Carlos Kleiber

Carlos Kleiber (3 July 1930 – 13 July 2004) was a German-born Austrian conductor who is widely regarded as being among the greatest conductors of the 20th century.

Kleiber was born as Karl Ludwig Bonifacius Kleiber in Berlin, the son of the eminent Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber and American Ruth Goodrich, from Waterloo, Iowa. In 1940, the Kleiber family emigrated to Buenos Aires and Karl was renamed Carlos. As a youth, he had an English governess and grew up in English boarding schools. He also composed, sang, and played piano and timpani. While his father noticed his son's musical talents, he nevertheless dissuaded Carlos from pursuing a musical career: "What a pity the boy is musically talented", wrote Erich to a friend.

Carlos first studied chemistry in Zurich, but soon decided to dedicate himself to music. He was repetiteur at the Gärtnerplatz Theatre in Munich in 1952, and made his conducting debut with the operetta Gasparone at Potsdam theatre in 1954. From 1958 to 1964 he was Kapellmeister at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, and then at the Opera in Zurich from 1964 to 1966. Between 1966 and 1973 he was first Kapellmeister in Stuttgart, his last permanent post. During the following years, he often conducted at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.

During his freelance career, Kleiber restricted his conducting appearances to a select number of occasions. He made his British debut in 1966 with a performance at the Edinburgh Festival of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, a work whose premiere his father had conducted in 1925. Kleiber's repertoire at the Royal Opera House included Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, La bohème and Otello. He made his Bayreuth debut in 1974 conducting Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

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