Eroica

The pleasant tuning-up hum of the Philharmonia Orchestra faded away and a hush fell over London's Royal Festival Hall. A tall, slightly stooped figure in a frock coat emerged from behind a yellow curtain. Feet dragging, he made his way to the podium with the help of a heavy walking stick. As the applause thundered down, the man's solemn, craggy face remained expressionless and unseeing as a blind man's. Otto Klemperer, 72, painfully mounted the podium, planted his feet firmly apart, and gave the downbeat for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was the climactic moment of a current London Beethoven cycle, and once he began to conduct, he was hardly recognizable as the same man who had painfully shuffled toward the center of the stage.

"He doesn't conduct like a conductor," a British composer said of him, "but like a man, and a great one at that." Never stooping to showy mannerisms or podium pyrotechnics, Klemperer kept his semi-paralyzed right hand clenched in a permanent fist and conducted almost entirely with his left, pulling the orchestra as if the musicians were marionettes on a hundred invisible strings. With his left hand shaking, soothing, plucking, dancing, he shaped phrases, tossed cues, whipped his men to new intensities. What he did above all was to keep an inexorable grip on the tempo and rhythm, and, never aiming at stunts, he tried to speak with Beethoven's voice. He succeeded perhaps better than any other living conductor.

"Dangerous & Insane." The London concerts marked the peak of a remarkable comeback in a notable--and notably erratic--career. In 1932, a year before

Hitler drove him out of Germany because he was a Jew, Otto Klemperer fell over backwards when a railing gave way during a rehearsal, striking his head at the base of the skull. For six years he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but a brain tumor developed and an operation in 1939 left him paralyzed on his right side.

In 1941 he went for a rest to a sanitarium in Rye, N.Y. and, after staying overnight, left without notice. A widely publicized nine-state alarm went out for him as "dangerous and insane." Klemperer spent his life savings to hire a 70-piece orchestra and Carnegie Hall to prove that he was not. Though the concert went well, for years he was unable to get a regular conducting job. In 1947 he was invited to lead the Budapest State Opera and Philharmonic. Some musicians thought he was in a class with Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Furtwangler, but his illness had left him eccentric. The first time he conducted at the opera house he wore high leather boots, took them off in the middle of the performance. During rehearsal, he became so enraged at a violinist that he grabbed the man's violin and smashed it over his head. Nightly, at the city's cafes, he scolded waiters, flirted with local beauties and pounded out jazz on the cafe piano.

Remote & Austere. He quit Budapest in 1950. Emaciated, half-paralyzed, speaking with a slur, Klemperer kept hunting for occasional conducting jobs. In 1951, in Canada, he fell again and broke his left thigh bone. Hobbling about on crutches, he still had the will to conduct but not the strength to stand up while doing it. Sitting on the podium before orchestras, he showed his old relentless temperament. One day, while conducting Don Giovanni in Cologne, he was so moved at the crash of trombone chords announcing the arrival of the statue for dinner with the Don that Klemperer spontaneously stood up and once again began conducting from his feet. He does not use a baton, and when a musician once complained about it, Klemperer shouted, "I cannot hold a baton. Nor could you if you had had a brain tumor."

How Klemperer feels about his new success, few people know. He lives in a London hotel suite, receives no visitors, is cared for by his daughter Lotte, and reads the Bible before going to bed each night. A remote and austere figure, he has achieved a unique position in the music world. His trials parallel those experienced by the composer of the "Eroica." Beethoven proved that not even deafness could keep him from composing. Otto Klemperer has proved that not even paralysis can keep him from the podium.

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