrived Europeans encouraged this nationalist shift, for example the German-born musicologist “Francisco” Curt Lange in Montevideo, who wrote of Europe as a “hecatomb,” no longer capable of inspiring or teaching the world. Lange encouraged Latin American musicians and composers to “draw on their own cultural resources.”Footnote 49
Kleiber's world, and his art, thus meant different things to different audiences at different moments. When Latin American elites attended art-music performances, learned instruments, or otherwise demonstrated knowledge of the European musical canon, they were signaling their engagement with what many still understood as a superior, universal artistic tradition. And yet European music could equally stand for a blinkered culture whose best days had passed. During Kleiber's 1931 stint at the Colón, for example, La Prensa's critic sniffed that the German symphonic repertoire needed to be alleviated and modernized by Argentinian pieces and a more eclectic musical selection. The German season's programming, supposedly “based on the [Buenos Aires] German community's tastes,” did not correspond to the needs and aspirations of “a city as new and cosmopolitan as is Buenos Aires.”Footnote 50 Buenos Aires's German colony—and Kleiber—were thus distanced from the needs of a vibrant, energetic Latin America.
Yet Kleiber was still able to draw audiences, and something like his accustomed salary, touring Latin America as a visiting conductor. His concerns seem to have been at least in part related to reputation and fees: a 1939 letter to his wife notes that “I think that I could get plenty to do here [i.e., in Buenos Aires] but I will not in any circumstances go below my normal fee and I don't think they could afford it. Besides, I'm not going to take the jobs away from the Argentinian conductors or from Kinsky, etc …”Footnote 51 Kleiber took on conducting seasons in Chile and Cuba, visiting work in Lima and Mexico City, and shorter dates across the continent, particularly conducting Beethoven cycles. He claimed to dislike it, as he wrote his wife in 1940:
Everything that you've built up—or think you've built up—in a few days or weeks is pulled down on the morning after the last concert and swept away by the cleaning-women. Nothing is left. It's as if a travelling circus had been there: just some holes in the ground, a few heaps of sawdust, and some horse-droppings …Footnote 52
Impermanence notwithstanding, Kleiber adapted quickly to his new circumstances, in part because his work remained relatively unchanged. Kleiber's Latin American musicians loved him as his European musicians had, noting his combination of rigorous musicianship, empathy, and humor. He was often able to professionalize and improve his musicians’ working conditions—an important issue given that many players had to “sell chocolate in the streets or play all night in a night-club to earn anything like a decent living.”Footnote 53 Chilean pianist Rosita Renard recalled affectionately that he would tease her about her habit of counting rhythms quietly to herself in English as she played Mozart. Kleiber, whom she called “Papito (Daddy),” pretended to scold her: “Rosita, I hired you to play the piano, not to sing.”Footnote 54 Kleiber helped the Mexican string player Abel Eisenberg obtain conducting positions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.Footnote 55 His first violinist at the Colón, Carlos Pessina, remembered Kleiber fondly. And in Latin America as in Europe, Kleiber insisted on surprising his audiences with newer and less traditional repertoire. He put Chilean, Peruvian, and Argentinian composers on his programs alongside Beethoven, Weber, and Richard Strauss.
Kleiber's yearly visits to Mexico City between 1941 and 1944 offer a useful encapsulation of his wartime work.Footnote 56 Mexico earned its postwar reputation as a país refugio through its reception of thirty thousand Spanish Republican refugees and a prominent group of German-speaking leftists, including Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Egon Erwin Kisch, Paul Merker, and Lenka Reinerová. But generally speaking, Mexico closed its doors to central Europeans, especially Jews. The total number of German-speakers entering the country between 1937 and 1943 was tiny, ranging from three to five thousand. Of those, relatively few were musicians on whose talent Kleiber might have been able to build.Footnote 57
Kleiber could have used some Landsmänner in Mexico, as he was explicitly barred from his usual guest stint with a national orchestra. Mexico City art music was essentially under the control of the powerful, well-connected composer and conductor Carlos Chávez.Footnote 58 Chávez had helped found the Mexican National Symphony Orchestra; he directed it and controlled hiring and programming. The symphony's previous director, Julián Carrillo, had trained in Leipzig. In contrast, Chávez deprecated music from German-speaking Europe and its practitioners. No non-Mexicans were allowed to play in his orchestra. Over time, Chávez gained control of other musical organizations, such as the initially independent Ópera de México/Ópera Nacional.
