Carlos Kleiber: Traces to Nowhere Blu-ray Review
The greatest conductor you may never have heard of.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 12, 2012
If you were asked to name the greatest conductor of all time, chances are, depending on your age and classical
music background, you'd have a wealth of likely suspects from whom to make your choice. Names like Arturo Toscanini,
Bruno Walter, Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, Fritz Reiner, Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Boulez, Seiji
Ozawa, Wilhelm Furtwangler and countless others could each be considered at the very least eligible for the title. But
Carlos Kleiber? Kleiber was born in Berlin in 1930, the son of conductor Erich Kleiber, a forward thinking man who
conducted the premiere of Alban Berg's
Wozzeck, but who resigned from the Berlin Opera in protest when the
Nazis decried Berg's music as "degenerate". The elder Kleiber then canceled his contract with La Scala when Mussolini
started following in Hitler's footsteps and became more openly and virulently anti-Semitic. This despite the fact that the
Kleibers were
not Jewish, and were in fact Christian. In the somewhat ironic department, Erich Kleiber decided he
wanted to get out of the roiling storm that was then Europe, and made a move across the Atlantic Ocean to a country that
would become famous in post-World War II history for its proclivities toward hiding former Nazis, Argentina.
Young Carlos, actually originally named Karl but who Latinized his name upon arriving in Buenos Aires, therefore had a
particularly international upbringing, something no doubt aided due to the fact that his mother was an American.
Carlos'
musical talents were on display at an early age, allegedly much to the dismay of his father, who preferred that his son
attempt to forge a career in something less stressful than a music career. Kleiber
fils' career was relatively
minor
in terms of actual numbers of performances, and he also became something of an anti-
cause célèbre due to his
refusal to give interviews, and so it came as something of a shock last year when the erudite
BBC Music
Magazine
named Kleiber the greatest conductor of all time. What is especially noteworthy (sorry) about the appellation is that it
was bestowed not by know it all editors, but by a coterie of high profile musicians (many of them conductors) who were
polled and asked to name their favorite or who had provided them the greatest inspiration. And Kleiber came in first!
Conductors come in all temperaments of course, with some notably more reserved than others, but the most successful
seem to have at least a modicum of gregariousness which ingratiates them to both their orchestras and the paying
public.
Traces to Nowhere makes a cogent case that Carlos Kleiber, reclusive though he was, had an affable
enough
persona (certainly much more than his allegedly extremely gruff father did), though he could also be a
taskmaster. The documentary is full of interviews with a number of people who worked with him, like Placido Domingo,
or those who had a more informal relationship with him (his sister Veronika and his longtime makeup artist), and while
the portrait that is painted may shed a little new light on the subject, there's still an inexplicable enigma at the core of
Kleiber that defies easy analysis.
Traces to Nowhere only deals with Kleiber's upbringing tangentially, skirting around the edges of what seems to
have been a somewhat tumultuous relationship between the elder and younger Kleibers, a dialectic which nonetheless
did nothing to diminish Carlos' hero worship of his famous father. In fact there's a rather interesting comment made by
one of the interview subjects in this piece that Carlos would only consider conducting pieces his father had, and then
only if he had his father's original conductors' scores and/or recordings of performances. There's something positively
Freudian about all of this, and it perhaps helps to at least partially illuminate whatever turmoil was going on in the
younger Kleiber's psyche that may have kept him from a more ubiquitous career.
It's clear from the many personal reminiscences contained in
Traces to Nowhere that Kleiber was admired
professionally (something the
BBC Magazine poll also makes abundantly clear) and loved personally. That
doesn't mean that Kleiber's peculiarities and peccadilloes were ignored by his friends and collaborators, though.
Several people are on record here stating they found Carlos' bizarre decisions with regard to his burgeoning conducting
career positively mind boggling. This was a man who was offered prestigious positions with such legendary orchestras
as the Vienna Philharmonic, accepted them, and then the next day would disappear on long driving trips to Slovenia,
shirking his commitments and deciding that he didn't want to work there, after all. (He did in fact end up working with
the Vienna Philharmonic on several occasions and two of the
very rare pieces of archival video available
showing Kleiber at work come from New Years' concerts there.) On a personal level, Kleiber evidently
had a wandering eye despite a long and supposedly happy marriage, something that a couple of the participants in this
documentary comment on with a raised eyebrow or two.
Traces to Nowhere takes its title from a Chinese maxim that Kleiber evidently loved which stated "as far as
possible you should leave no traces behind in life." Ironically the documentary traces Kleiber's last car trip to Slovenia,
using little snippets of the journey as interstitials placed between interview segments. A man who seems essentially
unknowable finally gives up at least a few of his secrets in the tiny (population 143) town of Konjsica, where the
villagers knew him as a man, not a legend.
The one thing that
Traces to Nowhere doesn't really adequately explore is
why so many professionals
thought so highly of Kleiber. Yes, his attention to detail is mentioned, as well as his almost balletic grace at the podium
(the archival film included in this documentary is absolutely fascinating to watch, and Kleiber does indeed often seem to
be almost dancing rather than conducting). But don't all great conductors have demanding standards vis a vis attention
to detail? And doesn't every great conductor have his own particular stick (or hand) technique that sets him apart from
his baton (or finger) wielding kin? There has to be something
more, and while
Traces to Nowhere hints
at Kleiber's genius, perhaps it's only to be expected that something as ineffable as that intangible quality can't be
adequately summed up in words. It seems perhaps that one of the great pieces that Kleiber never got around to
conducting might best sum up his life and career:
The Enigma Variations.
