TESTAMENT

Strauss and the appointment of the young Rudolf Kempe as
his deputy. Between 1948 and 1951 he also appeared
regularly at the Berlin Staatsoper, a guest engagement
terminated after the Russian-controlled regime accused
Carl Orff’s opera Antigonae of ‘formalism’ (Keilberth had
recently given the work’s première in Dresden). In 1949 he
was heard for the first time by the Wagner grandsons,
conducting a memorial concert for Richard Strauss in the
Festspielhaus. They were impressed and in 1950 Keilberth
was invited to conduct Meistersinger in next year’s
reopening Bayreuth Festival. He refused – because he did
not want to share the performances with Hans
Knappertsbusch, holding to the old Bayreuth tradition of
‘one work, one conductor’. In the words of his son and
biographer Thomas, ‘Keilberth thought that in so doing he
had ruined his chances of working at Bayreuth for ever
but, to his great surprise, the Wagners invited him to
conduct all the 1952 Ring performances’.
These caused a stir because of Keilberth’s ‘strict’ tempos
which were comparatively swifter than the Bayreuth
traditionalists and press had got used to from the work’s
most recent conductors there – Karl Elmendorff, Heinz
Tietjen, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan.
There was talk of the ‘speeded-up film style’ of his Wagner
– a style that actually owed much to major forerunners like
Felix Mottl and Richard Strauss – and debate whether
Keilberth was just ‘increasing speed’ or ‘forcing the pace’.
‘Keilberth’s Rhine Journey is made by fast steamer’ was a
typical comment at the time. Clearly Wieland Wagner’s
first ‘Latin’ conductor had been found.
According to Thomas Keilberth, the two men got along
well, trusting each other and finding a common sense of
humour. Also, Keilberth genuinely watched and cared for
what happened onstage and knew how to accompany
singers. In the rehearsal room, only Wieland’s liking for
Freudian and Jungian sexual psychology did not appeal to
him – Keilberth believed that ‘the erotic element is already
sufficiently expressed by the music’. But there were
problems elsewhere. The ‘one conductor, one work’
dictum was soon broached. Keilberth found himself
sharing the 1953 Ring with Clemens Krauss (in fact they
got on so well that they felt able to share rehearsals), and
the 1955 Holländer and 1956 Ring with Knappertsbusch (a
‘difficult’ relationship between ‘polar opposites’ in both
musical and personal matters, according to Thomas
Keilberth, where ‘the one doing the taking over always
faced an uphill battle against the style imposed by his
predecessor’). Keilberth also criticised Wieland’s ‘tendency
to play around with what conductors were naturally good
at’, having his point proved when he had to take over
Wieland’s new Tannhäuser production at the general
TESTAMENT
booklet note
English
rehearsal because Igor Markevich could not coordinate pit
with Wieland’s stage requirements at his chosen tempos.
After more objections from Keilberth about conductor
choices and, says Thomas Keilberth, ‘perhaps because, as
a relentless innovator, Wieland simply felt that the
conductor had been around for too long’, the festival
director invited him to take ‘conjugal leave’. In his diary
for 25 August 1956 Keilberth noted: ‘He calls it “conjugal
leave”; I call it “being chucked out”’.
By this time Keilberth had succeeded Eugen Jochum as
chief conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonisches
Staatsorchester, and had been reunited with his old
colleagues of the Deutsche Philharmonie Prague, now
resident in western Germany and renamed the Bamberg
Symphony Orchestra. He continued working with the
Bambergers for the rest of his life, leading them on tours
around Europe, to North and South America, and to the
Far East, and making recordings. He was a serious
candidate in 1955 to take over the Berlin Philharmonic
following Furtwängler’s death. An increasing number of
guest appearances with the Bavarian State Opera in
Munich led to his appointment there as GMD in 1959, a
true return to his musical roots. He also became head of
the Musikalische Akademie there. In 1959 too there came
the first of several invitations by Wieland to return to
Bayreuth that Keilberth always declined. In 1963 he led his
company into the rebuilt Nationaltheater with a gala (and
recorded) Meistersinger. Guest engagements outside
Munich continued and he accepted the post of honorary
conductor of Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra.
According to the Bavarian State Opera’s Intendant, the
stage director Rudolf Hartmann, Keilberth’s oftenexpressed
wish was ‘to die, if possible on the podium, best
of all like Felix Mottl, during a performance of Tristan’. His
wish was granted, during the Act II love duet, on 20 June,
1968, a date marked in his diary, according to his son,
with a light cross. It was 57 years, almost to the day, since
his mentor Felix Mottl had suffered a fatal heart attack on
the same spot.
� Mike Ashman, 2006
With thanks to Thomas Keilberth
DAS RHEINGOLD
The first stereo recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen was made by Decca, not at a series of studio
sessions conducted by Georg Solti and produced by John
Culshaw in Vienna between 1958 and 1965, but at ‘live’
performances at the Bayreuth Fespielhaus in the summer of
1955. The conductor was Joseph Keilberth and the