Lotte Klemperer

This obituary first appeared in The Independent and is reproduced with the author's permission.

Lotte Klemperer

Lotte Klemperer’s life was one of quiet dignity and self-effacement. Thrust into the limelight as the daughter of her famous father, the conductor Otto Klemperer, she sought no part of it for her own advantage, contenting herself with facilitating his often thorny path through the world. For Jon Tolansky, who played under Klemperer in the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden,

In her almost life-long devotion to her father, both when he was alive and since his death 30 years ago, she was completely concerned with the preservation and protection of the truth about him. In her he had a very remarkable guardian of his spirit. The conductor and musicologist Antony Beaumont put it more strongly: “My personal conviction is that the miracle of Otto Klemperer’s late flowering as an international conductor was largely her achievement”.

At the time of Lotte’s birth, Klemperer was chief conductor in Cologne, soon to move, via Wiesbaden, to take over the Kroll Oper in Berlin, where his anti-Romantic readings of the standard repertoire and eagerness to perform new music soon marked him out as one of the most important figures in German musical life. Her mother, Johanna, née Geissler, wound down a career as an operatic soprano to look after her children.

Both Lotte and her elder brother Werner (later to achieve fame in his own right as the Nazi Colonel Klink in the TV comedy series Hogan’s Heroes) were shielded from their father’s celebrity, as from outside politics: when, after the Nazi take-over in 1933, Klemperer explained to the nine-year-old Lotte that he had to flee the country because he was Jewish, she didn’t know what he meant.

Exile took the Klemperers first to Switzerland and then, in 1934, to the USA, where he was to become principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Epic arguments between her parents, often provoked by her father’s manic-depressive mood-swings, meant that Lotte was forced to grow up fast. One episode in 1941, when her father’s unfettered behaviour made the national headlines, thrust her into the public eye as her mother’s interpreter for a heaving pack of journalists. The pattern of her life was already set.

Otto Klemperer’s illness and the erratic conduct it triggered effectively derailed his career. Work came his way irregularly. Lotte, trying to establish a life of her own in New York, was now being used by both her parents: Otto, hoping to obtain engagements there, relied on her to find accommodation and repeatedly complained that it wasn’t suitable; Johanna’s letters to her daughter charted the difficulties of her marriage – although, with remarkable foresight, she added: “You will come to love him and will be proud and happy to have this man as a father”.

When Klemperer returned to post-War Europe, conducting concerts and opera in Vienna, Stockholm, Strasbourg and elsewhere, Lotte went with him, providing – as far as she could – a diplomatic filter between her fractious father and the outside world. Occasionally, she would try to carve out her own life, living in Paris in the late 1940s, while he took up a position in Budapest; her visits there stimulated her naturally left-wing sympathies, shared with her father. Her anti-capitalist sympathies endured: four decades later she was delighted when the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to offer the promise of a less authoritarian socialism.

Klemperer’s career was again on the ascendant when, in November 1956, his wife died. Lotte, who had already been acting as secretary, negotiator and administrator, now found even less time for herself – though she insisted it was no sacrifice: she loved working with her father, she said, and would have found any other job much more boring. Recordings and concerts, especially with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, underlined her father’s stature as one of the greatest living musicians, but it was Lotte who fielded the phone calls, the journalists, the promoters, the hangers-on. It was she who was backstage after performances and in the studio for recording sessions, she who was a nurse when he needed medication or assistance – and he was frequently ill.

Their interaction was often touching – Lotte was perhaps the only person in the musical world not in awe of her father, and she could be just as quick-witted as he. Gareth Morris, the principal flute and chairman of the Philharmonia during many of the Klemperer years, remembered one nimble rejoinder:

