Carlos Kleiber in the recording studio with the Staatskapelle Dresden. Deutsche Fotothek, via Wikimedia Commons.
The line belongs to Herbert von Karajan, who knew a thing or two about work, having always done too much of it: Carlos Kleiber only conducts when his fridge is empty. It was a compliment disguised as a jab, and for once the statistics back up the joke. In half a century of career, the man many colleagues and critics consider the greatest conductor of the second half of the twentieth century stepped onto the podium for some ninety concerts and a few hundred opera performances. Karajan, over the same span, piled up thousands.
With Kleiber, everything was subtraction. No interviews, practically ever; no permanent post after the Munich years; a tiny repertoire, a handful of operas and a few symphonies, filed down over decades. His Beethoven Fifth and Seventh, recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic in the 1970s, remain for many the summit of the symphonic discography, and the video of Fledermaus or of the 1989 New Year’s Concert shows what that gesture was: a drawing in the air more than a beating of time, music described rather than commanded. Those who played with him tell of obsessive rehearsals and evenings when the orchestra felt lifted off the ground. Then, for months or years, silence: cancellation letters, disappearances, refusal as a way of life. In the 1990s he accepted a concert in exchange, literally, for a brand-new Audi: the fridge, evidently, was empty again.
The father explains a great deal: Erich Kleiber, an immense conductor, who left Nazi Germany for Argentina and who harshly discouraged his son from music. Carlos spent his whole life in a duel with that ghost, often conducting the same titles as his father, from his father’s scores, as if asking for a permission no one could give him anymore. He died in 2004, secluded to the last, in Slovenia, in his wife’s village.
In the economy of attention, where those who vanish die, Kleiber is the counterexample that keeps a hope alive: he made rarity the very substance of value, the practical opposite of Celibidache but on the same philosophical hill, and the market, which despises those who do not produce, surrendered: every appearance of his became legend before it began. Ninety concerts were enough. It is the most elegant proof that in art quantity is not a virtue: it is merely the thing that is easiest to count.