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Herbert von Karajan

 
Actor: Herbert von Karajan
 
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Died: 1989
  • Occupation: Actor, Director
  • Active: '70s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Music
  • Career Highlights: La Bohème, Nikolai Ghiaurov, Carmen
  • First Major Screen Credit: Der Rosenkavalier (1961)

Biography

Best known for more than 30 years of conducting with the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, and at such venues as the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival, Herbert Von Karajan has been the subject of documentary films and appeared as himself in three films during the '50s and '60s. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Music Encyclopedia: Herbert von Karajan
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(b Salzburg, 5 April 1908; d there, 16 July 1989). Austrian conductor. After study at the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Vienna Academy he conducted opera at Ulm, 1929-34, gaining a reputation for seeking technical perfection. He became music director at Aachen in 1934. A performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1937 launched an international career. Former Nazi associations caused an interruption in his career but from 1947 his progress as ‘General musikdirektor of Europe’ was unimpeded: he recorded with the Philharmonia, London, and the Vienna PO from 1950, succeeded Furtwängler in 1955 as principal conductor of the Berlin PO and was director of the Vienna Staatsoper, 1957-64 (not without tensions). He was artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, 1956-60, and from 1967 was responsible for productions at the Easter festival there of operas by Wagner, Verdi, Musorgsky and Strauss. He had links with Paris and Milan, but Berlin and Vienna were his chief bases. His Met début was in 1967 with his Salzburg production of Die Walküre . He conducted an orchestral repertory ranging from Bach to Henze, in which Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner were central; his interpretations were noted for their smoothness of line and luxuriance of sound.


 
Biography: Herbert von Karajan
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Over 30 years as its conductor, Herbert von Karajan (1908 - 1989) molded the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra into perhaps the finest of the world's large classical music ensembles. He was a superstar among conductors - his thick, steel-gray hair and authoritative manner was instantly recognizable around the musical world.

Von Karajan had the kind of powerful personality that stirred disagreement - even beyond the controversy generated by his allegiance to German Fascism early in his career. Critics and audiences marveled at the flawless sheen he could elicit from the Berlin Philharmonic and the other ensembles he conducted, but some found his interpretations almost too polished, lacking in soul and drama. Von Karajan was an autocrat on the podium, and his fabled perfectionism resulted in exhilarating orchestral sound but did not encourage fresh thinking. He lived a jet-set lifestyle, seeking and often receiving publicity, and he had a taste for adventure. Some called him egotistical or ruthless, and musicians cracked jokes in which God aspires to reach von Karajan's level. Yet, whatever divergent opinions music lovers might hold, few would disagree that von Karajan loomed large in the musical imagination of the twentieth century.

Studied Piano from Young Age

The son of Salzburg's chief medical officer, von Karajan grew up in that musically rich Austrian city, the hometown of Mozart. He started piano lessons at age three, gave a recital at eight, and generally benefited from his family's support. Von Karajan embarked on piano studies at the Salzburg Mozarteum but temporarily switched to an engineering program at the University of Vienna. When he was 20, he heard an opera performance by the legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, an artist whose single-mindedness and drive von Karajan himself would seek to emulate. "From the first bar it was as if I had been struck a blow," Von Karajan later wrote (as quoted by Martin Kettle in London's Guardian newspaper). "I was completely disconcerted by the perfection which had been achieved."

Soon von Karajan was taking conducting lessons with Franz Schalk and leading a student ensemble. In March of 1929 he made his public debut as a conductor, leading a performance of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro in Ulm, Germany. He remained on the staff of the Ulm opera house for five years but often returned to Salzburg to conduct orchestral performances there and to appear at the city's annual festival. Word spread about his talents, and critics began to prophesy a great future for the young conductor; one early newspaper review referred to him as Das wunder Karajan.

After Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, von Karajan flirted with fascism as early as 1933. When he was offered a job as music director at the municipal opera house in the German city of Aachen in 1934 or 1935, he agreed to join Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) party as a condition of employment. Details of von Karajan's involvement with the Nazis emerged slowly over the years, troubling many observers, and he never explicitly apologized for his support of Hitler's regime. The general consensus among historians, however, was that von Karajan had little interest in politics and joined the party because that seemed to be a good professional move at the time.

