Herbert von Karajan

2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers

Herbert von Karajan ( April 5, 1908 – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor, one of the most renowned 20th century conductors. His obituary in the New York Times described him as "probably the world's best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music." Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for thirty-five years.

Biography

Genealogy

Herbert von Karajan was the son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family. The Karajan family is said to have originally been Aromanian ( Vlach) or Greek, from the region of Macedonia . His great-great-grandfather, Georg Johannes Karajanis was born in Kozani, a town in the Ottoman province of Rumelia,(present West Macedonia in Greece), leaving for Vienna in 1767, and eventually Chemnitz, Saxony. He and his brother participated in the establishment of Saxony's cloth industry, and both were ennobled for their services by Frederick Augustus III on June 1, 1792, thus the prefix " von" to the family name. The Karajanis name became Karajan.

Early years

Karajan was born in Salzburg, Austria as Heribert Ritter von Karajan. He was a child prodigy in piano. From 1916 to 1926, he studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where he was encouraged to study conducting.

In 1929, he conducted Salome at the Festspielhaus in Salzburg, and from 1929 to 1934, Karajan served as first Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater in Ulm. In 1933, Karajan made his conducting debut at the Salzburg Festival with the Walpurgisnacht Scene in Max Reinhardt's production of Faust. The following year, and again in Salzburg, Karajan led the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time, and from 1934 to 1941, Karajan conducted opera and symphony concerts at the Aachen opera house.

In March of 1935, Karajan's career was given a significant boost when he applied for membership in the Nazi Party. That same year, Karajan was appointed Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor and was a guest conductor in Bucharest, Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Paris . Moreover, in 1937, Karajan made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera with Fidelio. He enjoyed a major success in the State Opera with Tristan und Isolde and in 1938, his performance of the opera was hailed by a Berlin critic as Das Wunder Karajan (The Karajan miracle), claiming that his "success with Wagner's demanding work Tristan und Isolde sets himself alongside Furtwängler and de Sabata, the greatest opera conductors in Germany at the present time". Receiving a contract with Deutsche Grammophon that same year, Karajan made the first of numerous recordings by conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in the overture to Die Zauberflöte. Adolf Hitler did not appreciate Von Karajan's performance of Die Meistersinger June 1939 according to Winifred Wagner because Karajan who was conducting without a score lost his way, the singers halted, the curtain was rung down in confusion. According to Winifred Wagner Hitler decided that Von Karajan was not ever to conduct at the annual Bayreuth festival. However as a favourite of Hermann Göring he would continue his work as conductor of the Staatkapelle (1941-1945), the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera, where he would accompany about 150 opera performances in total.

Karajan’s Heldensonate, composed shortly after the German invasion of Austria, and which he had originally titled "Anschluß-Sonate", was performed in 1938 at one of the Wahnfried receptions Hitler attended annually. That work's only published recording was an April Fool's Day selection for the MusicWeb reviewing site. Its provenance is unclear, and it is not even clear that this disc has ever actually been auditioned.

On October 22, 1942 at the height of the war, Karajan married Anita Gütermann, the daughter of a well-known sewing machine magnate, and who, having a Jewish grandfather, was considered Vierteljüdin (one-quarter Jewish). After the wedding, the NSDAP decided that she was to become one of Germany's five "honorary Aryans". By 1944, he was, according to Karajan, on the outs with the Nazi leaders, but Karajan still conducted concerts in wartime Berlin on Feb 18, 1945 and fled Germany with Anita for Milan a short time later. Karajan and Anita divorced in 1958.

Karajan was deposed by the Austrian denazification examining board on March 18, 1946 and resumed his conducting career shortly thereafter.

Postwar years

In 1946, Karajan gave his first post-war concert, in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic, but he was banned from further conducting activities by the Russian occupation authorities because of his Nazi party membership. That summer, he participated anonymously in the Salzburg Festival. The following year, he was allowed to resume conducting.

In 1948, Karajan became artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna. He also conducted at La Scala in Milan. However, his most prominent activity at this time was recording with the newly-formed Philharmonia Orchestra in London, helping to build them into one of the world's finest. Starting from this year, Karajan began lifetime long attendance of the Lucerne Festival.

In 1951 and 1952, he conducted again at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

In 1955, he was appointed music director for life of the Berlin Philharmonic as successor to Wilhelm Furtwängler. From 1957 to 1964, he was artistic director of the Vienna State Opera. He was closely involved with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival, where he initiated the Easter Festival, which would remain tied to the Berlin Philharmonic's Music Director after his tenure. He continued to perform, conduct, and record prolifically until his death in 1989. Karajan's final years however were devoted exclusively to the Vienna Philharmonic after a much-publicised falling-out with the Berlin Philharmonic over their refusal to admit clarinettist Sabine Meyer, a Karajan protege.

Karajan and the compact disc

Karajan played an important role in the development of the original compact disc digital audio format. He championed this new consumer playback technology, lent his prestige to it, and appeared at the first press conference announcing the format. Early CD prototypes had a play time limited to sixty minutes. It is often asserted that the decision to extend the maximum playing time of the compact disc to its standard of seventy-four minutes was achieved in order to adequately accommodate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. This, however, is denied by Kees Immink, who co-invented the CD.

Nazi Membership

Karajan's membership in the Nazi Party and increasingly prominent career in Germany from 1933 to 1945 cast him in an uncomplimentary light after the war. While Karajan's defenders have argued that he joined the Nazis only to advance his own career, his critics have pointed out that other, more prominent conductors such as Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini, fled from fascist Europe at the time. It should be noted, however, that many famous conductors worked in Germany throughout the war years, including Furtwängler, Ansermet, Schuricht, Böhm, Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Rother and Elmendorff.

