SymphonyNow

Readers seeking insights into the conducting profession will find a wide spectrum of personalities and careers in a trio of new books on Carlos Kleiber (1930-99), Charles Munch (1891-1968), and Riccardo Muti, born in July 1941 and now in his second season as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The formats of these three books are as different as their subjects. Charles Barber’s Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber (Scarecrow Press, 363 pages, $75) represents an admiring younger conductor’s efforts, begun during his graduate-student days, to draw out a brilliant but eccentric and reclusive maestro through multiple layers of correspondence. D. Kern Holoman’s scholarly yet highly readable Charles Munch (Oxford University Press, 296 pages, $35) is the first full-scale biography of a violinist-turned-conductor whose institutional commitment—in particular to the Boston Symphony Orchestra during his thirteen years as its music director—was as strong as Kleiber’s was erratic. Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography (Rizzoli, 244 pages, $29.95) is a freewheeling, anecdotal autobiography in which Muti presents a highly personal face to the world as he reflects on a long career as an orchestral and operatic conductor.

In his introduction to Corresponding with Carlos, Barber writes that the book originated with his desire to contact, and eventually to study with, the conductor he had just discovered on public television leading a performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.  “Flashing energy and discipline, humor and release, this man was at the same moment doing everything and nothing. It was the most startling display of musical fireworks and singing eloquence I had ever seen on any podium.”  Attempting to reach the conductor through his agency, Columbia Artists Management Inc., Barber was informed that it was doubtful Kleiber would take on a student, but that CAMI would forward a letter to him at his home outside Munich. So the would-be student “charted a path to demonstrate how I could be of service to him, and did so with self-deprecating jokes … and a straightforward pitch.” Barber’s initial letter, dated January 25, 1989, drew the following hand-written response:

Dear Mr. Barber!
Tho’ honestly + immensely impressed by your qualifications and accomplishments (wish I could compete!) I am sorry to say: I hardly conduct at all; so that would mean you would be totally hors d’oeuvre (out of work) and horrified at my lack of interest, energy, initiative, and so forth … I’m a real mess, actually. Don’t tell anyone, please.
Yours Sincerely
Carlos Kleiber

“It went on like that, for two short pages. And so began my correspondence with Carlos.”

As Barber explains, “Although I wanted to learn from Carlos, a conventional master-student relationship was not in the cards. Sending him videos of other conductors (including myself) and asking his views came to be the next-best thing. Over time I sent him fifty-three videos of leading (and ‘misleading,’ he would say) conductors. Asking his advice about them, and about upcoming concert and opera repertoire in my own career, provoked unmatched insights. We did, of course, eventually meet in person.”

This unconventionally structured book consists of two biographical sections (“Family” and “Career”) supplemented with photos and other illustrations; a 92-page compilation of letters from Kleiber interspersed with commentary from the author; an epilogue, bibliography, and index; and four appendices documenting Kleiber’s repertoire and career. His personality and attributes as a conductor emerge not only in his letters to Barber, and in the author’s own opinions, but through the voices of colleagues. Conductor Bernard Haitink, for example, found Kleiber “ ‘an extraordinary man, above all the others. One of his secrets, I think, is that he knows the pieces he works on better than anyone else … Don’t be fooled by the small repertoire. His knowledge of music is immense.’ ” And the eminent pianist Maurizio Pollini recalls that Kleiber “ ‘had the capacity to understand instantaneously a work or a score. He immediately had an expressive or interpretive idea in his head, and all this resolved itself immediately, instantly, into a gesture appropriate for orchestra directing.’ ”

D. Kern Holoman, Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, Davis, and conductor emeritus of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, provides similar insights into a great conductor’s podium skills. His meticulously detailed biography Charles Munch proceeds in chronological fashion from the French conductor’s birth in Strasbourg to his final days in Richmond, Virginia, with four of its eleven chapters devoted to Munch’s tenure as the Boston Symphony’s music director from 1949 to 1962.  His influence there was immense. Among many other accomplishments, Munch introduced major works of French repertoire to Boston audiences, as well as numerous American ones; pioneered the use of risers on the Symphony Hall stage, “roaming the hall to listen as [Concertmaster and Associate Conductor Richard] Burgin conducted”; took the BSO on its first European tour in 1952, sharing conducting duties with his predecessor Pierre Monteux; and achieved “enormous financial success, within only a few months,” with a series of recordings on the RCA label.

But the most unusual thing about this biography—and for conductors, perhaps the most valuable—is a Companion Website that contains an appendix and discography replete with audio and video clips documenting Munch in performance. Serious commentary from the author can be found on this site as well, including such observations as the following, which sets the BSO’s Munch era in a sobering historical context:

The LPs made by Charles Munch with the Boston Symphony Orchestra reshaped the orchestra’s calendar, bankbook, and perception of its public: in short, its very mission … The heady vision was of a musically literate American public, schoolchildren to grandparents, where everybody knew their instruments of the orchestra, their sonata form—and their Grand Canyon Suite.

Munch and Kleiber, among a great many other musicians, both rate a mention in Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography, a breezy new book by their junior colleague, authored in Italian and published here in an English translation by Alta L. Price. Muti refers to Munch as one of the “legends” whose rehearsals he attended as a student, and he tells of being photographed with Kleiber during a rehearsal break in Salzburg: “We were seated in the music hall and, as a joke when they asked us to sign it, we switched things around and wrote our names under one another’s picture.” The Kleiber anecdote is typical of the chatty character of this book, which mingles thoughtful observations about music and career with the charm and humor of a natural extrovert. Despite the book’s title—and the fact that it does begin with Muti’s birth in Naples and his childhood in Molfetta, on the opposite coast of southern Italy—Riccardo Muti is more memoir than autobiography. Its only index, curiously, is an index of names—friends and acquaintances, musical associates, family members, composers—with no indication of topics or institutions referenced in the book. A wonderful selection of photos, many in color, flesh out his biography. And for those who would seek to learn about Muti’s musical sensibilities and conducting style from an objective observer, there’s a 44-page afterword by the Italian music historian Marco Grondona, liberally illustrated with musical examples.