Indeed, von Karajan ran into trouble with the fascist overlords of German culture during the Nazi period. At first, with his striking good looks and fearsome energy, he created a sensation in German musical circles. In the late 1930s he was the toast of musical Berlin thanks to highly successful stints conducting The Marriage of Figaro and the gigantic Wagner opera Tristan and Isolde at the Berlin State Opera, where he became music director in 1938. He feuded with the other leading German conductor of the time, Wilhelm Furtwängler, who never joined the Nazis but maintained strong control over musical life in Germany. Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, admired von Karajan's work, but Hitler himself disliked it. That was a strong sign of trouble for von Karajan, who remained at work in Berlin during the first part of the war, but eventually fled to Italy with his second wife, Anna Maria. She was one-quarter Jewish, which further complicated the couple's status under the German government's system of racial classification.

Underwent American De-Nazification Procedure

After the war, von Karajan returned to Austria and submitted himself to questioning by an American de-Nazification tribunal. At first he was prohibited from performing, but was cleared to conduct a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946. In the audience was Walter Legge, a top producer and executive with England's EMI record company. Amazed by von Karajan's energy, Legge smoothed the way for von Karajan to record with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, a Vienna music society orchestra, and later to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Even at this stage the ambitious von Karajan drove a hard bargain; a series of recordings Legge made with von Karajan conducting the Philharmonia took months of negotiation.

In 1947, finally given an unconditional green light by officials of the American occupation, von Karajan began to conduct frequently and resumed much of his former star status. The following year he was hired as conductor at La Scala, the Milan, Italy opera house that stood at the center of Italian operatic tradition. It was a measure of von Karajan's versatility that over much of his career he was considered among the world's top conductors of Italian opera, something uncommon among composers trained in the German-Austrian tradition. Despite his authoritarian streak he was a talented handler of singers with equally strong personalities; African-American soprano Leontyne Price, according to John Rockwell of the New York Times, called von Karajan "one of the kindest men I ever met."

In Germany and Austria, too, von Karajan's mystique grew. Partly because, aside from Furtwängler, he had few competitors at his level in the German-speaking world; many of Germany's top musicians had been Jewish and had fled, if they could, to the United States and other countries. The expansion of classical music as recordings migrated from three-minute 78 rpm discs to LPs, which were much better suited to compositions that might be an hour or more in length, also played a role in his growing success. Von Karajan toured widely with the Philharmonia and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. To relieve the pressure associated with his growing renown, he took up yoga; he later practiced Zen Buddhism.

Finally, in 1955, von Karajan had his chance. Furtwängler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, died before the orchestra, Germany's most prominent, could undertake an American tour - its first since the war, and a potent symbol of Germany's full restoration to membership in the international cultural community. Von Karajan offered himself as the ideal replacement. The claim was justifiable, but von Karajan, with characteristic calculation, also insisted that he be named the orchestra's conductor for life. The orchestra's administration agreed, and the protests and pickets that met von Karajan in the U.S. were soon silenced by his dynamic presence on the podium.

Made More Than 800 Recordings

Von Karajan's appointment as the Berlin Philharmonic's conductor inaugurated a long reign at the top of the classical music world. The classics were at the top of their postwar popularity, and conductor-stars such as Leonard Bernstein flourished in both the U.S. and Europe. None could rival von Karajan, however, in terms of a reputation for absolute mastery over an orchestra. Signed to West Germany's premier classical label, Deutsche Grammophon, von Karajan recorded Beethoven's cycle of nine symphonies on three separate occasions. He amassed a total of over 800 recordings over his long career. The Berlin Philharmonic was his "instrument," but he was in demand as a guest conductor. An often-told anecdote related how von Karajan got into a taxi at an airport and, when the driver asked him where he wanted to go, he replied that it didn't matter; people wanted him everywhere.

Named the artistic director of the Vienna State Opera in 1956, von Karajan became as famous in opera houses as he was in orchestral concert halls. He conducted Wagner's massive four-opera Ring cycle at the Bayreuth theater in southeastern Germany, where it had been premiered a century before. Von Karajan also assumed the directorship of the Salzburg Festival in his hometown, revitalizing an event that had come to seem a rather lifeless shrine to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his music. Where other German conductors tended to restrict themselves mostly to the classic Austro-German strand of classical music running from Haydn and Mozart through Beethoven and Brahms, von Karajan ranged farther afield, winning special acclaim for his interpretations of the orchestrally lush symphonies of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. He continued to appear frequently in Italy and to conduct the music of Verdi, Puccini, and other Italian operatic composers.

