Josef Krips

After the end of World War II, Austrian conductor Josef Krips ranked among the most active figures in his profession, an ironic gain resulting from his expulsion from his homeland when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. He built an extensive career across two continents, appearing regularly in both symphonic and operatic repertoire.

At the Vienna Academy he trained under Felix Weingartner, who later became permanent conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, and from 1921 to 1924 he worked as Weingartner’s assistant at the Vienna Volksoper. Krips subsequently directed ensembles in several cities before receiving simultaneous appointments in 1933 as resident conductor of the Vienna State Opera and as a professor at the Vienna Academy. He retained both positions for three years, until the March 1938 annexation forced him to depart Austria. He settled briefly in Yugoslavia, where he led the Belgrade Opera and the Belgrade Philharmonic for one season until the outbreak of war interrupted his musical activities.

Once the Allies prevailed in 1945, Krips returned to Vienna and conducted the State Opera at its reopening as well as the Vienna Philharmonic; the following year he also appeared at the reopened Salzburg Festival in a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Because many of his colleagues who had worked under the Nazi regime remained barred from public performance until 1947, Krips suddenly became one of Austria’s most sought-after conductors. He further led the State Opera and the Philharmonic on their first postwar tours. Between 1950 and 1954 he served as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and in 1954 he accepted his initial American post as principal conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1963, the same year he made his Covent Garden debut leading Don Giovanni, he became principal conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, remaining in that role until 1970. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1966 and joined the roster of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, in 1970.

Krips’s prominence in the postwar musical scene rendered him one of the best-known European conductors on both sides of the Atlantic. His cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra, originally issued on the budget Everest label, enjoyed lasting popularity among students and first-time listeners; those performances have recently reappeared on compact disc in remastered form from Omega Records. He also produced several distinguished opera recordings for major companies, among them a Don Giovanni for London and, for EMI, a version of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio featuring Anneliese Rothenberger, Lucia Popp, Gottlob Frick, and the Vienna Philharmonic, still regarded as one of the most appealing accounts of the work.