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Herbert von Karajan (April 5, 1908 – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian
conductor. His New York Times obituary described him as, "probably the world's
best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music," and
placing him "in the topmost ranks of 20th-century conductors." Karajan conducted
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for thirty-five years.
Genealogy
Herbert von Karajan was the son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family of Greek
ancestry. His great-great-grandfather, Georgeous Johannes Karajanis (Greek:
ΓεώÏγιος Ιωάννης ΚαÏαγιάννης), was born in Kozani, at that
time a town in the Ottoman Empire now in Greek Macedonia, 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
Herbert von Karajan was born in Salzburg, Austria as Heribert Ritter von Karajan.
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 Brussels, Stockholm,
Amsterdam, and other European cities. Moreover, in 1937, Karajan made his debut
with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera with Fidelio. He enjoyed a
major success with Tristan und Isolde and in 1938, was hailed by a Berlin critic as
Das Wunder Karajan (The Karajan miracle). 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. However
Adolf Hitler had only scorn for the famed conductor after he fumbled at one point
in a gala performance of "Die Meistersinger" for the King and Queen of Yugoslavia
in June 1939. Conducting without a score, Karajan lost his way, the singers halted,
the curtain was rung down in confusion. Furious, Hitler directed Winifred Wagner :
"Herr von Karajan will never conduct at Bayreuth in my lifetime", and he did not.
After the war, Karajan did his best to prevent the evocation of this shameful and
not too glorious incident that perhaps saved his post-war career.
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). Within days of the
wedding, "things started turning nasty" when the NSDAP opened an enquiry into
whether or not Karajan was exempt from the Party's racial laws. Karajan apparently
verbally tendered his resignation from the Party, but was kept on as a Party
member, either because the resignation was not submitted in writing, or Party
leaders felt he was better used conducting concerts. However, Karajan's conducting
career now took a definite turn for the worse, and by 1944, he was on the outs with
the Nazi leaders. Karajan conducted his final concert in wartime Berlin on Feb 18,
1945 and, fearing for his life, 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.
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 brilliant but soloistically inclined 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. However, it is likely that the story is apocryphal.
Nazi
Membership
As was the case with soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Karajan's membership in the
Nazi Party and prominent cultural association with Nazism 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 great 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. Additionally, 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?, her book on CIA cultural policy in postwar Europe, 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.'"
Additionally and in contradistinction to Furtwängler, Karajan had no objections to
conducting in occupied Europe. Musicians such as Isaac Stern 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, a woman of clear Jewish origin, but it is
only from that point that Karajan's star within the government dimmed.
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.
This characteristic style struck many listeners as yielding different degrees of
success in music of different eras. Web data suggest that, of Karajan's numerous
recordings, those of mainstream nineteenth century Romantic repertory often attract
the greatest admiration (some regard his 1962 recording of the Beethoven symphonies
as the yardstick for all other performances of these pieces.) He was simply
peerless in the music of Anton Bruckner and Robert Schumann. But von Karajan's work
in music of the Baroque or Classical periods is not at present fashionable outside
Germany and Austria.
Two reviews, arguably representative of British and American opinion, from the
widely-read 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 ... an excellent first choice."
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
behavior
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 rehearsal of the Beethoven Triple Concerto with David Oistrakh, Sviatoslav
Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich, pianist Richter asked Karajan if they could go
over a passage again, to which Karajan replied "No, now it is time for pictures".
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, pointing out both conductors were "unequaled in their mastery of podium
histrionics." In fact, with his intimately known Berlin group Karajan frequently
recalled Fritz Reiner in his economy of motion. He also often conducted with his
eyes closed. Many were the "anecdotes" purporting to illustrate his ego.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Herbert Von
Karajan - Manifestor - Biography
