Carlos Kleiber

Whenever people asked me who the greatest conductor alive is, there was one simple answer - Carlos Kleiber. As of July 13, 2004, this question has been much more difficult to answer. Kleiber, the son of another great conductor, Erich Kleiber, passed away after a long illness. His recordings and videos reminded us why we became musicians and what we need to strive for.

The best way to describe Carlos Kleiber to nonmusicians is to compare him to Bobby Fischer. After Kleiber became the most acclaimed conductor in the world, he became a recluse. He only performed when all conditions met his approval. He was notorious for cancelling and walking out of concerts. On the rare occasions he stayed the course, the results were miraculous. If you asked his peers such as Pavarotti, Domingo, Bernstein and Karajan; they would not hesitate in telling you that Kleiber existed on a level much higher than them.

Another thing to understand is that his father was a legend, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th Century yet his son's career achieved much higher levels of acclaim. How many people can you think of accomplished a similar feat? Kublai Khan? J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart come to mind it was the sons who first attained such a status and the parents have retrospectively benefitted in twists of historical nepotism. It's usually the sequel rule: Something's almost never better in its second incarnation. Look at our current President.

Kleiber would conduct a piece you've heard a billion times and he would remind you of why that piece is so great and more importantly, make you hear things you've never heard before. He accomplishes the seemingly impossible. His interpretations embody every positive quality imaginable, even the ones conventional wisdom considers to be mutually exclusive. Near perfect playing, beautiful sounds that bring out the long lines he created, red hot passion, and most importantly a profound and sincere spiritual, emotional and intellectual element that pervades each performance.

If you watch him conducting, you first feel that his conducting is rather eccentric. After a while, you realize that every gesture serves a grand purpose. He never does something just because he has to like beating time. Even if you aren't a musician, you see the passion he has, his balletic movements haunt you, and you get a strong sense of his command and control over every aspect of music making.

My friends would get together just to watch Kleiber videos together. We've watched them so much that we invariably end up adopting some of his gestures. One time, good friend of mine conducted for Kurt Masur. He did well but he went overboard with the Kleiber stuff. After the masterclass, I went up to him and asked, "Watching those Kleiber videos again?" "Always!" We're not mindlessly following his example - we've sat around and dissected every move and figured out its purpose in communicating musical ideas to the players. It is through this process we've become influenced by him.

There haven't been many deaths of famous people that have affected me so profoundly. I remember when Joseph Heller died. His Catch-22, other than being fucking hilarious, portrayed a world gone mad and helped me cope with a less important crisis - the complications of being an adolescent. Pierre Bourdieu, the French socialogist and political activist, not only opened the world's eyes to the impending danger of globalism, but he also challenged the overly simple and deceptively systematic method of analysis of cultural data known as structuralism and added much needed flexibility and human sesibility to this prevailing method of analyzing data. His work greatly influenced me and how I view the world after being exposed to them in college. Carlos Kleiber is a perfect musical role model who constantly reminds me of what is attainable, both as a musician and as a human being.