Kleiber was generally able to supersede the obstacles Chávez set for him. For example, on Kleiber's first visit in 1941, Chávez threatened to fire any orchestra musicians who played with Kleiber. Kleiber managed to conduct his Beethoven festival at the Palacio de Bellas Artes with an ad hoc orchestra made up of players drawn from the capital's nightclubs and bars, with the help of the Mexico City musicians’ union.Footnote 59 (The union musicians adored Kleiber, naming him their honorary Secretary General when he returned in 1942.)Footnote 60 On his 1942 and 1943 visits, Kleiber conducted the relatively new Mexican national opera companies, staffed at the time by German-speaking refugees such as Carl Alwin and Wilhelm von Wymetal, before Chávez gained control.Footnote 61
As he had done in Europe and on stages elsewhere in Latin America, Kleiber's programming in Mexico combined standards such as Bizet's Carmen and Beethoven's Fidelio with “music that stimulated [the audience's] nerves,” in particular that of tonal modernist composers Manuel Ponce and Silvestre Revueltas. This assuredly did not endear Kleiber to Carlos Chávez, who understood himself and his epigones as sole representatives of the Mexican avant-garde.Footnote 62 As he had championed Alban Berg in Berlin, so he featured Silvestre Revueltas for his 1943 and 1944 performances. Revueltas's sister Rosaura claimed to have approached Kleiber with her brother's work; Kleiber even went so far as to adapt Revueltas's film scores for Redes (Nets, 1934–1935) and Música para charlar (Chit-Chat Music, 1938) into orchestral suites for the concert stage, and premiered them in 1943 and 1944. Kleiber's is now the most commonly played version of this piece.Footnote 63
Another way Kleiber's Mexico visits adumbrated his Latin American work overall is the seemingly random nature of his political engagement. Kleiber agreed to be interviewed for the radio by various German-speaking antifascist organizations, all of them much farther left than his own political inclinations. The first was ARAM, the Acción Republicana Austriaca de México (Austrian Republican Action Group in Mexico), founded by Austrian communists and social democrats with a small admixture of liberals. ARAM's membership held diverse opinions, and their only point of political agreement was that the Habsburgs should be kept out of postwar Austrian politics. Most of ARAM's activities were culturally focused, including Austrian musical evenings, in a setting called the “Café Prater,” serving apple strudel as the Schrammel Trio played.Footnote 64 ARAM also had a half-hour-long Friday afternoon radio program, La Voz de Austria/Der Stimme Österreichs on Radio Gobernación/XEPD, to play Austrian music for the Mexican audience, as a form of refugee cultural relations.
The specifics of ARAM's engagement seem to have mattered little to Kleiber, who accepted positions as honorary president of many Austrian societies across the region in a general antifascist spirit.Footnote 65 Kleiber's sense of eventual postwar politics was vague and apolitical, as his remarks on the Mexico City radio make clear. On January 15, 1943, just before a local soprano sang Johann Strauss's Lieder, Kleiber spoke:
All of you true Austrians should have only one ideal, that the word Austria should be able to mean more than it has in the past, and that out of the Allied victory a new Austria might arise. That should be our goal. I beg you not to concern yourselves unduly with the form our government will take in the future. The time for politicization will happen later. [Now] I greet all our countrymen with a hearty and forthright Grüß Gott. May the Lord protect our little country [sic: Landl].Footnote 66
For another example of Kleiber's undiscerning politics, Kleiber did an interview during that same visit with German communist Paul Merker of the organization Freies Deutschland (Free Germany).Footnote 67 Freies Deutschland was an important antifascist network, supporting an eponymous journal as well as a publishing company, Das Verlag El Libro Libre, and a cultural organization, the Heinrich Heine Klub. Egon Erwin Kisch, Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Alexander Abusch, and Andre Simone were among its most prominent members. Freies Deutschland's journal, mainly in German with a Spanish-language insert intended for Mexican elites, was sold throughout Latin America and shipped to bookstores in South Africa, Australia, China, Sweden, Palestine, Great Britain, India, and the Soviet Union. The journal covered news extensively, drawing on its own correspondents based in London and elsewhere as well as summarizing reports from other journals and radio networks: Aufbau, German-American, Neue Volkszeitung, Atlantic Monthly, the BBC, and Radio Moscow, among others.Footnote 68 The Heinrich-Heine-Klub attracted a regular audience of some two hundred to eight hundred people at its gatherings and was one of the most important centers of German culture and letters in Latin American exile between 1941 and 1946.Footnote 69
In short, Kleiber's Latin American sojourn maintained patterns he had established in Europe. He was sought after as a touring conductor of the first order and was paid handsomely for it. He joined forces with anyone who could help him do his best musical work, whatever their political orientation or general background, from Josef Goebbels to Erich Engel to musicians from Mexico City's bar bands. He accepted honorary chairships of Austrian exile organizations, which he mostly ignored; he did a radio interview with German communists affiliated with Moscow. What mattered, always, was the music, and the faraway dream of a postwar Europe, the details of which could remain comfortably hazy.
War's End: Back to Berlin?