Von Karajan on the podium was an unforgettable figure for those who saw him in concert, and even more so for the players who worked under him. Philharmonia orchestra flutist Gareth Morris (as quoted by Terry Teachout in Commentary) recalled von Karajan's conducting of Ravel's Bolero this way: "With the eyes closed and the hands barely chest high, von Karajan gave us the beat with a single finger, and even that barely moved…. With each slight lift of the hands the tension became even greater. By the end of the piece, the hands were above his head. And that power of that final climax was absolutely colossal." Von Karajan generally conducted with his eyes closed, as if to say that the music existed in an abstract world beyond the conductor and musicians. Indeed, controlling though he may have been, his interpretations did not draw attention to themselves in a radical way; he aimed instead to erase the boundary between music and listener.

French fashion model Eliette Mouret became von Karajan's third wife, and he lived the high life in his spare time, maintaining houses in the Austrian Alps, in the Swiss resort of St. Moritz, and in the glamorous French town of St. Tropez. Von Karajan learned to fly his own plane, at first a two-seater and finally a Lear jet that he shared with an Austrian airline. He was a mountain climbing enthusiast, and he could often be found on Europe's ski slopes. Von Karajan drew photographers and gossip journalists with outlandish statements; he once, for instance, said that he was considering having himself cryogenically frozen so that he could later be thawed and re-record pieces from the standard classical repertory.

The ego revealed by such statements grated on some observers during the last phases of von Karajan's career, and some of the bloom came off his reputation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Reviewers sometimes charged that he was repeating himself as he performed and recorded the same works again and again, and even the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic began to resist his authority; when he tried to add a young protegée, clarinetist Sabine Meyer, to the orchestra, the (all-male) group of musicians, which traditionally held the prerogative to make personnel decisions, rebelled, and von Karajan was forced to give in. Von Karajan did, however, succeed in making an international star of another protegée, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, whose playing had the same steely quality of perfection that von Karajan cultivated as a conductor. In increasingly poor health after a stroke and several other serious medical crises, von Karajan resigned as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in April of 1989. Though he continued to work, he lived only three more months and died at his home in the Austrian Alps on July 16, 1989. Some called him the last great conductor in the German-speaking world's great tradition.

Books

Osborne, Richard, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, Chatto & Windus, 1998.

Vaughan, Roger, Herbert von Karajan, Norton, 1986.

Periodicals

Billboard, August 7, 1999.

Commentary, May 2000.

Guardian (London, England), July 17, 1989.

National Review, August 18, 1989.

New York Times, July 17, 1989.

Washington Post, July 17, 1989.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Herbert von Karajan
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(born April 5, 1908, Salzburg, Austria — died July 16, 1989, Anif, near Salzburg) Austrian conductor. A child prodigy on the piano, he attended Salzburg's Mozarteum. He took his first conducting post in Ulm in 1929. In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party, and under the Third Reich his reputation grew swiftly. After World War II he initially was not allowed to conduct, but in 1947 he began recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, the start of a legacy of some 800 recordings. His U.S. debut in 1955 was attended by controversy over his Nazi-era activities. That same year he became Wilhelm Furtwängler's successor at the Berlin Philharmonic, and he headed the Salzburg Festival from 1964 until his death.

For more information on Herbert von Karajan, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Herbert von Karajan
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Karajan, Herbert von (käräyän') , 1908–89, Austrian conductor. Karajan began his conducting career in 1927. After World War II his reputation spread through Europe to the United States. He toured with various orchestras (notably the Berlin Philharmonic) and participated in many of Europe's music festivals. He was musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic and was artistic director of the Vienna State Opera (1956–64). He was a remarkable conductor, but his dictatorial style made him controversial.
 
