So I was mildly surprised, upon looking back through my High Fidelity reviews, to discover some important reservations, not all of them related to casting or to O.K.’s famously slow tempi. With respect to his much-praised Fidelio, I found myself unusually impatient with the crawlthrough of the opening scenes, and, after much positive comment, concluded with ” . . . possibly there is missing just the final spark of personal involvement that would leave us remembering only the opera’s ennobling spirit.” Of the Die Zauberflöte, I summarized with ” . . . astounding clarity, balance, structure—full of beauty and lucidity, but not the sense of a drama taking place.” (When DG’s recording under Karl Böhm was released shortly thereafter, I remarked that its sense of dramatic atmosphere was far stronger than Klemperer’s, and that while some of this was attributable to the presence of spoken dialogue—Klemperer’s had none—that didn’t account for the whole difference.) About the Don Giovanni, I actually called it “stodgy, boring” (this recording was on the whole weakly cast, despite the presence of the young Nicolai Ghiaurov in the title role), and by way of example, complained that the opening scene ” . . . develops as a piece of musical structure rather than as a scene.”

By the time I looked back through these reviews, I had re-listened to the Holländer. As with the Don Giovanni, Klemperer was not fortunate in his cast (Heyworth reports that EMI was worried about the recording, and in no rush to release it). As the Dutchman he had Theo Adam, an excellent artist with some important vocal strengths, but those only an approximate fit with the best timbre and “sit” for the role. His Senta was Anja Silja, of whom we could say similar things, and who had already lost much of the fresh, sailing quality she’d brought to the Sawallisch/Bayreuth recording a few years earlier. (I’ll touch on both these performances below.) Martti Talvela, the Daland, could not be more solid or duller—no hint of personality or inflective imagination escapes the monochrome reliability of his vocalism. Ernst Kozub has to be accounted an asset, for he certainly has one of the best voices to record the role of Erik, has no major technical issues, and is able to create effects with the bigger moments; still, there’s not a lot of shape, of musical or dramatic guidance, to his singing.

But on this hearing, I was trying to listen through the singing to the conducting and playing (of the Philharmonia Orchestra, a fine one with which O.K. often recorded). And by the end, I was certainly aware that he had brought the reading home in a certain sense: he had made its logic  distinct and forceful and its destinations, including its overall arc, eventually overtaken. He’d made the work’s bones show, which is to say that (to repeat an observation from my remarks of fifty-some-odd years back) he had elucidated its structure. That’s always a significant value, but to Klemperer it was the paramount one. No use complaining that it’s impersonal or undramatic, because to him the structure was personal, and in itself dramatic. With this refreshed impression of O.K.’s late opera conducting in mind, I looked again at the relevant chapters of Carnegy and Heyworth, and at the photo of one of the Holländer sets that is reproduced in both (Act 1 and/or 3, and we gather that some of its elements also lowered behind Act 2) by Ewald Dülberg, one of the several cutting-edge designers whose work shook things up at the Kroll. In the photo, we see the anti-decorative, austere, form-follows-function aesthetic of the modernism of that time and place, and a suggestion of Constructivism. We feel that the shapes and materials, rather than what they depict, are the principal point. At the same time, although these shapes and materials cleanly detach from the illustrative styles of more traditional productions, they do not detach from what they represent—they evoke it in an abstract, “purified” form—and do not fight free of the narrative of which they are a part.