The war had greatly changed the world—but not, it seemed, Kleiber's world. The final ten years of his life covered familiar terrain: offers of work at the world's most prominent stages, arguments with orchestra administrators over fees and programming, efforts to protect beloved musicians and teach singers, circling hopefully between Vienna and Berlin. Now as before, Kleiber indulged in the luxury of willful political blindness, willing to compromise with authoritarians and hurl angry rhetoric at democrats. Very little of it seemed to matter. Each time, Kleiber was able to extricate himself, look for other, better offers, and dream of Vienna.
Offers from outside Latin America were coming Kleiber's way, and to take them, he had to break the lucrative long-term contract he had held in Cuba between 1943 and 1947. The Cuban national symphony orchestra was run
[b]y a Patronato of wealthy amateurs who financed the orchestra and expected, in return, to have the last word in the choice of programmes. The players came, in many cases, from the local police and fire brigade bands, and their instruments were often on temporary loan from the Patronato. The concerts were subscription concerts and the audience came almost entirely from those who could afford to take a whole season's bookings in advance.Footnote 70
But Kleiber had found much to his liking in Cuba. The Patronato paid his exorbitant salary, tolerated the number of rehearsals he demanded, and helped him create a set of conciertos populares for Cubans who could not afford regular season tickets.Footnote 71
In 1947, however, when the Patronato innocently requested that he program more Johann Strauss waltzes, Kleiber suddenly and publicly found himself appalled, conveniently freeing him for work elsewhere. As he left Havana, he indignantly compared the Patronato's actions to Nazi efforts to control his artistic freedom in 1935.Footnote 72 Kleiber landed well, of course: Toscanini had invited him to New York, to serve as the principal guest conductor of Toscanini's NBC Symphony for the 1945–1946 and 1947–1948 seasons. From there he would go to London, while maintaining his busy itinerant schedule across the Atlantic, from Buenos Aires to Florence and other stages. Kleiber evidently underwent an “audition” at the Vienna Philharmonic in 1951; the literature says little about this arrangement, embarrassing to a conductor of his stature, and evidence of his deep unfulfilled desire to return to Vienna.Footnote 73
Kleiber had two main postwar European engagements. The first was in London, as Covent Garden's first guest conductor after the war, chosen personally by intendant David Webster. At least briefly, it seemed possible that Kleiber might stay. Kleiber earned his standard press plaudits in the Daily Mail and elsewhere. His singers and musicians adored him, as usual. His work with soprano Sylvia Fisher as the Marschallin in Strauss's Rosenkavalier helped her become “not only undisputed prima donna but one of the finest singers of the day.” The Covent Garden singers recalled their work with him as “a shared ‘spiritual experience.’” Kleiber was said to be able to handle both his musicians and the dramatic direction of his operas as would a psychologist and teacher.Footnote 74
And yet, as happened more often than not, Kleiber's tenure at Covent Garden quickly became complicated. As conditions of a permanent contract, Kleiber insisted on a staggeringly high salary and total artistic control. “There was a tendency for arguments to be settled with the threat of ‘Well then, I am going back to South America!’—where, apparently, whatever Kleiber had wanted Kleiber got!”Footnote 75 Webster recalled a discussion with Kleiber in which a great smile came over his face: “I don't think I make rows, but maybe it is true to say that where I am rows seem to be!” Brilliance seemed to be where Kleiber was, too: his performances of Berg's Wozzeck in 1952 were so acclaimed that Berg's publisher asked Vienna's leading conductors to travel to Covent Garden, to better understand Berg's work. Still, Covent Garden let Kleiber move on.Footnote 76
Kleiber had kept up his visiting-conductor schedule while at Covent Garden, of course. One of his most frequent occasional destinations had been Berlin—to be specific, and perhaps surprising, East Berlin, where he flirted for years with a new group of authoritarian leaders, hoping to regain “his” Staatsoper on his own terms. Kleiber was not entirely blind to the postwar devastation in both Germanies, to the new circumstances of the Cold War, to the possible consequences of his actions. But certainly no one would praise him for his political acuity. As he had throughout his life, Kleiber continued to see his talent and the primacy of his art as far more significant than any political constellation. Once again, he would be wrong.