Wikipedia: Herbert von Karajan
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Herbert von Karajan in 1938

Herbert von Karajan (5 April 1908–16 July 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."[1] Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for thirty-five years. He is the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, with record sales estimated at 200 million.[2]

Contents

Biography

Genealogy

Herbert von Karajan was the son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family. The Karajan family is said to have originally been Aromanian[3][4] or Greek[citation needed], from the region of Macedonia.[5][6] His great-great-grandfather, Geòrgios Johannes Karajànnis, was born in Kozani, a town in the Ottoman province of Rumélia (present West Macedonia in Greece), leaving for Vienna in 1767, and eventually Chemnitz, Saxony.[7] 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 surname Karajànnis became Karajan.[8] Herbert's family from the maternal side, through his grandfather who was born in the village of Mojstrana, Duchy of Carniola (today in Slovenia), had Slovene origins according to a modern genealogical research, thus contrasting with the traditional view which expressed a Serbian or simply a Slavic origin of his mother.[9]

Early years

Herbert von Karajan's parents, Ernst and Marta

Karajan was born in Salzburg, Austria as Herbert Ritter von Karajan.[10] He was a child prodigy at the piano.[11] From 1916 to 1926, he studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where he was encouraged to study conducting by his teacher, who noticed his amazing talent and ability.

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 1935, Karajan's career was given a significant boost when he was appointed Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor and was a guest conductor in Bucharest, Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Paris [2] [12]. 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".[13] 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. On 26 July 1938, he married his first wife, operetta singer Elmy Holgerloef. They would divorce in 1942.

Adolf Hitler did not appreciate Karajan's performance of Die Meistersinger on 2 June 1939, according to Winifred Wagner, because Karajan, who was conducting without a score, lost his way, the singers halted and the curtain was rung down in confusion.[14] According to Winifred Wagner, Hitler decided that Karajan was not ever to conduct at the annual Bayreuth festival.[citation needed] However, as a favourite of Hermann Göring he would continue his work as conductor of the Staatskapelle (1941-1945), the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera, where he would accompany about 150 opera performances in total.

On 22 October 1942, at the height of the war, Karajan married his second wife, Anna Maria "Anita" Sauest, born Gütermann, the daughter of a well-known manufacturer of yarn for sewing machines, and who, having a Jewish grandfather, was considered Vierteljüdin (one-quarter Jewish). By 1944, Karajan was, by his own account,[citation needed] losing favor with the Nazi leaders, but he still conducted concerts in wartime Berlin on 18 February 1945, and fled Germany with Anita for Milan a short time later.[15] Karajan and Anita divorced in 1958.

In the closing stages of the war, Karajan relocated his family to Italy with the assistance of Victor de Sabata.[16]

Karajan was discharged by the Austrian denazification examining board on 18 March 1946, and resumed his conducting career shortly thereafter.[17]

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 Soviet 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 1949, 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[18].

In 1951 and 1952, he conducted 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.

On 22 October 1958, he married his third wife, model Eliette Mouret; they became parents of two daughters, Isabel and Arabel.

He continued to perform, conduct and record prolifically until his death in Anif[1] in 1989, mainly with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic.

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. The maximum playing time of CD prototypes was sixty minutes, but the final specification enlarged the disc size and extended the capacity to seventy-four minutes. There is a story that this was due to Karajan's insistence that the format have sufficient capacity to contain Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a single disc, though Snopes has not verified this story.[19]. Kees Schouhamer Immink, a Philips research engineer and fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, denies the Beethoven connection.[20][21]

In 1980, von Karajan conducted the first recording ever to be commercially released on CD: Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), produced by Deutsche Grammophon. The recording is often acclaimed as one of the greatest of this work.

Through the 1980s, von Karajan re-recorded many works such as Beethoven's Nine Symphonies (his highly regarded recordings are the ones made in the 1970s), with Deutsche Grammophon's CD booklet introduction saying that he wanted to preserve his legacy digitally. He also pioneered the Digital Compact Cassette though that format was not particularly successful. [22]

Nazi membership

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Karajan joined the Nazi Party in Salzburg on 8 April 1933; his membership number was 1.607.525. In June the Nazi Party was outlawed by the Austrian government. However, Karajan's membership was valid until 1939. In this year the former Austrian members were verified by the general office of the Nazi Party. Karajan's membership was declared invalid, but his accession to the party was retroactively determined to have been on 1 May 1933 in Ulm, with membership number 3,430,914. [23][24]

