Considered in a recent referendum, voted by the world's 100 greatest conductors, as the greatest conductor of all time, Carlos Kleiber, is to nine years since his death, still a mystery. All his life he denied himself, never granted interviews, never wrote about himself or his art in essays, articles, books. He said, in fact, that he did not want to leave any trace. He conducted only a handful of titles in his career: eleven operas and a handful of Symphonies (never Mozart or Mahler). to Rome he performed only twice. What is it that still makes him so important and unique today, because he still lives in a legendary aura in the music world? The play, in the form of a fantastic and imaginary conversation, finally gives voice to his myth, dealing with the most characteristic aspects of his personality: his maniacal perfectionism, his very conflicted relationship with his father Erich, who was to himself a great conductor but who did not achieve his son's fame, his extreme sensitivity and fragility that led him to clamorous escapes and abandonments, his absolutely inimitable dialogue with orchestras (at rehearsals he expressed himself by paradoxes and extramusical metaphors). The text, along with the interweaving of music and video, portrays for the first time the heights and depths of an artist who profoundly marked the 20th century, becoming in the world of conducting the equivalent of a rock star, capable of transforming his performances into an almost mystical experience.


INTERVIEW BY VALERIO CAPPELLI to RICCARDO MUTI

Riccardo Muti, you were close friends with Carlos Kleiber. When did the two of you meet?

"In 1981 at La Scala. I was conducting Le Nozze di Figaro, he was preparing another opera. He would stand in a box and follow my rehearsal readings. We didn't know each other personally. He was interested to looking at other colleagues, trying to find out if there was anything new, unknown, even though he was an even magical conductor. He didn't ask for advice, he asked questions about why I had made that gesture. It was not insecurity: it was curiosity."

In the environment, what was said about him?

"His name was known to us as early as the 1970s, there was a lot of talk about this talented son of the great conductor Erich Kleiber. Carlos was Berlin-born but came from South America (strange even this provenance from a world so far away), and then he came to Europe."

The friendship between you was born ...

"After La Scala we saw each other many times to Monaco, where he lived. At my first Macbeth there, he was impressed with the way I worked with the chorus, he said that we Italians are familiar with singing, especially Italian operas, which he was not."

Surprising for a profession where ego is part of the tools of the trade.

"And these things he was able to write them down and put them in black and white. He asked questions with simplicity and innocence, with an air from of childishness. One of his passions was cars. When he received one full of accessories, he came to to pick me up at the Hotel Le Quattro Stagioni-Kempinski, he was proud to turn on all those lights and colors. There, the color reflected on his nature and certain judgments."

Meaning?

"In the field of Italian conductors, more than Toscanini's rigor and from certain harshness that he did not share, he was impressed from De Sabata, his world of such impetuous imagination, his almost improvisational sense. He said he disliked those who achieve a result through fear and an aggressive attitude. His thinking and thinking were inclined to a nature of controlled freedom."

to Kleiber was sometimes disorienting in his judgments of other conductors.

"Some of his reflections on very famous colleagues went against current judgment. He found them boring or too rational. In America there was admiration for Fritz Reiner or George Szell. He, on the other hand, adored Leopold Stokowski, who was the opposite of Toscanini, who considered Stokowski a great dilettante. But the sense of delight was present in Carlos Kleiber's interpretations. Just watch him live on DVDs and one is struck by his way of conducting, which is not beating time but marking with gesture the curvature of the music, not the command. He had a clear ability to respect the agogic of the musical phrase, that inner breath that gave the sense of absolute freedom. He divided conductors into three categories: the drivers who understand nothing about engines, the conductor who is not a good driver but is able to take an engine apart and put it back together again, and these are the most common. Then there is a small group, the pilots who know the whole mechanism."

It was Sviatoslav Richter to called him the insecure titan.

"When they recorded Dvorak's Piano Concerto, Kleiber was young. His insecurity was an outward manner, you could tell that there was an iron security of his ideas. He would ask with his disarming manner, it almost seemed like questions from beginner. In reality it was a verification."

He had an ethical approach to music.

"I think it came from his father, Erich. Of his father-father he never spoke, of his father-director he had an extraordinary admiration. Erich was the first interpreter of Wozzeck, a'opera modern but also strongly romantic that Carlos saw being born and developing in his home."

When he said that there are beautiful music only on paper....

"He wanted to say that in the face of to sublime pages, the sublime is untouchable; he found that the highest expression was in being on paper because in the mind of a performer they already create a fantastic and unattainable world; when the sublime materializes in a concrete sound, the absolute limitation of the performer is revealed."

All his life he practiced a handful of titles. Never a Mozart'sopera or a Mahler Symphony, never Beethoven's Ninth. What would he have wanted to hear from him?

"It is an important topic. When he came to my Parsifal at La Scala he was there, next to to my wife, from the first rehearsals to the general. I told him: Parsifal seems to be written for you. And he, who had a great sense of humor, replied: I would never do it, I don't have long enough arms. He was referring to the length of the last Wagner. And then I remember a comment from him on Twilight of the Gods: There are such high points that one might as well die on the podium. Wagner's ecstasy."

To the orchestras he spoke with extramusical metaphors.

"to a clarinetist asked for a piano. But I am playing like this, he replied. Kleiber added: The musician is like a beggar with his hat in his hand. If he can get one penny he is happy, if he has two he is happier. And to speaking of humor, once to Salzburg under a picture of us together reversed the signatures, put his under my face, and vice versa."

