This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
My first encounter with Klaus Tennstedt was in a neon-lit media room where we were supposed to be discussing his favourite recordings. It turned out something got lost in translation. Klaus, coming from the German Democratic rump-state, knew hardly any Western releases and cared less. He was happy just to chat about music for an hour.
I came away transformed. Not by anything Klaus said to me in jumbled German-English. It was having his total beam of attention that erased every trivial thought from my mind.
I saw the same effect with orchestras. Klaus arrived as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, an array of stressed-out strings and Salvation Army brass who couldn’t agree on much or even like each other. Klaus stumbled into a morning rehearsal, one shoelace undone, fag still between his lips, and the sound changed.
Players could not believe what their fingers yielded. “We felt like Vienna,” one said. It was not the baton, just the man. “Klaus didn’t have a great technique,” observed a young maestro, “but the music … What a difference!”
Conducting is 99 per cent image. Abbado and Muti wore diamond-cut tails. Solti terrorised the back rows. Boulez affected Gallic insouciance, Ozawa a Beatles mop-top. All very photogenic. Tennstedt, squinting, wore Erich Honecker spectacles and a shirt that was soaked in sweat within minutes. He waved his arms like a drowning tramp (“a demented stork” wrote one critic). He lost his place in the score and his balance on the podium. Human? All too human. Inimitable and unique.
Warner is marking his 100th birthday this month with a 41-disc box, not that he’d have reached 100. He smoked like a factory stack and drank to excess. He drove big cars badly and flew with a tube of lube in his pocket in case he got lucky with an air hostess.
He was chaotic in all things except music, where he demanded precision and gave his all. He once ordered the LPO to go home and “study your private parts”. Collapse of English po-faces. I think he knew what he was doing.
An orchestra player’s son in Halle — “Handel’s town,” he’d prompt — Klaus was a promising violinist when a hand deformation forced him to give up. Kurt Masur, a teenaged conductor, suggested he give it a go. Masur heard Klaus’s mother complain, “Why can’t you be more like Kurt?” Whilst Masur became a Politburo pet, Klaus annoyed party bigwigs and was banished to Schwerin, a small lakeside city. Masur petitioned Honecker to let Klaus leave. When Klaus reached freedom, aged 45, the only job he could obtain was in the remote naval town of Kiel.
Spotted by a Canadian scout, his Toronto debut proved so incandescent that America’s Big Five came begging for dates. Klaus promptly had a nervous breakdown and took a year out. “It was then that I discovered Mahler,” he told me. “Mahler, too, had suffered.”
The tragedy of his life — never mentioned — was his daughter’s suicide in the GDR. Klaus, blaming himself, found meaning in Mahler’s Death of Children songs and redemption in Beethoven. The almighty Herbert von Karajan acclaimed him as “the last true Kapellmeister” and invited him to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic.
But when Karajan asked what Tennstedt thought of his new Richard Strauss disc, Klaus, unable to lie, listed every false note. He was not reinvited.
Cresting a 1980s Mahler revival, he recorded a symphonic cycle for EMI and bought a Rolls-Royce, his boyhood dream, on the royalties. Next morning in Kiel, he found the German neighbours had scratched the paintwork. They did so every day until he sold the car.
Cancer grabbed his throat and took him out for long stretches. Each time he entered the Royal Festival Hall, the audience would rise to its feet in acclamation. A banner fluttered from a balcony rail: “Welcome back, Klaus!” No other conductor in London ever had such a reception.
I took an awkward adolescent to see him backstage. Klaus beckoned her to his sofa, placing an arm around, but not touching, her shoulder. She sat motionless, absorbed for 20 minutes as he chatted away to me in a foreign language. That’s what he did: he enchanted.
Rivals viewed him as sparrows to an eagle. Some muttered deprecations. Carlos Kleiber, the most accomplished, saw Tennstedt conduct Mahler on television and was smitten. “Never clever or perfunctory, never self-conscious,” wrote Kleiber. “GENUINE.”
When his cancellations exceeded comebacks, I attended every orchestra-only rehearsal of Mahler’s mega eighth symphony, knowing I would never hear the music again with such lucidity. He accepted a doctorate honoris causa from Oxford University in exchange for rehearsing the student orchestra.
I spent the morning with him in June 1994, hearing about his frailties and his fears. He then worked the students through a ten-minute overture by Carl Maria von Weber that none of them have forgotten. Afterwards he whispered: “Will I conduct again?”
He never did. Klaus Tennstedt died at home, aged 71, in January 1998, and I knew we’d not see his like again. He exemplified the gulf between the divinely gifted and the merely self-made. Kleiber, and perhaps the young Karajan, were his only equals.
Essential as the Warner set is, it smells of daytime studios. Genius demands a live response, ideally after dark. Some inspirations can be found online. YouTube has a Metropolitan Opera Fidelio of an intensity that defies reason. There are live Mahlers from Minnesota and a Berlin Bruckner of unearthly iridescence. A Tristan end-scene from Tanglewood is literally to die for. The word I am looking for, the one that springs to mind when I think of Klaus, is: love.