Can we excuse Kleiber for his political pliability in the service of art? Certainly, art music—tied so profoundly to German identity since the eighteenth century—was viewed on both sides of the Iron Curtain as tremendously significant.Footnote 77 For Germans traumatized by their wartime experiences, music represented a connection to past cultural glories and an escape from present hardship. As Celia Applegate has noted, “The ‘survival stories’ of twentieth-century Germans have a steady undertone of musical experiences.”Footnote 78
But for the occupying powers, music quickly became a competitive arena of cultural diplomacy. Domestically, the occupiers’ alleged devotion to art music might prove useful as “a public symbol of the occupiers’ intentions and of their commitment to high culture.” Concerts began in the Soviet sector, with the Berlin Philharmonic performing its first postwar concert on May 26, 1945, and a concert amid the rubble in Dresden on June 6. SMAD also began transmitting musical radio programming, initially from Berlin Radio on Masurenallee, and soon thereafter from Goebbels's station, now renamed Radio-Berlin-Tanzorchester. In both East and West, composers—and whenever possible, artists—banned under the Nazis returned to concert stages; pianos were pulled from the husks of buildings.Footnote 79
From a standpoint of international competition, the occupying powers hoped to attract not just previously banned artists but the most prominent among them. Kleiber, like other prewar greats, represented an opportunity: whoever gained him could brag that he had chosen the side that would better support artists, freedom, true Germanness. And, of course, it meant denying the other side that same victory. Kleiber seemed relatively unaware of being a potential pawn in a cultural-relations chess game. Or, rather, he was playing a different game, in which the stakes were neither national nor international but both highly local and universal at the same time—that is, Kleiber was playing for the Staatsoper, and for Europe's musical past.
Old Staatsoper colleagues began writing to the Kleibers in late 1950, inviting them to return to Berlin for a visit—with, of course, the sponsorship of the East German state, which was hoping to borrow from Kleiber's prewar fame and lure him back to his former home. The Staatsoper ensemble was playing nearby in the Admiralspalast on Friedrichstrasse, as the Staatsoper itself had sustained severe bombing damage during the war. The Kleibers came first together, in spring 1951, and then Kleiber returned that June, to direct a celebrated guest performance of Der Rosenkavalier and Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.Footnote 80
But clearly his hopes focused on more than a single performance. The morning after conducting, he picked his way across the battered city square where “his” Berliner Staatsoper had once stood and gazed into its ruins.
Passers-by were intrigued to see a big black motor car draw up in the rubble at a quarter to eight in the morning and a small sturdy figure in blue beret and great overcoat clamber across to the indecipherable trough that had been the orchestra pit. The whole area was, of course, unrecognizable.
Kleiber was not the only person dreaming of a return to the Staatsoper, and greatness, during his visit. In a letter to his wife, he casually described meetings with officials at the highest ranks of East German power: a “minister” (most likely Paul Wandel, Minister for Volksbildung [Popular Enlightenment/Education]), Wilhelm Pieck himself, president of East Germany, and with Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the SED, whom Kleiber referred to as the “vice president,” in a telling display of political nonchalance.
Kleiber's recollection of these meetings from that letter neatly encapsulates his indifference to the political present and his hopes of re-creating the Staatsoper of the past. He wrote:
There's talk of pulling down what's left of the Staatsoper and the Hedwigskirche and building a “Forum” instead. I protested violently against this and in the end I got not only the Minister but also … the President's Staatsekretär to agree with me that the Staatsoper should be rebuilt exactly as der alte Fritz built it. That is really a great victory! And I believe they'll really do it.
His memory of meeting with Pieck and Ulbricht was similarly focused on his own goals of a renewed, not simply rebuilt, Staatsoper. In it, the savvy Moscow communist Wilhelm Pieck is transformed into a kindly old uncle: “Pieck is quite unaffected and might be the chairman of a bowling club. He was full of compliments and said, ‘Perhaps if we could count on you to inaugurate the rebuilt Staatsoper …’ So I said ‘Not perhaps—if you really built it up exactly as it was—then “Quite certainly!”’Footnote 81
But that would be Kleiber's last contact with the unaffected bowling club chairman. Kleiber's trips back and forth to East Berlin, and his contacts with the East German government, were managed mainly by the Stakuko, or the East German Staatliche Komission für Kunstangelegenheiten (State Art Commission), which among other endeavors brought some forty prominent West German musicians and conductors to the East. Kleiber and his wife developed a personal closeness to Maria Rentmeister, their Stakuko handler, who located potential sites for the Kleibers to build a home, worried fondly about their health, and reported diligently to the Ministry of Culture about Kleiber's fears and concerns.Footnote 82