The last memory?

"In 2004 at my last New Year's concert to Vienna, I called him for advice on a Johann Strauss piece in which I found great differences between Karajan, Krauss and his father. He answered me in the strangest voice: I just got back from the hospital, my wife died. I was dismayed, I wanted to call him back after a few days. But he wanted to help me, he said some things about Italianness and our freedom for that kind of music. The next morning he had me send a birthday card, saying he would be in front of the TV. After the concert another note came: that Strauss piece was perfect."

What about his scorching times?

"They weren't always. They were for the last tempo of Schubert's Third, which is in the form of a tarantella, or for the finale of Beethoven's Seventh or Brahms' Second. Like sudden gusts of wind."

Valerio Cappelli

courtesy of the Corriere della Sera

‍VALERIOCAPPELLI‍

Born to Rome in 1958, Valerio Cappelli graduated in History of the Enlightenment from the Sapienza University of Rome. He has worked at Corriere della Sera since 1978, where he follows major events in classical music and cinema, both Italian and international. He has collaborated to Radiodue and Raidue, and contributes to Amadeus magazine.

MARIO SESTI

Mario Sesti (1958) is a consultant to the Rome Film Festival and Director of the Taormina Film Festival: his documentary films have been shown at the Cannes Film Festival, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2003 one of his films on the lost ending of Fellini's 8 1/2 (The Last Sequence) was selected by the Cannes Film Festival. For many years he worked at the "Espresso" as a journalist and film critic, teaches at DAMS in Rome.

PIER LUIGI PIZZI

Present from more than sixty years in the world's most important theaters and festivals, set designer and director Pier Luigi Pizzi has won prestigious international awards, including the Legion d'Honneur and the title of Officier des Arts et des Lettres in France, of Grand Officer of Merit of the Italian Republic, and in 2006 of Commandeur de l'Ordre du Merithe Culturel in the Principality of Monaco, to which he added his seventh Abbiati Prize, for the best opera performance of the year in 2000 with Britten's Death in Venice at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa. In his long career he has staged more than five hundred performances. He opened the Wortham Center in Houston in 1987 with Aida and theOpera Bastille in Paris in 1990 with Berlioz's Les Troyens. Rossini's Il viaggio to Reims was staged atOpera Monte Carlo for the coronation of Albert I of Monaco, and Salieri's Europa riconosciuta for the December 2004 reopening of La Scala. From 2006 to 2011 he was Artistic Director of the Sferisterio in Macerata, increasing the melodramatic repertoire with baroque and contemporary works. Of importance is his collaboration with the Teatro Real in Madrid and his intense activity for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome. He recently debuted at the Bolshoi with Bellini's La Sonnambula, followed from Gioconda atOpera Bastille in Paris. Pizzi rarely devotes himself to prose theater, but his most recent direction of Goldoni's Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale was rewarded by Critics and with Olympians. Next October he will open the new Astana Theater in Kazakhstan with Verdi's Attila . He has also devoted himself to staging major art exhibitions. He returns to the Spoleto Festival after D'amore si muore by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Il malato immaginario directed by Giorgio De Lullo, and Mozart by Sasha Guitry.

REMO GIRON

"To meet him is to come across deep and restless characters such as Raskolnikov, Orestes, Philoctetes, Astrov; it is to have before one the lowest common denominator of the ideal actor for directors such as Costa, Ronconi, Sepe, Patroni Griffi, Ljubimov, Martone, Stein; it is to see an artist disarming in humility and most rigorous in his Stanislavkian training, explicit spokesman of neurosis but also repository of one of the most authoritative voices in the entertainment world, fatally equipped with the halo of "villain" but ready to to find in human negativity the deepest nuances of his craft, of his theatrical research. To meet him is also to measure oneself with the mystery of a physiognomy, of a character, of an anti-heroic and phlegmatic consciousness of the man of the stage between the second and third millennium, a mystery so communicative and emblematic from to leave a mark not only to theater but also in cinema, and in the most successful models of the film-TV." (from Do not erase memory - Interview to Remo Girone by Rodolfo di Giammarco)

For the Spoleto Festival Remo Girone starred in 1978 in Accademia Ackermann directed by Giancarlo Sepe with Victoria Zinny, his partner on stage and in life, in 1982 in Chekhov's Ivanov directed by Carlo Cecchi, and later in Il Viaggiatore directed by Mauro Avogadro and in Dacia Maraini's Camille Claudel. Recently for the cinema he played the role of Amanzio Rastrelli in the film Il Gioiellino about the Parmalat bankruptcy.

ANITA BARTOLUCCI

Winner of the De Feo Award and twice of the Olympians of Theater, Anita Bartolucci worked for ten years in the company of Giorgio De Lullo and Romolo Valli. In theater over the years she has been directed from prestigious directors such as Ronconi, Patroni Griffi, Castri, Menegatti, Guicciardini, Calenda, Missiroli, Scaparro, Maccarinelli, Avogadro, Albertazzi Landi, Camilleri, Bigai, and Stein. Since 2007 he has been in the Stabile del Veneto where he has worked with Pizzi, Pasqual and De Fusco. His many film and television experiences include Jekyll, Topaze and Quello che sta al gioco directed by Giorgio Albertazzi, ll messia with Roberto Rossellini, Perdiamoci di vista with Carlo Verdone and L'odore del sangue with Mario Martone.

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