Although Otto Klemperer was approaching his 80s and not always in the best of health, the years 1967/68 were a period of great activity for him. The interpreter and creator who had been so at home with the radicalism of late 1920s-early 1930s Berlin picked up on the energy and youth of the age in 1960s London both to make and to work with new friends and colleagues.
With Pierre Boulez he attended and debated contemporary music concerts... . With Daniel Barenboim Klemperer debated Mahler 7, engaged in friendly banter about his own compositions and agreed ... to record with him the Beethoven Piano Concertos and Mozart No.25. He even did some work with Jacqueline du Pré on a test recording of Strauss’s Don Quixote. On his visit to Bayreuth he met Anja Silja and was charmed by her personality and the unsentimental nature of her performance as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.
While Klemperer’s interest in cutting-edge contemporary music remained lively... his own performing and recording repertoire remained of an earlier vintage... . His Mahler now expanded to take in Symphonies Nos.7 and 9... . The Mozart operas and late symphonies that had once been so important to him... would now be performed, and recorded, in London as well... .
The London newspaper critics in October 1968 talked about this performance of Schumann Two as the rediscovery of a long lost work... . At first Peter Stadlen was perplexed: ‘it still comes as a surprise that Otto Klemperer’s tidily analytical mind will enter a happy symbiosis with Romantic music’. Mosco Carner (The Times) worried about Schumann’s mental health at the time of the score’s composition: because he was having ‘dark days’ (the composer’s own euphemism) surely the symphony couldn’t be good? ‘With Schumann’s difficulty in thinking in strict symphonic terms and his often clunky management of orchestral mechanics, the work would seem to merit its neglect’. Yet, eventually, Carner’s heart won out over his head. ‘Genius must out.
For all its faults each of its four movements contains moments of the sheerest beauty and the Adagio is a pure gem – typical Schumann in its introspection and Versponnenheit (‘airiness’) and demonstrating the puzzling fact of being like most of his slow movements, most imaginatively scored’.