His apprehensions were on full display during a late 1952 concert tour to Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich with some of East Germany's great ensembles, such as the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.Footnote 83 Maria Rentmeister worried that “Kleiber the horse is balking (Das Pferd Kleiber ist scheu geworden),” noting his open criticism of the DDR and his concern about what he perceived as poor working conditions for the musicians he directed. Kleiber believed art in the DDR was overly influenced by politics and that unqualified people were promoted, Rentmeister reported. Kleiber warned her that “it would be a shame and an international scandal were he to have to break a contract” over some unpleasant incident—presumably state interference with the freedom of art—if he took up his Staatsoper baton.Footnote 84
The rest of the world believed Kleiber had already made a decision. A blunt New York Times headline from June 1952 read “KLEIBER CHOOSES REDS.”Footnote 85 But in fact, negotiations were ongoing and were not concluded for at least another year.Footnote 86 Kleiber's most important stipulations, unsurprisingly, centered around the Staatsoper and his own artistic freedom as its director. He insisted that the Staatsoper be exactly reconstructed, on its original site, “just as Frederick the Great … built it.”Footnote 87 Within the Staatsoper, he would brook no political interference: “In musical matters I have the first and the last word.”Footnote 88
This is not to say that Kleiber forgot his own comfort. He asked to be paid in deutsche marks, not in eastern marks; he expected the East Germans to subsidize at least some of his fees when conducting abroad; and he asked for a regular stipend involving, among other things, the ability to easily cross into West Berlin to attend performances there. The Kleibers requested to be lodged in the formerly grand Hotel Adlon until acceptable permanent accommodations were found. Kleiber's son Carlos was granted the opportunity to direct the operetta Gasparone in Potsdam; Kleiber himself personally negotiated the terms, including the monthly salary and the pseudonym under which Carlos would conduct. Maria Rentmeister recalled that Kleiber seemed to want to test his son's talent under somewhat anonymous conditions.Footnote 89 And Kleiber's Stakuko handlers worked to obtain musical scores for him from elsewhere in the Eastern bloc—a copy of a Mozart trio from Leningrad, original scores of Freischutz and Figaro from Poland.Footnote 90
Meanwhile, Kleiber continued to raise questions of artistic freedom and political pressure in his correspondence with East German officials. In January 1953, for example, he worried that politics and propaganda might preempt reine Kunstausübung in the 1950s as they had in 1935; he also mentioned the many musicians he had met who lived in difficult material conditions, or in ongoing fear.Footnote 91 The Kleibers’ correspondence with Berlin contains many clippings from West German newspapers, detailing efforts to censor supposedly “decadent” works in the DDR, such as Richard Strauss's Salome. “Are these reports true?” Ruth Kleiber inquired, in careful handwriting.Footnote 92 In July 1953, Kleiber mentioned conditions in Berlin during the infamous June strikes and their subsequent repression.Footnote 93 In December, he reminded the Stakuko bureaucrats that until the “cultural-artistic borders between East and West … are finally down” it would be impossible to have access to a high-quality ensemble of artists or to guarantee that neither East nor West would threaten absolute artistic freedom. More specifically, he warned that in his Staatsoper, “It would be utterly unthinkable to see any changes made to the libretto of an opera that implicitly changed the sources of a composer's inspiration.”Footnote 94
Throughout 1954, Kleiber waged similar preemptive battles with Max Burghardt, the Staatsoper's Intendant. He asked Burghardt to avoid politics in the new Staatsoper: “I hope you will allow to reemerge … the old spirit of ‘desiring to make only Art’ …”Footnote 95 He noted that interfering with his artistic vision would of course cause him to “step back”—that is, to quit:
The nowadays unfortunately so “modern” mania for “Stylization” is especially … inappropriate here! And I cannot do Weber music like that. … if the entire “Freischutz-Matter” becomes suddenly difficult and due to an overly hurried preparation no truly artistic result can be guaranteed, I would rather step back. In that case it is really not my fault!Footnote 96
On a different topic, Kleiber struck a similar note insisting on his artistic autonomy—in this case on the primacy of German music—although he left the door open to music that would please the Soviets:
I am absolutely of the opinion that this newly reconstructed German Staatsoper above all must open with works by the four great German classics—Beethoven, Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner. That must be the first set of works (Meister) to resound there. And a Weber and a Richard Strauss should also be prepared. … After the four German classics, Italian, Russian, French operas can [be programmed]—and I comment, by the way, that it would interest me very much to conduct “Khowantschina” with a Russian director and stage designer!Footnote 97
