Erich Kleiber

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Erich Kleiber ranked among Austria’s most esteemed conductors, admired for exact, dynamic, and elegantly proportioned readings of core symphonic and operatic literature. He received a standard academic schooling and began violin lessons in childhood, attending concerts from an early age that featured legendary musicians such as Gustav Mahler. In 1908 he enrolled at the university in Prague to pursue philosophy and art history while simultaneously entering the Prague Conservatory for musical training; there he earned a prize in 1911 for a symphonic poem.

Prior to completing his studies he secured an entry-level post typical for aspiring conductors, serving as chorus master at Prague’s German Theater beginning in 1911. From 1912 to 1919 he held a staff conducting position at the Court Theater in Darmstadt. His career followed a conventional trajectory through appointments in Barmen-Elberfeld, Düsseldorf, and Mannheim, where he arrived in 1922. Guest engagements included a striking 1922 Berlin performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio that led, three days later, to his appointment as General Music Director of the Berlin State Opera.

While leading that institution he maintained rigorous standards, recruited many of the era’s foremost singers, introduced production reforms, and presented numerous new operas to Berlin audiences. His staging of Janáček’s Jenůfa helped establish the composer’s international reputation beyond Czechoslovakia, and his premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, prepared over 137 rehearsals, proved a major success. He also introduced works by Milhaud, Schreker, and Krenek.

Extensive guest conducting took him to New York for his debut in 1930, the same year his son Carlos Kleiber—who later achieved worldwide renown as a conductor—was born. Following the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, Minister of Culture Joseph Goebbels prohibited music the regime classified as “Entartete”; Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu fell under this ban. Kleiber resigned publicly from the State Opera in protest and gave a farewell concert on 4 December 1934 that featured a suite drawn from the still-incomplete score, earning enthusiastic acclaim.

He departed Germany immediately afterward and remained absent until 1951. Settling in Buenos Aires, where earlier tours had been warmly received and where his contemporary Fritz Busch had already found refuge after leaving Germany in 1933, Kleiber conducted regularly at the Teatro Colón, assuming responsibility for its German repertory from 1937 to 1949. From this base he appeared in Santiago, Mexico City, Havana, and Montevideo, contributing to the development of local orchestras.

His first London Symphony Orchestra engagement occurred in 1935; in 1938 he led a celebrated London production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with Lotte Lehmann. He continued performing throughout non-German Europe until the outbreak of World War II, after which his activities were restricted to the Americas. Widely regarded as a preeminent interpreter of Mozart, Beethoven, and Richard Strauss—especially Der Rosenkavalier—he led only a single production in his native Vienna, a 1951 Rosenkavalier. Political circumstances and the war also postponed his Italian debut until the 1951 Maggio Musicale in Florence, where he conducted Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes starring Maria Callas and gave the first performance of Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice since the composer’s lifetime.

Rehearsals reflected his near-obsessive pursuit of precision; he rejected sentimentality and derived his interpretations from thorough analysis rather than inherited performance conventions. In 1954 he accepted the offer to resume leadership of the Berlin State Opera, now located in East Berlin, and the appointment was announced. Arbitrary political interventions by the Soviet-influenced East German authorities prompted his resignation on 16 March 1956, before he assumed the post. He died later that year, leaving a legacy of vivid recordings that include Der Rosenkavalier, several Beethoven symphonies, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.