Walter and Klemperer

I may be the only person who doesn't understand the Toscanini/Furtwangler debate. Both of them have a very limited repertoire in which they excel to their fullest capacity. When you're looking for something beyond fireworks or very one-dimensional conceptions of what music should be, they come up more lacking than a number of their contemporaries.

Listen to Walter and Klemperer in the German mainstream sometime. No one has done Don Giovanni better than either of them, or Fidelio, or perhaps the Missa Solemnis and Zauberflöte, or the Deutsches Requiem. All five are, of course, incredibly complex pieces of music, and there are things which Furtwangler and Toscanini both miss in the ones of those they've done. Walter and Klemperer miss nothing - not a single note of pathos or humor or excitement or repose is absent.

Both originate in many ways from their contact with Mahler, whom one has to figure was as great a conductor as he was a composer, and that there was a similar dichotomy in his conducting that there was in his compositions between romantic and modern... Walter represents the grand tradition, he never precluded excitement, but his performances personify beauty, nostalgia, tradition, and keeping the old flames of the 19th century alive in new eras. Klemperer is the conductor of 'progress' who loves and understands the grand tradition but believes it isn't enough: who distrusts beauty and nostalgia, but who believes that romanticism isn't enough and that the tradition must evolve for a new era. In Klemperer, romanticism is either dismissed altogether or becomes so intense that it turns into outright expressionism.

Oh to have heard how Mahler might have synthesized these two approaches, but between the two of them, we get the revealed truth of some of the greatest works of art on earth.

Here are what I believe are the two ultimate performances of the ultimate opera ever captured in broadcast form.

Walter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS3z2yeNpqg

Klemperer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja9owgSj5jI