We were making a recording of the Schumann Concerto with [the Hungarian pianist] Annie Fischer [an old friend of Klemperer’s]. I went round to listen to it in the listening room at Abbey Road. Klemperer said to Annie Fischer, who was sitting there: “The trouble is, you are too chaste”. Lotte ran her fingers down the back of his head and said: “And that’s more than we can say for you, father”. When Klemperer died, on 6 July 1973, Lotte became the guardian of his legacy, keeping a discreet but firm eye on anything to do with him. Where she felt the interest was sincerely motivated, she could be extraordinarily helpful. When I contacted her to suggest an anthology of her father’s writings, she did everything she could to make Klemperer on Music a reality – but insisted on a subtitle to explain that his essays and obiter scripta weren’t very important: we settled on Shavings from a Musician’s Workbench. Antony Beaumont, too, discovered this side of her character:

A footnote sparked off our friendship. In my edition of Busoni letters I had written something about her father that wasn’t quite right. She wrote to correct me. The tone of her letter betrayed not a hint of irritation; on the contrary, it was polite, helpful, witty. In addition to those qualities I soon learnt to marvel at her generosity, humility and sense of purpose. … Many children of the famous are brought up, even if they lack all talent, to bask in the family glory. Lotte was quite the opposite: she knew it was her duty to guard the monument, but saw herself as no more than a supporting plinth. But she didn’t feel at all put upon by her duties as custodian and continued to enjoy life enormously. She had, especially, a ready sense of humour and could on occasion laugh until she wept.

Although her father’s recordings brought her a comfortable income, she continued to live frugally in a small Zurich flat. She often travelled to hear performances by musician friends. And she also turned her attention to her mother’s career, writing Die Personalakten der Johanna Geissler (“The Personal Documents of Johanna Geissler”) in the early 1980s, meticulously retracing her mother’s footsteps in the first decades of the century, and assembling an account of her life in facsimile documentation (an English edition is in preparation). Her researches, she said, opened “a whole new world to me. They took me to several German towns, to registries and public record offices, town archives, municipal and opera libraries”.

Jon Tolansky saw parallels between father and daughter:

Like him, she was disarmingly direct, unfalteringly honest and penetratingly alert. The slightest whiff of pretence or evasion in the air immediately drew bone-dry wit – or bitingly sardonic disdain. She also shared the great conductor’s simple humility. Like him, her close friends were the only persons she addressed by their first names, but to others she was never aloof or grand. She just had no time for the false informality of our present age and firmly kept her methods of professional and personal communications apart. This and her relentless pursuit of the truth gave her a formidable air, but I found her a warm and generous person, capable of true compassion without a trace of sentimentality. Lotte Klemperer, born Cologne, 1 November 1923; died Zurich, 1 July 2003.

Otto Klemperer - Behind every great conductor By Norman Lebrecht / July 30, 2003

I wonder whether any young woman today would do what Lotte did, and give up her life for the sake of her father and his art. Lotte was the only daughter of Otto Klemperer, the conductor who, more than any other, made Berlin a byword for musical modernism in the 1920s and London a benchmark for orchestral excellence in the 1960s.

He could not have achieved these transformat ions unaided. Klemperer suffered from a severe form of cyclothymic illness which, in manic phases, provoked arrest and disgrace, and in depressive mood, brought him close to self-destruction. Without a responsible relative in constant attendance, Klemperer could not have fulfilled his invaluable musical duties. Even now, 30 years after his death, every British orchestra contains players whose standards were set by Klemperer, and whose eyes glisten at the mention of his name.

The first to look after him was his long-suffering wife, Johanna - long-suffering because when Klemperer was on a high he was beset by satyriasis, recklessly pursuing every woman within arm's reach. Gustav Mahler's daughter, Anna, once found herself chased by him around a dining table. Knowing that he had been close to both her parents, she breathlessly sought to preserve dignity and friendship. "Dr Klemperer," she gasped, "in Bach's B-minor mass, rehearsal figure 48, is that top note F or F-sharp?" Klemperer stopped as if stunned and delivered a magisterial analysis of the work. Music was the only interest that could override his furious compulsions.

Johanna saw him through the glory years at Berlin's Kroll Opera, where he presented popular classics in radical reconstructions, along with new operas by Weill and Janaek, to an audience comprised of factory and office workers. What Klemperer did at the Kroll remains a utopian model for 21st century opera houses. It was, inevitably, anathema to the Nazis.