In late 1954, the Kleibers finally came to settle in East Berlin. The Staatsoper's planned opening was scheduled for January 1955. Both Kleiber and the DDR administrators remained wary of one another for different reasons; both sides played for different stakes. The DDR cultural administrators cautioned one another as the Kleibers arrived: “I do not need to emphasize that this is of great importance for the entire artistic situation in Berlin and in the DDR …”Footnote 98 Kleiber, by contrast, remained concerned about artistic freedom, which he understood both as a personal concern and as a larger universal moral value. And yet while Kleiber hoped to return to the Staatsoper's podium, on the other hand, the East Germans had rebuilt the Staatsoper in its original form. His biographer summarized the situation with “It was a gamble, of course: but one in which the other side's stake (the rebuilding of the theater) would remain on the board even if he himself lost the game.”Footnote 99
Almost immediately, however, Kleiber found himself embroiled in a conflict the local newspapers termed the Sängerkrieg, or Singers’ War. Max Burghardt, Kleiber's Intendant, had hired away important singers from Hamburg, Vienna, and the Städtische Oper (City Opera) in West Berlin, such as the Heldenbariton Josef Herrmann. Partly in response, the Städtische Oper refused to partner with Kleiber and the Staatsoper in creating productions or sharing singers. The West Berliners had other fears as well, specifically that the Staatsoper could pay singers more, charge less for tickets, and thus compete favorably for ensemble quality and audience members in a devastated city and country.Footnote 100
The problems were also political; both East and West wanted singers to choose a side. The West Berlin Senate passed a resolution barring performers who had played in the East from appearing in West Berlin.Footnote 101 In a press conference, West Berlin senator Joachim Tiburtius warned would-be employees of the Staatsoper that “singers are also citizens”—that is, the glories of art would not trump Berlin's political circumstances and the commitments they demanded.Footnote 102 Burghardt felt a different sort of pressure at the Staatsoper, given that Berlin could provide East Germans with a convenient exit point. He recalled that singers from Leipzig, Weimar, or Dresden put emotional pressure on Burghardt to hire them. “A DDR singer … threatened suicide if I blocked his way to Berlin.”Footnote 103
Kleiber's intervention in this conflict once again demonstrates his political obtuseness. He visited the Städtische Oper himself to argue for openness and failed. Carl Ebert, the head of the Städtische Oper, was bound to obey the dictates of the West Berlin Senate for his funding. Kleiber became irate, accusing the West Berliners of echoing Nazi efforts to control art, and positing East Germany as the supposed protector of freedom:
The Staatsoper authorities … were delighted that I should build, in some degree, a music-bridge between east and west. From which side, therefore, can there be said to be “political interference in art”? It is grotesque that I should have to write to you in the same terms that I used to Herr Goering in 1935 and say that “Music is meant for one and all, like sunshine and fresh air” and that “I shall make music wheresoever I am allowed a free choice of programme and conditions in which serious work can be done.”Footnote 104
Soon Kleiber's bombast and the Singers’ War faded. By early 1955, Ebert had lured back some of his singers to the Städtische Oper. Tiberius's mandate that artists had to choose a side of the Iron Curtain quietly became standard. At the Staatsoper, Max Burghardt and Johannes Becher, DDR minister of culture, bragged that singers banned by the West were actually seeking the “greater artistic possibilities” available in the East.Footnote 105
Only a few months later, another problem arose. Kleiber had insisted as a condition of his return that the Staatsoper be rebuilt in absolutely identical form, including the gilded quotation by Frederick the Great over the entrance to the building: Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis (from Frederick the Great, for Apollo and the Muses).Footnote 106 But in late winter 1955, the DDR leadership suddenly ungilded the quotation, and Kleiber exploded. Cultural Minister Johannes Becher invited Kleiber for coffee, cognac, and complaint. Burghardt reported that after the meeting Kleiber had seemed to thaw and to have been charmed by Becher's humor. “The Frederick inscription was no longer mentioned.”Footnote 107 The DDR cultural bureaucrats assumed a return to business as usual and continued their work on Kleiber's behalf, for example, writing to the head of the Plauen City Theater to request they hire Kleiber's son Carlos.Footnote 108
But the thaw and charm were temporary. From a safe distance, Kleiber tendered his resignation in March 1955. Writing from Cologne, and once again drawing on a comparison to Nazism, Kleiber explained that the matter of the Staatsoper's inscription symbolized a much larger set of problems: the DDR's lack of honesty, predictability, and commitment to artistic freedom.
