Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer was born in Breslau, then in German Silesia, in May 1885, to a Jewish family. He studied piano in Frankfurt and conducting in Berlin under Hans Pfitzner, and made his early career as Gustav Mahler’s protégé — Mahler recommended him for his first conducting post at the Deutsches Theater in Prague in 1907. He held opera house posts at Hamburg, Strasbourg, Cologne and Wiesbaden, and was appointed general music director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927, where for four years he led one of the most adventurous opera productions of the late Weimar Republic.

The Nazi takeover in 1933 forced his emigration. He worked at the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1933 to 1939, then with the Budapest Opera, then suffered serious health problems — a brain tumour operated on in 1939 left him partially paralysed, and bipolar disorder shaped much of his later career. From 1954 he was principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, and the EMI recordings produced through the 1950s and 1960s — Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, Bach — established his reputation as one of the great twentieth-century interpreters of the central German repertoire.

Klemperer became a British citizen in 1970. He died in Zurich in July 1973. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his work with the Philharmonia from the 1950s and 1960s.