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[who?] have argued that he joined the Nazis only to advance his own career, critics such as Jim Svejda[citation needed] have pointed out that other prominent conductors, such as Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini, fled from fascist Europe at the time. However, British music critic Richard Osborne argues that among the many well-known conductors who worked in Germany throughout the war years—a list that includes Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernest Ansermet, Carl Schuricht, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss and Karl Elmendorff—Karajan was in fact one of the youngest and least advanced in his career.[25]

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. [26] 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 opened his concerts with the Nazi favourite 'Horst Wessel Lied.'"[27] In addition, although he did open a Paris concert with the Horst Wessel Lied, he had a history of avoiding political or nationalistic gestures at performances wherever possible.[citation needed]

Jewish musicians such as Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, and Itzhak Perlman refused to play in concerts with Karajan because of his Nazi past.[28][29] Richard Tucker also pulled out from a 1956 recording of Il trovatore when he learned that Karajan would be conducting, and threatened to do the same on the Maria Callas recording of Aida, until Tullio Serafin replaced Karajan. [30] Some[who?] have questioned whether Karajan was committed to the Nazi cause given his marriage in 1942 to Anita Gütermann, who was partly of Jewish origin. Evidence suggests[citation needed] that he received several threats to his career as a result of the engagement, and had attempted to resign from the Nazi Party when questioned about it.

Commentators such as Osborne and the British journalist Mark Lawson[31] have suggested that music, and access to making music, over-rode everything for Karajan, and that may have led to him making amoral decisions such as Nazi membership in order to get what he wanted with regard to music. Lawson in particular has suggested that the lack of conclusive evidence about Karajan's personal political ideology, and apparently contradictory episodes in his life (such as his marriage), at least suggests that his membership was more a means to an end than the expression of an ideological standpoint.

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.[citation needed]

However, it has been argued by commentator Jim Svejda and others that Karajan's pre-1970 manner did not sound polished as it is later alleged to have become.[32]

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; 2005, p1477.
  • 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."[citation needed][33]

The same Penguin Guide does nevertheless give the highest compliments to Karajan's recordings of the selfsame Haydn's two oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons.[34] It must also be stated that no less a respected Haydn scholar than H.C. Robbins Landon wrote the notes for Karajan's recordings of Haydn's 12 London Symphonies and states clearly that Karajan's recordings are among the finest he knows.

Regarding twentieth century music, Karajan had a strong preference for conducting and recording pre-1945 works (Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Puccini, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Arthur Honegger, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Carl Nielsen and Stravinsky), but also did record Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (1953) twice, and did premiere Carl Orff's "De Temporum Fine Comoedia" in 1973.

Professional behavior

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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.[35]

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."[36] This did not prevent violinist Oistrakh from saying, when Karajan turned 65, that he was "the greatest living conductor, a master in every style."[citation needed]

Awards and Honours

Karajan was the recipient of many honours and awards. On 21 June 1978, he received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music from Oxford University.[37] He was honored by the "Médaille de Vermeil" in Paris, the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, the Olympia Award of the Onassis Foundation in Athens and the UNESCO International Music Prize. He received two Gramophone awards for recordings of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and the complete Parsifal recordings in 1981. In 2002, the Herbert von Karajan Music Prize was founded in his honour; in 2003 Anne-Sophie Mutter who had made her debut with Karajan in 1977, became the first recipient of this award.[38]

In popular culture

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Discography

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

An other discography was made for the 100th anniversary of Karajan's birth [39] (2008). This discography includes all of Karajan's recordings from 1946-1984. The discography's presentation by the EMI (the record company):

"EMI Classics are very proud to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of conductor Herbert von Karajan in 2008 with five special releases including, for the very first time ever, The Complete EMI Recordings. Herbert von Karajan was very closely associated with EMI Classics (from 1946-1984), a partnership that produced nearly 160 CDs worth of music and over 1,000 hours of recorded music. Maestro von Karajan is not only the world’s best-selling conductor, but also one of EMI Classics’ best-selling artists of all time."

The discography's got 2 parts: Orchestral (88 CDs) and Opera & Vocal (72 CDs). The full tracklist is available at the website.

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." [40]
  • "Those who have achieved all their aims probably set them too low" http://www.karajan.org
  • Isaiah Berlin referred to Karajan as "a genius, with a whiff of sulphur about him".