I cannot see why this 200-year-old inscription, which was newly gilded only a few months ago, should not have been condemned years ago, if at all—at the time, in fact, when my conditions were accepted and it was agreed that the house would be rebuilt exactly as der alte Fritz gave it to the German nation … This incident—following, as it does, upon other notorious incidents of recent months—is for me a sign, sad but sure, that, as in 1934, politics and propaganda have made their way into this temple … I have had to acknowledge that the spirit of the old theater cannot reign in the new building.Footnote 109
When Max Burghardt offered to meet with Kleiber, hoping to persuade him to return, Kleiber self-deprecatingly acknowledged that his artistic absolutism meant “I would be for the government an … ‘enfant terrible’ which would become unbearable sooner or later for both sides.”Footnote 110
Kleiber was, in fact, criticized from—and himself criticized—both sides. East German voices accused Kleiber of singlehandedly damaging the possibilities of East and West German reconciliation.Footnote 111 In his memoir, Max Burghardt called Kleiber “rootless”—using language associated with antisemitism, though not quite echoing the old allegation that Kleiber was Jewish—and implied that Kleiber's wartime emigration had led him to a retrograde position of historical ignorance. “Not an enemy,” Burghardt concluded, “rather a friend [deep in] error.”Footnote 112
Observers expected Kleiber to take work in West Berlin, but Kleiber haughtily refused, making yet another unforced political error: “I hereby declare that I shall not raise my baton in west Berlin while the present authorities remain in control. These people showed themselves small-minded, chauvinistic, and opposed to any understanding when I tried to build a musical bridge between east and west. My ‘case’ is unsuited to, and useless for, political propaganda of any kind in either direction.”Footnote 113
Kleiber escaped any consequences from this second Berlin episode. In fact, other offers had come his way, and the East Germans muttered grimly among themselves that the fuss about the gilded inscription had simply been a pretext for him to accept them. Kleiber was planning to take the Vienna Philharmonic on a North American concert tour for the fall of 1956. He made some marvelous recordings with Decca, including one of Strauss's Rosenkavalier in Vienna 1954, and was in discussions to record Beethoven's Fidelio and Missa solemnis with them. He was also in negotiations about conducting Parsifal with Maria Callas at La Scala, and he led concerts in Stuttgart and Cologne.Footnote 114
On January 27, 1956, Mozart's two-hundredth birthday, Kleiber was found dead in the bathtub of his Zürich hotel suite. He most likely died of a heart attack, despite later rumors that both Kleiber and his son Carlos took their own lives (Carlos died in 2004). Both Ruth and Erich Kleiber had complained of frequent ill health throughout the 1950s; they wrote Maria Rentmeister often from Swiss sanatoriums, such as the Bircher-Benner sanatorium near Zürich.Footnote 115 The couple's health problems as they aged had not been made easier by Kleiber's demanding postwar performance schedule, involving near-constant travel between Europe, the United States, and Latin America.Footnote 116 Kleiber canceled a string of Latin American concerts in the summer of 1953, citing unspecified health problems.Footnote 117 In October 1954, Burghardt recalled Kleiber mentioning that his heart was “not quite right.”Footnote 118 And Kleiber had apparently been ill at a poorly reviewed, problematic performance of Verdi's Requiem in Vienna in November 1955. Kleiber was buried in the Hönggerberg graveyard outside Zürich, wearing the poncho given him during the war by the players of the Chilean national symphony orchestra.Footnote 119
Conclusion
Kleiber's life and struggles—or his relative lack thereof—allow historians to use the details of a single experience to refine our general understanding of his place and time. His itinerant career, his complex affiliations, and his problematic choices remind us of many things we already knew. That Germanness has never spoken with one voice, or developed in a single place, or meant a single set of things. That even in eras and places we consider in hindsight to have been overwhelmingly political, it is possible for people to pretend politics do not exist, and act accordingly.Footnote 120
Centrally, Kleiber's life was migratory, a pattern he both chose and mourned. The world of art music is inherently mobile, with career incentives encouraging musicians and conductors to move from ensemble to ensemble, develop touring careers, and so on. As Kleiber's fame grew, offers to conduct came from across the world, making him all the more peripatetic. The Kleibers’ lives were thus supra- and subnational at once: they were at home everywhere and nowhere, at upscale tourist towns on the French Riviera and mountain retreats in the Andes and spa hotels in the Swiss Alps. Their lives were, as Michael Geyer has termed it, “crazy quilt” twentieth-century lives, functioning beyond the limitations of the, or a, nation-state.Footnote 121 We might also think of this mobility as something of a Habsburg hangover, given that the world Kleiber had been raised in was lost; the war left him again politically and culturally homeless, despite his Argentine citizenship. Kleiber's lifelong yearning to return to Vienna was just one manifestation of his attachment to a foregone place and time.Footnote 122
Kleiber's affiliation to an idiosyncratic central European identity accompanied his lifelong transnationality. This article's title, “Citizen of the Staatsoper,” describes his sense of civic belonging to an artistic and political world that made theaters like the Staatsoper possible. He found aspects of that world in idealized visions of the Vienna of his childhood, in Weimar Berlin, in the Darmstadt princely court where he had begun his career: he “regard[ed] Frederick the Great, Knobelsdorff, Weber, Spontini, Nicolai, Richard Strauss, Berg, Busoni, Milhaud and himself as part of a continuous historical process called the Berliner Staatsoper, which must be kept in being by whatever means.”Footnote 123 This cultural loyalty to the assemblage of aesthetic and intellectual values associated with bourgeois central Europe was overtly cosmopolitan and universalist, based on the power of music, art, and ideas, expressed in almost any language. We might also read it as a romanticized version of late-Habsburg cultural life, with the work of German-speakers at its heart, but still embracing multiple languages, ethnicities, and eras joined together in art.Footnote 124
Kleiber's life motto may as well have been ars gratia artis: in practice, this led to a problematic willingness to negotiate with authoritarians or to try to ignore them, which might lend itself to being read as collaboration. Kleiber's initial responses to Nazi and East German socialist political pressure were focused far more on what he wanted than on those regimes’ efforts to pressure him or on whether his presence might be used to whitewash over horrors. He was of symbolic and cultural value to these regimes, and he knew it. Kleiber experimented to see whether he might be able to carve out an area of autonomy and aesthetic exploration, placing his own power against the power of these young states, testing whether he might shape them. Too often he simply dismissed the dangerous. Kleiber's biographer wrote of him, “It was, for example, natural to him to regard persons in high office as grotesques and their blandishments as part of a charade which it was easy to enjoy and essential to discount.”Footnote 125 Too often Kleiber condemned the wrong side with outsized rhetoric, likening the Havana orchestral Patronato and the West Berlin Senate to the Nazis.
