E-Mail This Article to a Friend Carlos Kleiber 1930-2004 BY DAVID WEININGER

Had Carlos Kleiber never existed, someone would undoubtedly have had to invent him. One of the most acclaimed conductors of his time, Kleiber, who died on July 13 at the age of 74, built his reputation on the basis of a handful of performances of a startlingly small repertoire. Rumors swirled about where the reclusive maestro might make the next of his infrequent appearances. Some of his publicity photos showed an uncanny resemblance to Nosferatu. If "brilliant" was the word that cropped up most often in his obituaries, "eccentric" was probably a close second. The public didn’t even learn of his death until a week after the fact.

Today’s superstar conductor usually heads a major orchestra and/or opera house and makes numerous guest conducting visits throughout the season, with some recordings thrown in. His annual activities cover wide swaths of territory both musical and geographical. Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, James Levine — all were or are not only great musicians but stars in the classical world.

As a public figure, Kleiber cut hard against this grain. In fact, as a "public figure" he barely existed at all. He never held a permanent post at an orchestra, and stints at opera houses were confined to the early part of his career. His repertoire was smaller than that of any other conductor: a few symphonies each by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and a handful of operas by Verdi, Wagner, Weber, and Richard Strauss made up its bulk. There is exactly one recorded instance of Kleiber’s accompanying a soloist in a concerto (the Dvorák Piano Concerto, with Sviatoslav Richter). He was notorious for canceling concerts at the last minute, sometimes in the midst of rehearsals when his perfectionist standards weren’t being met.

Indeed, the most surprising thing about Kleiber’s conducting career is that he really never had one. He never hired an agent, and he limited his appearances to the few European orchestras with whom he felt comfortable. His American engagements can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Karajan once cracked that Kleiber bothered to conduct concerts only when his freezer was empty. Or, one might add, when he needed some new wheels: in 1996, Audi enticed him to do a concert in a small German town in return for a sports car worth a reported $100,000.

All this would be mere eccentricity were it not for the genius that Kleiber manifested whenever he did conduct. His way with music was invariably exciting but never superficial, and he had an uncanny ability to make even the most familiar works sound revolutionary and new. His recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies were hailed as masterpieces from the moment of their 1976 release, and it can be argued that they have yet to be surpassed. These are precise performances, full of detail and dynamism. Ditto for the Fourth Symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the latter a marvel of subtlety and power. Kleiber was brilliant in Viennese light music, and his two appearances at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Day concert are among the best such occasions preserved on disc.

His operatic efforts were hailed with equal enthusiasm. His Tristan und Isolde ranks with those of Furtwängler and Böhm; his recording of Weber’s Der Freischütz has become the modern standard. His last operatic performance was of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier: Barbara Bonney, who sang the role of Sophie, recalled that when it was over, the principals agreed that "if we all get run over by a bus now, it won’t matter, because we’ve had the greatest opera performance of our entire lives." (The production, from the Vienna State Opera, is available on a Deutsche Grammophon DVD.)

Just a couple of months ago, the German label Orfeo released Kleiber’s only performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a live recording with the Bavarian State Orchestra from 1983. This is no bucolic trip to the country; instead, Kleiber offers another driven reading full of forward momentum, sometimes awkward and rushed, as in the first movement, sometimes dazzlingly fleet, as in the scherzo. The storm is thunderous; the beautifully paced finale sounds natural and idiomatic. It’s not definitive in the way that his other Beethoven is, but like almost everything he did, it’s eminently worth hearing.

There remains the paradox of why someone as passionately hermetic as Kleiber would have chosen to take on music’s most exposed and public role in the first place. Perhaps it was his attempt to emulate his father Erich, himself one of the 20th century’s great conductors. Whatever the reason, Kleiber, having been all but gone for a number of years, is now officially gone, and the music world is left to chew over his strangely brilliant legacy the same way it did when he was alive — from afar.