Otto Nossan Klemperer was born May 14, 1885 in the town then known as Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), the second child and only son of Ida and Nathan Klemperer.  (family trees: Nathan  Ida)

Both parents were musicians. Nathan, endowed with a rich baritone voice, impressive appearance, and intimate acquaintance with the German Lieder repertoire, seemed destined for the concert stage. But as the younger son of a school-teacher, Abraham, who could only afford to educate his eldest son*, it was as tradesman, not musician, that Nathan earned his livelihood. From his hometown Prague, "the Second Vienna," he headed west to the trade center Breslau to make his living, where he and his brother Hermann manufactured and sold toys.

Ida was a pianist of breathtaking ability. "She played with such overwhelming fire," wrote a young violinist of her performance of a Beethoven sonata, "that at moments she really made me forget my own playing and listen to her interpretation." In her case, unlike Nathan's, it was not lack of family finances that thwarted any hopes of a professional career. Hamburg had prospered from its status as a major European port; her own family's fortunes had also flourished. Rather, her gender and station rendered performing for a living unthinkable.

It was at a toy convention in 1881 when both were in their mid-thirties that they finally met, where Nathan was a prize-winning exhibitor and Ida an out-of-towner being shown Breslau's attractions by her sister. Although of diverse backgrounds and temperaments — Ida was as highly disciplined and as uncompromising in her moral standards as Nathan was congenial and laissez faire — their shared love of music drew them together. That evening, Ida accompanied Nathan in some Schubert songs. Three days later, they were married.

They settled in at Kaiser Wilhelm-Strasse (now Ul. Powstanców Slakich 3) and had two children in addition to Otto: Regina ("Regi"), b. August 1883 and Marianne, b. February 1889.

In October 1889, the family moved to Bogenstrasse in western Hamburg to be near Ida's well-to-do relatives. "In Hamburg the first thing I saw from the train were the round pillars with concert and theatre advertisements," recalled Klemperer. "They fascinated me, and what a role they have played in my life!"1

Although never financially well-off — Nathan's passions were music and theater, not business — the household was rich in other ways. Ida composed music, gave piano lessons, taught her children, and accompanied her husband in songs by Schubert, Loewe, Schumann, and Brahms. Nathan recited Schiller and Goethe, and staged in-house theatrical performances in which the children and their friends participated. Visits to the theater, concerts, and later, the opera were part of the family routine.

He was especially impressed by the Hamburg premiere of Richard Strauss's Tod und Verklärung. "That impressed me tremendously; the sound of the orchestra, the whole build-up — I found it wonderful."

Otto attended the Hamburg Stiftungsschule which, under the forward-looking headmastership of Otto's relative, Anton Rée, broke with tradition and offered a free education to children of all faiths. He later attended the Johanneum. For a gifted student with a culturally-rich home environment like Otto, school held little interest. Only the history courses held his attention. But the walk home provided a unexpected encounter with musical greatness. As he later recounted:

One day, as I was walking home from school, I saw an odd-looking man beside me. He was holding his hat in his hand and seemed unable to walk properly. He had a jerky gait, halted abruptly from time to time, and appeared to have a clubfoot. Regarding him with inordinate curiosity, I told myself: 'That's Kapellmeister Mahler from the Municipal Theatre.'
(Minor Recollections, London: Dennis Dobson, 1964, pp.11-12)

As to young Otto's early musical instruction, Peter Hayworth relates:

From quite early it was decided that Otto should also be a musician. At the age of about five his mother started giving him piano lessons and within a year or so he could play, as he later put it, 'quite nicely'. Before long he was able to share in the musical activities of the household, performing Haydn symphonies in reductions for four hands with his mother and even joining in occasional chamber music. His greatest pleasure, however, was to put a book of poems on the piano and improvise on the ideas that these conjured up in his mind.
Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times, Volume 1 1885-1933, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.10

By the age of seven or eight, while standing behind a clarinettist who was performing with a military band at the Zoological Gardens, his perfect pitch and his sight-reading skills enabled him to observe a discrepancy between the notes the man was playing and those notated in his music. Only later did he discover that the musician was indeed playing a type of clarinet which produced sounds a tone lower than what was written.

At the age of ten or so he began studying under Hans Havekoss, under whose instruction he "quickly mastered much of the keyboard literature from Bach to Schumann." When the ten-year-old Otto served as piano accompanist to his father, who sang for the other guests at the hotel where they were staying during a holiday in the Holstein lakes region, both were assumed to be professionals hired for the purpose.

By the age of fifteen his talents were impressive enough to win over the two individuals whose opinion mattered most: the musical authority his parents consulted to discover if he had the makings of a great musician, and his mother's cousin Helene Rée, the patroness of struggling Hamburg talent who volunteered to finance his education and whose generosity he never forgot.

It was decided that an ordinary education would not suffice for so extraordinary a young man. His regular schooling was ended. At sixteen, after rigorous examination, he was sent to study under the highly esteemed pianist and professor James Kwast at one of the leading institutes of its kind in Germany, the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.

At the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Klemperer received instruction in theory and composition from Ivan Knorr and in piano from James Kwast. "To Kwast and Knorr I owe the whole basis of my musical development," stated Klemperer. The teen-aged Klemperer soon established himself as a pianist of note, performing Beethoven's Sonata in D major in a conservatory concert and serving as accompanist to the celebrated baritone Julius Stockhausen.

After only a year in Frankfurt, Klemperer was off to Berlin. When James Kwast left in 1902 for the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in the Potsdamerstrasse, Klemperer followed — a pattern which was repeated in 1905 when Kwast transferred to the Stern Conservatory, also in Berlin.

In Berlin, Klemperer was pronounced a spell-binding pianist who was destined for the concert stage. He also found himself much sought-after as an accompanist, touring with the celebrated Dutch cellist Jacques van Lier and rehearsing the singers of the Stern Gesangsverein under the conductorship of Oscar Fried. It was Fried who would introduce Klemperer to opportunties which would steer his career in an unforeseen direction.

In 1905, Fried called upon Klemperer to conduct the off-stage orchestra in the first successful production of Mahler's Third Symphony. Mahler was pleased with the results. A few months later in 1906, Klemperer was thrust into the position of principal conductor. He'd joined Max Rheinhardt's production of Orpheus in the Underworld as chorus master, again under Fried. When Fried refused to conduct the third performance because of an argument with one of the leads, Rheinhardt asked Klemperer to take over. The 21-year-old student took the podium, which he retained until the end of the season fifty performances later.

While in Vienna in 1907 for a performance with van Lier, Klemperer sought Mahler's help in launching a conducting career. Impressed by Klemperer's piano reduction of his Second Symphony, which Klemperer performed for him from memory, as well as by what he had already seen of Klemperer's conducting ability, Mahler wrote out the following recommendation:

GUSTAV MAHLER recommends Herr Klemperer as an outstanding musician, who despite his youth is already experienced and is predestined for the career of conductor. He vouches for the successful outcome of a probationary appointment and is willing personally to provide further information.

The recommendation would soon prove invaluable. Klemperer attended the annual festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, in hopes of discovering news of a job opening in this gathering of music professionals. He made such a discovery — but not in the concert halls. At lunch one day he found himself seated near two men from the German Theatre in Prague who were discussing their need for a junior conductor. When he presented himself and Mahler's card, he was sent at once to report to the Theatre's director, who hired him on the spot.