Romantic Symphonies and Overtures – Klemperer

There used to be a parlor game among record collectors of a certain age: name the Klemperer tempo you argued about longest at a dinner table. Mine was always the finale of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major, the Great, though the box under consideration here reminds me that half his repertory qualified for the sport.

He earned the reputation honestly. Klemperer’s late recordings, made mostly in Kingsway Hall with the Philharmonia and its successor orchestra, have long carried the burden of being called monumental — a word critics reach for when they mean slow and cannot decide if they approve. Reviewers in the ‘60s sometimes treated him as a man carving symphonies out of granite with a chisel gone blunt. Hearing this collection whole, disc after disc, the granite metaphor collapses. What’s here is a maestro who trusted rhythm over speed, sonority over polish, the long paragraph over the local effect.

Take the Schubert Fifth, an unassuming, Mozart-haunted piece that plenty of conductors treat as a warmup exercise. Klemperer does not. The winds sit forward in the balance, a signature of these Kingsway Hall sessions. The phrasing has real lift, real geniality. The Menuetto has actual dirt on its shoes; you can hear the ländler underneath the double bar lines. It doesn’t drag. It breathes.

The finale is the argument-starter. Klemperer takes it well under the fashionable tempo, phrases with a specificity that borders on the fussy, and then the triplets get more spin, not less, because the pulse beneath them never wavers. I confess it stayed with me for a day afterward, looping in the back of the skull at his tempo and no other, which either means he was right or that earworms don’t respect musicological argument. Possibly both.

The Unfinished gets no such argument. Here the tempos sit close to convention, but the atmosphere is anything but conventional. The opening bars of the first movement carry genuine dread, cellos and basses growling from underneath rather than merely stating a theme, and the second group sings with a tenderness that critics of his “cold intellectual” period somehow always managed to miss. The exposition repeat is observed, which by the early 1960s was already becoming unfashionable; Klemperer didn’t care what was fashionable, ever, about anything. The Andante con moto is spacious without turning static, one-in-a-bar, not the trudging three that lesser batons impose. There is a passage in the development where the brass chorale emerges like something out of Parsifal two generations early, and one remembers that Klemperer stood closer to Mahler, literally and musically, than almost anyone left by the time these sessions happened. He assisted Mahler. He absorbed the man’s sense of symphonic time at the source, not through the filter of later reading tradition, and it shows in exactly this kind of unhurried inevitability.

Where does this leave the set against the field — Furtwängler’s visionary but sonically compromised Schubert, Böhm’s elegant Vienna traversals, Karajan’s glossier, faster, less argumentative accounts? In a category of one. Klemperer’s Schubert doesn’t compete on the usual terms because it isn’t playing the usual game. EMI’s remastering is full-blooded, detailed, occasionally a touch dry in the string tone but never harsh, and it lets you hear exactly how the Philharmonia’s players made his conception audible.

Not everything across ten discs earns unqualified praise; there are stretches elsewhere in the box where the deliberateness tips toward the literal, where you wish he’d simply let a phrase go. But the Schubert alone justifies the investment, and justifies, too, a reconsideration of the whole austere-Klemperer myth. He was never really austere. He was patient, which is a different and rarer virtue, and patience like this ages well. Decades on, I’d trust his instincts over most of what followed.