Klaus Tennstedt retired as a conductor in 1994; two years later at his home near Kiel he recorded this interview for radio. Tennstedt looks back at the restrictions imposed on his work as a music director in the GDR, his move to the West and and his work in the USA and the UK. The quality of the recording is good, despite Klaus's voice being affected by the throat cancer diagnosed in 1985.
My thanks are due to the kind Japanese classical music fan who extracted this original broadcast interview from a rare CD in his personal collection and sent me a copy.
An English translation of the interview follows below:-
Interview for radio, recorded in May 1996. The interviewer is Andreas Schmidt. The interview was broadcast by NDR Channel 3 on Tennstedt's 70th birthday, 6th June 1996.
AS: Herr Tennstedt, your career took off late in your life. You were already 50 when you had your international breakthrough. Before that, you were conducting in the GDR, you were more of a 'midfielder' there, then you moved to Kiel in Western Germany. There you worked as General Music Director for four years, again more or less in a provincial setting. And then finally came the big breakthrough. Why so late? Was it because of the conditions in the GDR?
KT: Yes, of course. The highest thing I could achieve there was the position of General Music Director at the Staatstheater Schwerin, which is a good opera house, but of course is also considered provincial. And I was so unpopular with the superiors that I couldn't get anywhere other than the provinces.
AS: To be a little cheeky, one could say: Kurt Masur made it.
KT: Yes, other things played a part there ... I don't want to talk about that. There was also politics involved, right? Then we had the fall of the Wall. And, um ... he might have handled things more skilfully than me!
I have ... I fought at the Ministry of Culture against things that didn't suit me. Imagine this: it was stipulated that you had to do sixty percent of the so-called modern music using composers from the GDR, and that really bothered me, because the GDR composers of the time - let's exclude Paul Dessau and [Siegfried] Matthus - were absolute dilettantes. And I couldn't put up with that. I just didn't do it. And so I didn't fulfil the sixty percent ... and then, just imagine ... there on the front page of the Schweriner Zeitung, in large type, it read: 'Tennstedt and the decadent Western music'. Well, that was it for me ... after that, it was really all over.
Then I arranged my escape. One time they let me out to guest-conduct in Sweden and - I don't know how the Stasi did it - by mistake they gave me a visa for three months, which far exceeded the time I'd intended to work in Sweden. And then I went - without their knowledge, as it was strictly forbidden - to West Berlin and found an 'escape helper' for my wife. For her it was much more difficult; she had to travel via Hungary and Czechoslovakia ... that could have gone terribly wrong.
Anyway, we both managed to flee. And then I was very, very glad to get a job out of 40 applicants in Kiel, as General Music Director. And I was very happy about that. I no longer had the impression that I could ever make a so-called international career. I was just really glad that I was here.
AS: How is it that you have received so many international honours, that you are so well known, but in Germany only the real connoisseurs know who you are? Why is that?
KT: Well, I have worked a lot with the Berlin Philharmonic, I've made records with them too, and just before my hip became a problem we did the extremely difficult Mahler Sixth symphony and the orchestra and audience were delighted. That was a great evening.
The reason I was away so much from Germany is simply that America was reaching out ... the so-called Magic Five, the big five orchestras kept hiring me again and again. My schedule was full. It was simply not possible to conduct in Cologne or Munich or wherever, because the schedule was full. And then London came along, and then there was absolutely no more time left at all.