New documentary Traces to Nowhere takes a look at the elusive conductor Carlos Kleiber

The Austrian documentary Traces to Nowhere, newly released on DVD, doesn’t do much to explain the little enigmas that still surround the reclusive conductor Carlos Kleiber... which is a good thing. We hear some details of his life: Kleiber (1930-2004) was the son of another well-known conductor, and even when his own reputation seemed to equal or surpass that of his father’s, he oddly never felt he measured up. His father remained a giant in his mind. There are other details about his life, the admiration and enmity that his idiosyncratic style and fast success earned him, his unusual death, and so on.

But one of the film’s strengths lies in its skirting away from a preponderance of biographical detail and towards the use of archival footage of the conductor at work: This sounds like it would be a little dull (“Hey, wanna watch some archival footage of a Serbian conductor rehearsing with the Vienna Philharmonic in the 1970s?” “Er, no thanks. There’s an ice cube I was planning to watch melt.”) But the conductor actually had a beautiful and precise way of verbally translating his vision of a score to his musicians that’s exciting to watch, even for non-musicians and those who may not normally be fans of classical music.