In these efforts and failures, Kleiber had prestigious company. Arturo Toscanini was famed for his run-ins with Mussolini, but these “mainly had to do with the latter's attempts to infringe on the conductor's prerogatives at La Scala, where Toscanini was ensconced by 1922 as a veritable potentate. It was from the beginning a set of symbolic trifles, like playing the Giovinezza before performances, or displaying the Duce's portrait in the foyer. … the sticking point, it seems, was … that the God would have to render unto the Caesar.”Footnote 126 In 1936, the musicians of the New York Philharmonic—many of whom were Jewish, some of them refugees from Nazism—protested Wilhelm Furtwängler's engagement as a guest conductor. He canceled his New York work with a dodge echoing Kleiber's own phrasing: “Am not politician but exponent of German music which belongs to all humanity … propose postpone my season … until … public realizes that politics and music are apart.”Footnote 127
Kleiber's tin ear for politics is reminiscent of insights about “national indifference” that have helped historians rewrite central European history over the past decade.Footnote 128 Tara Zahra and others have demonstrated that the majority of people ignore politics until they are forced to confront them by a centralizing state. Although artists and intellectuals have long been seen as the exception to this rule, Kleiber and his colleagues illustrate the difficulty of generalization—and the professional fact that musicians shift status and worlds, both artists and technicians, often blind to anything outside their chosen sphere. Bronislaw Mitman, the Warsaw-born concertmaster of Peru's National Symphony Orchestra, was infamous for his casual response to visiting Machu Picchu, then as now regarded as one of the world's greatest cultural heritage sites: he gazed on it and said in Yiddish: “Nu? Alte Steine (So what? Old stones).”Footnote 129 Not all artists are sensitive to art other than their own.
The final lesson from Kleiber's microhistory is the striking consistency of his career and concerns over the course of two world wars and three continents. The standard chronology of the twentieth century understands both world wars as sharp ruptures with the prewar eras. The literature of exile focuses on the distances, both geographical and cultural, between Europe and the Americas. Habsburg Vienna, Weimar Berlin, mid-century Buenos Aires, and early Cold War East Berlin are drawn as utterly distinct. Yet supported by his wealth, connections, and prestige, Kleiber's life and work in fact changed relatively little from Darmstadt to Berlin to Mexico City. Kleiber's wartime work in Latin America echoed almost exactly his European tasks and habits. Everywhere, he shaped and taught ensembles, mentored individual musicians, programmed newer music (whether Janáček or Revueltas) alongside “classics,” worked to shift audience expectations, insisted on the same exaggerated number of rehearsals, and picked fights with administrators. His story highlights the connectedness and similarity of these seemingly disparate places and historical moments; it illustrates surprising transnational commonality in art music across the world. Celia Applegate has termed this continuity “persistence, not sameness”—but it underscores the surprising steadiness of Kleiber's circumstances.Footnote 130
Kleiber never quite regained his Staatsoper; he believed he had at least brought it back into being. But more than a physical place, the Staatsoper for Kleiber was an eloquent signifier, representing not just the world of elite art music but also a particular German-speaking cultural climate that enabled its creation and sustenance, moving easily from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, led by Kleiber himself, perhaps more a benevolent autocrat than a citizen. Kleiber's life was devoted to the values embodied by the Staatsoper, whether in Santiago, Havana, or Covent Garden. H. Glenn Penny has written of German-speakers in Latin America, “[Theirs] is not only a tale of German history happening elsewhere. It is a tale of simultaneous histories … [and] transnational lives.”Footnote 131 In Kleiber's case, his devotion to Ernste Musik and música erudita, uniting Frederick the Great, Mozart, Alban Berg, and Silvestre Revueltas through his professional and aesthetic idées fixes, translated easily across national borders and an ocean. Despite decades of near-constant movement, we might also argue that Kleiber never really left the Staatsoper—and that his life was devoted to building and rebuilding it, wherever he was.
