Otto Klemperer

The family name had originally been Klopper, but was changed to Klemperer in 1787 in response to a decree by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II aimed at assimilating Jews into Christian society.

Nathan Klemperer was originally from Josefov, the ghetto in the Bohemian city of Prague; Ida was from a more prosperous Jewish family in Hamburg.

Both parents were musical: Nathan sang and Ida played the piano.

At age four, Klemperer and his family moved from Breslau to Hamburg, where Nathan earned a modest living in commercial posts and his wife gave piano lessons.

It was decided quite early in Klemperer's life that he would become a professional musician, and when he was about five he started piano lessons with his mother.

At the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt he studied the piano with James Kwast and theory with Ivan Knorr.

Kwast moved to Berlin, first to the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and then to the Stern Conservatory.

Klemperer followed him at each move, and later credited him with the whole basis of his musical development.

Among Klemperer's other teachers was Hans Pfitzner, with whom he studied composition and conducting.

Otto Nossan Klemperer (14 May 1885 – 6 July 1973) was a German conductor and composer, originally based in Germany, and then the United States, Hungary and finally, Great Britain.

He began his career as an opera conductor, but he was later better known as a conductor of symphonic music.

Otto Nossan Klemperer was born on 14 May 1885 in Breslau, Province of Silesia, in what was then the Imperial German state of Prussia; the city is now Wrocław, Poland.

He was the second child and only son of Nathan Klemperer and his wife Ida, née Nathan.

In 1905, Klemperer met Gustav Mahler at a rehearsal of the latter's Second Symphony in Berlin.

Oskar Fried conducted, and Klemperer was given charge of the off-stage orchestra.

In the interim he made his public debut as a conductor in May 1906, taking over from Fried after the first night of the fifty-performance run of Max Reinhardt's production of Orpheus in the Underworld at the New Theatre, Berlin.

Mahler wrote a short testimonial, recommending Klemperer, on a small card which Klemperer kept for the rest of his life.

A protégé of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, from 1907 Klemperer was appointed to a succession of increasingly senior conductorships in opera houses in and around Germany.

He later made a piano arrangement (now lost) of the symphony, which he played to the composer in 1907 when visiting Vienna.

On the strength of Mahler's endorsement, Klemperer was appointed chorus master and assistant conductor at the New German Theatre in Prague in 1907.

From Prague, Klemperer moved to be assistant conductor at the Hamburg State Opera (1910–1912), where the sopranos Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann made their joint débuts under his direction.

His first chief conductorship was at Barmen (1912–1913), after which he moved to the much larger Strasbourg Opera (1914–1917) as deputy to Pfitzner.

From 1917 to 1924 he was chief conductor of the Cologne Opera.

During his Cologne years he married Johanna Geisler, a singer in the opera company, in 1919.

She was a Christian, and he had converted from Judaism.

Between 1929 and 1931 he was director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, where he presented new works and avant-garde productions of classics.

In the late 1930s Klemperer became ill with a brain tumour.

An operation to remove it was successful, but left him lame and partly paralysed on his right side.

Throughout his life he had bipolar disorder, and after the operation he went through an intense manic phase of the illness and then a long spell of severe depression.

He was from a Jewish family, and the rise of the Nazis caused him to leave Germany in 1933.

Shortly afterwards he was appointed chief conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and guest-conducted other American orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and later the Pittsburgh Symphony, which he reorganised as a permanent ensemble.

His career was seriously disrupted and did not fully recover until the mid-1940s.

He served as the musical director of the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest from 1947 to 1950.

Klemperer's later career centred on London.

In 1951 he began an association with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

He remained a practising Roman Catholic until 1967, when he left the faith and returned to Judaism.

The couple had two children: Werner, who became an actor, and Lotte, who became her father's assistant and eventually, his caregiver.

Johanna continued her operatic career, sometimes in performances conducted by her husband.

By that time better known for his readings of the core German symphonic repertoire than for experimental modern music, he gave concerts and made almost 200 recordings with the Philharmonia and its successor, the New Philharmonia, until his retirement in 1972.

His approach to Mozart was not universally liked, being thought of by some as heavy, but he became widely considered the most authoritative interpreter of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.