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b John Rockwell (17 July 1989). "Herbert von Karajan Is Dead; Musical Perfectionist was 81". The New York Times: pp. p. A1. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE3DD173BF934A25754C0A96F948260. 
  2. ^ The Life and Death of Classical Music by Norman Lebrecht, p. 137.
  3. ^ Binder, David. "Vlachs, A Peaceful Balkan People" in Mediterranean Quarterly, Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 2004, pp. 115–124.
  4. ^ Letter from Karl-Markus Gauss to Austrian Newspaper Der Standard (Hungarian)
  5. ^ Herbert Von Karajan: A Life in Music by Richard Osborne.
  6. ^ Current Biography Yearbook 1986 by H.W. Wilson Company.
  7. ^ John Rockwell (22 June 1986). "General Music Director of Europe". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DEFD71E3BF931A15755C0A960948260. Retrieved on 2007-04-15. 
  8. ^ "Herbert Von Karajan-Karajan Family". Karajan Family. http://www.karajan.co.uk/family.html. Retrieved on 2007-04-15. 
  9. ^ Branka Lapajne (2008-04-04). "The Shared Slovenian Ancestors of Herbert von Karajan and Hugo Wolf". http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2500. Retrieved on 2008-05-05. 
  10. ^ Osborne (1987)
  11. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Article for Herbert von Karajan
  12. ^ The woman in the footage is Winifred Wagner, a lifetime friend of Adolf Hitler
  13. ^ Osborne (2000), p. 114
  14. ^ Below, Nicolaus von: "Als Hitlers Adjutant, 1937-45". Mainz: Hase & Koehler, 1980. ISBN 3-7758-0998-8, p. 166 (german); Below, Nicolaus von: "At Hitler's side: the memoirs of Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant 1937-1945": translated by Geoffrey Brooks. London: Greenhill Books ; Mechanicsburg, Pa. : Stackpole Books, 2001. ISBN 1-85367-468-0. p. ?
  15. ^ Osborne (2000)
  16. ^ Andrews, Deborah (1990). The Annual Obituary, 1989. St James Press. pp. 417. ISBN 1558620567. 
  17. ^ Osborne (2000); Karajan's deposition is presented in whole as Appendix C.
  18. ^ Lucerne Festival homepage, Karajan Celebration 2008
  19. ^ "Roll Over, Beethoven". snopes.com. 2007-05-23. http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp. Retrieved on 2008-04-30. 
  20. ^ Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (1998). "The CD Story". Journal of the AES, vol. 46, pp. 458-465, 1998. http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdstory.htm. Retrieved on 2008-06-19. 
  21. ^ Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (1998). "The Compact Disc Story" (PDF). Journal of the Audio Eng. Soc. 46 (5): 458–465 esp. 460. http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdstoryoriginal.pdf. Retrieved on 2008-06-19. 
  22. ^ [1]
  23. ^ Fred K. Prieberg: Handbuch Deutsche Musiker 1933–1945 Kiel, 2004, CD-ROM-Lexicon, p. 3545f. The author inspected the files of Karajan (as part of the Reichskulturkammer) at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (former Berlin Document Center). This background story was first published by Paul Moor in: High Fidelity Vol. 7/10 October 1957, p. 52-55, 190, 192-194 (The Operator). In addition, Prieberg's opinion about the Karajan biographer Richard Osborne has been stated: "his knowledge of history is sadly very low" (p. 3575)
  24. ^ Karsten Kammholz (not quite with the accuracy of Prieberg: Der Mann, der zweimal in die NSDAP eintrat; in: Die Welt, January 26, 2008
  25. ^ Osborne (2000), p. 85
  26. ^ http://www.classicalnotes.net/features/furtwangler.html
  27. ^ http://www.classicalnotes.net/features/furtwangler.html#karajan
  28. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/09/classicalmusicandopera.austria
  29. ^ http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm13-8/sm13_8_karajan_fr_en.html
  30. ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0902507/bio
  31. ^ BBC Radio 4 broadcast
  32. ^ http://www.amazon.com/Record-Shelf-Guide-Classical-Audiocassettes/dp/0761505911/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240088613&sr=1-2
  33. ^ [these recordings are no longer mentioned in the 1999 edition of the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs.]
  34. ^ [The Creation is listed first on pp. 656-7 of the 1999 Penguin Guide to Compact Discs, and the comment reads: "Among Versions of The Creation sung in German, Karajan's 1969 set remains unsurpassed, and now reissued as one of DG's 'Originals' at mid-price, is a clear first choice despite two small cuts..."] [The Seasons is, by 1999, listed in the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs in third place on p. 661, and the text states "Karajan's 1973 recording of The Seasons offers a fine, polished performance which is often very dramatic too. The characterizations is strong ... the remastered sound is drier than the original but is vividly wide. etc. etc. ..."]
  35. ^ Richard Kostelanetz. "Review of: Who killed Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht". Rain Taxi. http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2001fall/lebrecht.shtml. Retrieved on 2007-04-15. 
  36. ^ Monsaingeon, p. 143.
  37. ^ Herbert Von Karajan - Visits to Great Britain
  38. ^ Gramophone - News - The world's best classical music magazine
  39. ^ http://www.karajan100anniversary.com/new_products.htm
  40. ^ Brian Moynahan, 'Funeral in Berlin', The Sunday Times, 30 January 1983, quoted in Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anecdotes.

