Klemperer Proves It

Last week in Manhattan, at considerable personal expense, after great personal effort, a musician conducted an orchestra to prove to the world that he is not crazy. There have been worse reasons for a concert. Many people suppose that all musicians are more or less wacky.* But hulking, six-and-a-half-foot Otto Klemperer, exiled German conductor, had lately been pictured as something worse.

Conductor Klemperer, able musician but a Jew, was ousted from the Berlin State Opera in 1933, became leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Two autumns ago he was given a leave of absence after undergoing a brain tumor operation, which left him partly paralyzed and shambling-gaited. Last autumn he resigned. Soon he found another orchestra over which to wave his enormous, expressive hands: the New York City Symphony (WPA). He quit this job in January, after a row over whether to play Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original 15-instrument version (as he wished), or with a full string section.

Distraught, Conductor Klemperer went to Rye, N.Y. one weekend last March, asked for a room in a private sanatorium. Next morning he left, and the sanatorium director. Dr. Daniel J. Kelly, notified police, who issued a nine-State alarm describing Conductor Klemperer as "dangerous and insane," bearing a cane which he "likes to use on policemen." Next day the conductor was picked up in Morristown, N.J. by police who grabbed first the cane, then him. Jailed for 26 hours, he was released when his wife flew East from California. A psychiatrist examined Conductor Klemperer, pronounced him sane but "nervous, temperamental and unstrung."

Last fortnight Otto Klemperer filed suit for $200,000--half for his arrest, half for damaging statements about him--against Dr. Kelly and his wife. Meanwhile he put a 70-piece orchestra through the last of three weeks of rehearsals. He had held auditions for several hundred players, had chosen some women and some Philharmonic men, among others, to play under him. He dug deep into his life savings to pay their salaries and the rental of Carnegie Hall for a night. Conductor Klemperer's concert nearly filled the hall with people, and did fill it with satisfactory sounds of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Hindemith. In a not entirely successful attempt to gain brilliance of string tone, Conductor Klemperer had his fiddlers and violists on their feet throughout the concert. As definitely as any conductor could, Otto Klemperer had proved what he intended to. He hulked off, made ready to return to California and seclusion for the summer.

* Robert Schumann, Bedrich Smetana, Edward MacDowell, Hugo Wolf died insane.

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