Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer was a prominent conductor whose career spanned from the first decade of the 20th century through the early 1970s. He made many recordings, of which perhaps the best known are those of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler. Klemperer was born in Breslau, then in Prussia, now Wrocław, Poland. He studied music first at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, and later in Berlin under Hans Pfitzner. In 1905 he met Gustav Mahler while conducting the off-stage brass at a performance of Mahler's Symphony No.