The family left Germany a month after Hitler seized power. Lotte was nine and a comfort to her father in the bewilderment of exile. "Dr Klemperer," said an orchestral administrator in Los Angeles, "you and I have become such good friends that from now on I'm gonna call you 'Otto'." "You may call," growled Klemperer, "but I vill not come."

In 1939 he underwent surgery for a brain tumour and emerged with one side of his face paralysed, his tongue atrophied and his behaviour even more erratic. Johanna refused to commit him to a mental institution, but Klemperer walked out on her, saying he needed a year's freedom. He went careering around the country with the wife of the Utah Symphony music director, Maurice Abravanel, leaving a trail of unpaid bills. Reported missing on the front page of the New York Times, he was arrested and displayed in the next day's papers behind bars. Released on bail, he faced a mob of reporters, with Lotte acting as mediator and interpreter. She was 17 and had already been thrust into her life's mission.

Most American orchestras, scandalised by Klemperer's conduct, crossed him off their books. After a concert in Los Angeles, he went walkabout and was found beaten up in a gutter. A 1947 tour of Europe was peppered with madcap incidents, winding up in Budapest where Klemperer took charge of the State Opera and Lotte flirted with communism until they were nudged out.

Back in America, he was blacklisted for serving on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and refused a passport extension. In November 1954, he was holed up, flat broke, in a fleapit New York hotel when a young agent, chancing his luck, asked him to conduct a concert in Portland, Oregon. Klemperer balked at travelling 3,000 miles for a single gig, but Lotte and the agent fell "half in love" and she persuaded her father to take the date. It marked a turning point in post-war musical destiny.

In Portland, Klemperer ripped an epochal Beethoven Seventh out of the unbelieving fingers of provincial musicians, most of whom had never played it before. The agent, Ronald Wilford, made his name overnight and went on to become the mightiest commercial force in musical America. Klemperer was given a passport and flew to London, where the producer Walter Legge wanted him to conduct the Philharmonia, EMI's recording band.

In a city awash with orchestras-that played just about as well as required and seldom better, Klemperer fired the Philharmonia with an unEnglish excess of aspiration and self-belief. He conceived each work as a structural integrity, revealing its contours from the opening bars and giving musicians and listeners alike an extraordinary confidence in their comprehension of the work. Every concert seemed to have been programmed as an act of human necessity. At the end of his inaugural Beethoven cycle, the jubilation was so exuberant that the London County Council commissioned a bust of Klemperer from Jacob Epstein for the Royal Festival Hall, where it stands to this day.

He continued to court disaster, suffering near-fatal burns when his pipe caught fire in bed and he tried to extinguish it with a whisky flask. In the public eye he was brutally forthright, never more so than on John Freeman's Face To Face television programme. With London musicians he was alternately rough-tongued and paternal, handing out cigarettes to the ones who pleased him. When Legge disbanded the Philharmonia in 1964, Klemperer gave his allegiance to the players, investing them with his own rugged independence and securing the orchestra's survival.

None of this could have come about without Lotte's devotion. Her tongue could be as rough as his when dealing with the fixers of the record industry, but she had the charm and wit to ease most vicissitudes, never presuming to control his life. One morning, bringing the old man his breakfast tray, she found him in bed with a young woman. "This is my daughter, Lotte," grunted Klemperer by way of introduction, "and you - what did you say your name was?"

To feminists, Lotte's must appear a wasted life, a voluntary form of child sacrifice that postmodern times have made redundant. She died this month, aged 79, at her home outside Zurich, unknown beyond the backstage of concert halls and with few tributes to mark her passing.

Intellectual, attractive and formidably capable, Lotte could have made a very different life for herself. When I asked once whether she had ever considered it, she politely ignored my impertinence.

She had made a calculated career choice to be her father's helper, a role that was no less valid in her eyes than the heady ascent of women politicians, artists and CEOs. In 1954, Lotte wrote that her parents' plight had "made me resentful, furious and ... ambitious". By facilitating her father's fulfilment, her achievement will resonate for ever on record and in our concert life. The Philharmonia will soon announce a musical tribute in memory of Lotte Klemperer.