Carlos Kleiber

Snapshot

The most revered conductor of the 20th century began his Salzburg life as a boy in a Mondsee guesthouse, listening to his exiled father rehearse. He came back as a conductor, worked at the Landestheater under a false name, and eventually conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in performances that musicians still speak of in hushed tones.

The Story

Carlos Kleiber’s Salzburg connection begins before his conducting career. In early 1935, when he was four years old, his father Erich Kleiber resigned from his post at the Berlin Staatsoper in protest at Nazi cultural control and moved the family to Mondsee, the lake town just east of Salzburg. The boy grew up hearing his father’s rehearsals and the soundscape of the Salzkammergut, before the family moved on to South America.

He returned to Salzburg in February 1959, conducting Smetana’s Die verkaufte Braut at the Landestheater under the pseudonym Karl Keller. The choice of pseudonym was deliberate: his father Erich was already a legend, and Carlos wanted to establish himself without the shadow. He worked at the Salzburg Stadttheater through 1964, programming La Boheme, baroque chamber works, and Czech repertoire in a house that seated 800, where every nuance was audible.

What followed at the Salzburg Festival and with the Vienna Philharmonic was something that defies ordinary description. He conducted perhaps 96 operas and concerts in his entire career, a total that many working conductors exceed in a single year. What he chose to conduct, he performed with an incandescence and precision that left orchestras stunned. His recordings of the Beethoven Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic are the reference recordings. His work on Strauss’s Rosenkavalier and Der Freischutz are treated as definitive by conductors and musicians who followed him. He died in Slovenia in 2004, having conducted nothing for the final years of his life. Musicians who worked with him consider him the greatest conductor who ever lived.