Some have argued that careerism could not have been Karajan's sole motivation, since he first joined the Nazi Party in 1933 in Salzburg, Austria, five years before the Anschluss. In The Cultural Cold War, published in Britain as Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders noted that Karajan "had been a party member since 1933, and never hesitated to open his concerts with the Nazi favourite ' Horst Wessel Lied.'" However, Richard Osborne's full-length biography has documented conclusively that he joined the Party as late as 1935, as a precondition for attaining the directorship in Aachen. Previously, he had filed for membership in 1933-- probably to shore up his career in Ulm during a month marked by purges of cultural leaders from orchestras, opera houses, and universities-- but appears to have made no subsequent effort to pursue the application. In addition, although he notoriously did open a Paris concert with the Horst Wessel Lied, he had a history of avoiding political or nationalistic gestures at performances wherever possible.

Musicians such as Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, and Itzhak Perlman refused to play in concerts with Karajan because of his Nazi past. Some have questioned whether Karajan was committed to the Nazi cause given the fact of his marriage in 1942 to Anita Guetermann, partly of Jewish origin. Evidence suggests that he received several threats to his career as a result of the engagement, and had attempted resignation from the Nazi Party when questioned about it.

Musicianship

There is widespread agreement that Herbert von Karajan had a special gift for extracting beautiful sounds from an orchestra. Opinion varies concerning the greater aesthetic ends to which The Karajan Sound was applied. The American critic Harvey Sachs criticized the Karajan approach as follows:

Karajan seemed to have opted instead for an all-purpose, highly refined, lacquered, calculatedly voluptuous sound that could be applied, with the stylistic modifications he deemed appropriate, to Bach and Puccini, Mozart and Mahler, Beethoven and Wagner, Schumann and Stravinsky... many of his performances had a prefabricated, artificial quality that those of Toscanini, Furtwängler, and others never had... most of Karajan's records are exaggeratedly polished, a sort of sonic counterpart to the films and photographs of Leni Riefenstahl.

However, it has been argued by commentator Jim Svejda and others that Karajan's pre-1970 manner did not seem as calculatedly polished as it is later alleged to have become.

Two reviews from the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs can be quoted to illustrate the point.

• Concerning a recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, a canonical Romantic work, the Penguin authors wrote "Karajan's is a sensual performance of Wagner's masterpiece, caressingly beautiful and with superbly refined playing from the Berlin Philharmonic" and it is listed in first place on pages 1586-7 of the 1999 Penguin Guide to Compact Discs

• About Karajan's recording of Haydn's "Paris" symphonies, the same authors wrote, "big-band Haydn with a vengeance ... It goes without saying that the quality of the orchestral playing is superb. However, these are heavy-handed accounts, closer to Imperial Berlin than to Paris ... the Minuets are very slow indeed ... These performances are too charmless and wanting in grace to be whole-heartedly recommended."

The same Penguin Guide does nevertheless give the highest compliments to von Karajan's recordings of the selfsame Haydn's two oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons.

As for twentieth century music, Karajan was criticized for having conducted and recorded pre-1945 works almost exclusively ( Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Puccini, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Arthur Honegger, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Carl Nielsen and Stravinsky), although he did record Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (1953) twice, and did premiere Carl Orff's "De Temporum Fine Comoedia" in 1973.

Professional behaviour

Some critics, particularly British critic Norman Lebrecht, charged Karajan with initiating a devastating inflationary spiral in performance fees. During his tenure as director of publicly-funded performing organizations such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival, he started paying guest stars exorbitantly, as well as ratcheting up his own remuneration:

Once he possessed orchestras he could have them produce discs, taking the vulture's share of royalties for himself and rerecording favorite pieces for every new technology: digital LPs, CD, videotape, laserdisc. In addition to making it difficult for other conductors to record with his orchestras, von Karajan also drove up the prices that he would be paid and thus other conductors wanted.

During a recording session of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich, pianist Richter demanded an extra take, to which Karajan replied "No, no, we haven't got time, we've still got to do the photographs." This did not prevent violinist Oistrakh from saying, when Karajan turned 65, that he was "the greatest living conductor, a master in every style."

Finally, Karajan was held by some to be excessively egotistical. When he conducted Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera, he raised the conductor's stand to place himself in the line of sight of the audience; in operatic recordings of Verdi, he changed the balance so as to bring the sound of the orchestra forward in the final mix, all to emphasize his role in the music-making. Critics compare him with Leonard Bernstein, claiming that both conductors were "unequaled in their mastery of podium histrionics." As evidenced by many video recordings, he also often conducted with his eyes closed.

In popular culture

Karajan's Decca recordings of Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss' An der schönen, blauen Donau (The Blue Danube waltz) were used by director Stanley Kubrick in his science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (with Kubrick animating the sequence to match the prerecorded music, the opposite of the usual practice for soundtracks). The popular effect of this unconventional use of the music was such that the music became more identified for subsequent generations with space stations, primitive men, alien cubes and such, than with the original waltz. Some years later, Kubrick again used Karajan's recordings, this time Béla Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in The Shining. Although there is a 1958 version by Ferenc Fricsay of the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, the symphony's finale we hear at the end of the movie is Karajan's now-famous 1963 recording. These two versions are from DG and performed by the same orchestra, The Berlin Philharmonic.

Discography

A complete discography of Karajan's recordings is available at the website of the Herbert von Karajan Centrum.

Quotes

• Explaining why he preferred conducting the Berlin Philharmonic to the Vienna Philharmonic: "If I tell the Berliners to step forward, they do it. If I tell the Viennese to step forward, they do it. But then they ask why."