References

  • Lebrecht, Norman (2001). The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power. New York: Citadel Press. ISBN 0806520884. 
  • Lebrecht, Norman (2007). The Life and Death of Classical Music. New York: Anchor Books,. ISBN 9781400096589. 
  • Layton, Robert; Greenfield, Edward; March, Ivan (1996). Penguin Guide to Compact Discs. London; New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0140513671. 
  • Monsaingeon, Bruno (2001). Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0571205534. 
  • Osborne, Richard (1998). Herbert von Karajan. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0701167149. 
  • Osborne, Richard (2000). Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1555534252. 
  • Raymond, Holden (2005). The Virtuoso Conductors. New Haven, Connecticut; London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300093268. 
  • Alessandro, Zignani (2008). Herbert von Karajan. Il Musico perpetuo. Varese: Zecchini Editore,. ISBN 8887203679. 

External links

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Herbert von Karajan

Video

Preceded by
Clemens Krauss		 Music Director, Berlin State Opera
1939–1945		 Succeeded by
Joseph Keilberth
v • d • e
Vienna Symphony Principal Conductors

Ferdinand Löwe (1900) · Wilhelm Furtwängler (1920s) · Oswald Kabasta (1933) · Hans Swarowsky (1946) · Herbert von Karajan (1948) · Wolfgang Sawallisch (1960) · Josef Krips (1970) · Carlo Maria Giulini (1973) · Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1980) · Georges Prêtre (1986) · Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (1991) · Vladimir Fedoseyev (1997) · Fabio Luisi (2005)
v • d • e
Berliner Philharmoniker Principal Conductors

Ludwig von Brenner (1882) · Hans von Bülow (1887) · Arthur Nikisch (1895) · Wilhelm Furtwängler (1922) · Leo Borchard (1945) · Sergiu Celibidache (1945) · Wilhelm Furtwängler (1952) · Herbert von Karajan (1954) · Claudio Abbado (1989) · Simon Rattle (2002)
v • d • e
Vienna Staatsoper General Directors

Franz von Dingelstedt (1867) · Johann von Herbeck (1870) · Franz von Jauner (1875) · Wilhelm Jahn (1881) · Gustav Mahler (1897) · Felix Weingartner (1908) · Hans Gregor (1911) · Richard Strauss / Franz Schalk (1919) · Franz Schalk (1924) · Clemens Krauss (1929) · Felix Weingartner (1935) · Erwin Kerber (1936) · Heinrich Karl Strohm (1940) · Lothar Müthel (1941) · Karl Böhm (1943) · Franz Salmhofer (1945) · Karl Böhm (1954) · Herbert von Karajan (1956) · Egon Hilbert (1964) · Heinrich Reif-Gintl (1968) · Rudolf Gamsjäger (1972) · Egon Seefehlner (1976) · Lorin Maazel (1982) · Egon Seefehlner (1984) · Claus Helmut Drese (1986) · Eberhard Waechter / Ioan Holender (1991) · Ioan Holender (1992)
v • d • e
Orchestre de Paris Music Directors

Charles Munch (1967) · Herbert von Karajan (1969) · Georg Solti (1972) · Daniel Barenboim (1975) · Semyon Bychkov (1989) · Christoph von Dohnányi (1998) · Christoph Eschenbach (2000)



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