So, apparently, did his dedication to his young son and daughter; he was determined to give them more attention than his father had given him.
Carlos Kleiber: "My father always told me: `Do whatever you want, but don't try to conduct waltzes. They're the hardest things in the world.' Unfortunately, I didn't listen to him."
By the early 90's, Kleiber's appearances had become rare, and over the next decade, they tailed off completely.
The sense of loss at his death is tempered by the fact that the music world essentially lost him years ago.
Yet Kleiber was not eccentric in the way the reclusive pianist Glenn Gould and the gurulike conductor Sergiu Celibidache were.
His interpretations were straightforward, never gimmicky or exaggerated, neither experimental nor given to deconstruction.
He was simply consumed by the desire to come as close as he could to the composer's original vision of a piece.
The experiments, the deconstructing and the reconstructing took place in his mind, as part of the process of coming to grips with a work.
If one were to try to reduce his quest to a question, it would be: "What is this work?," not "What can I do with this work?"
Kleiber's interpretations of even the most overplayed repertory - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, "La Traviata" or "Die Fledermaus" - gave listeners the illusion that the works were new, that Kleiber himself had never heard anyone else's interpretations of them and that he was presenting something fresh and vital for their consideration and delight.
As with major conductors of the past - Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and, of course, Erich Kleiber - so with Carlos Kleiber: the music's intellectual, emotional and purely visceral charge almost always came across at the most intense and deepest level imaginable, whether or not one agreed with a specific interpretation.
Listeners often felt that they were hearing not an interpretation but the work itself, the text with no extraneous commentary.
Although this, too, was an illusion, only the greatest interpretive artists have been able to create it.
But unlike those conductors, born in the 19th century, Kleiber seemed more vulnerable than commanding when he stood before an orchestra.
I remember him stopping the Scala orchestra when he was having trouble achieving a certain subtle nuance in one of the "Rosenkavalier" waltzes and saying, sadly: "My father always told me: 'Do whatever you want, but don't try to conduct waltzes. They're the hardest things in the world.' Unfortunately, I didn't listen to him."
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