Herbert von Karajan

Herbert von Karajan
Birthdate	April 5 1908
Died	July 16 1989

Herbert von Karajan (Salzburg April 5, 1908 Anif near Salzburg – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian conductor. He was one of the most prominent conductors of the postwar period and is widely regarded as the world's most recorded conductor. 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, Georg Johannes Karajanis, was born in Kozani, at that time a town in the Ottoman Empire (now in Greek Macedonia) Vienna in 1767, eventually moving to Chemnitz in 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. The Karajanis name became Karajan. [http://www.karajan.co.uk/family.html" target="_blank" >^*

Early years

Herbert von Karajan was born in Salzburg as 'Heribert Ritter von Karajan (ref R Osborne's biography mentioned below). From 1916 to 1926, he studied at the Mozarteum Conservatory in Salzburg, where he was encouraged to study conducting.

In 1929, he conducted Salome at the Festspielhaus in Salzburg.

From 1929 to 1934, he was first Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater in Ulm, Germany.

In 1933, he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival, conducting the music for the "Walpurgisnacht Scene" in Max Reinhardt's production of Faust. The following year, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time, also in Salzburg. 1933 was also the year from which Karajan's membership of the Nazi Party was officially dated though in fact it was backdated from March 1935 when he actually applied for membership ('Aufnahmegruppe der 1933er, nachgereichte')

From 1934 to 1941, he conducted opera and symphony concerts at the Aachen opera house.

In 1935, Karajan was appointed Germany's youngest "Generalmusikdirektor" and was a guest conductor in Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and other cities.

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 was hailed by a Berlin critic as "Das Wunder Karajan" (1938). He received a contract with Deutsche Grammophon; his first recording was the Die Zauberflöte overture, made with the Staatskapelle Berlin.

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 making recordings with the newly-formed Philharmonia Orchestra in London. He built the orchestra into one of the world's finest.

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. He continued to perform, conduct, and record prolifically until his death in 1989.

Karajan and the compact disc

Karajan played an important role in the development of the original compact disc digital audio format (circa 1980). 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 exhibited a playing time limited to a mere sixty minutes. It is often asserted that the established standard of seventy-four minutes was achieved in order to adequately encompass Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the existing library of Karajan's recordings, and his expressed wishes, played some part in the decision to extend the maximum playing time of the compact disc. However, it is also possible that this story is an urban legend. ^*.

Politics

As was the case with soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Karajan's membership in the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 cast him in an uncomplimentary light when revealed later, despite the apparent fact that he joined the party to advance his career rather than for ideological reasons. Musicians such as Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman refused to play in concerts with Karajan because of his Nazi past. Karajan's commitment to the Nazi cause has been questioned given the fact of his marriage in 1942 to Anita Guetermann, a woman of clear Jewish origin. Karajan's star within the government dimmed from that point.

Musicianship

There is widespread agreement that Karajan had a gift for extracting beautiful sound from an orchestra. Where opinion varies concerns the greater aesthetic ends to which the Karajan sound was employed. 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.

This all-purpose style struck many listeners as yielding different degrees of success in the music of different eras. Web data suggest that of Karajan's numerous recordings, those of the mainstream nineteenth century Romantic repertory often attract great admiration (and that many regard his 1962 recording of the Beethoven symphonies as the yardstick for all other performances of these pieces), but there is little affection for his work in Baroque music or that of the Classical period.

Two arguably representative reviews from the widely-read Penguin Guide to Compact Discs can be taken 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."

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, 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 von Karajan with initiating a devastating inflational 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 until he died (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, Svyatoslav Richter and Mystislav Rostropovich, Oistrakh asked Karajan if they could go over a passage one more time to which Karajan replied "No now it is time for pictures". This did not prevent Oistrakh from saying, when Karajan turned 65, that he was "the greatest living conductor, a master in every styles."

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, he frequently resembled Fritz Reiner in his economy of motion. He also often conducted with his eyes closed, intent upon the effect he was creating, secure in the fact that he had one of the greatest orchestras of the modern era under his command. He did, however, share one similarity with Bernstein: If he did not like a work - and there was much non-Germanic literature he did not like - it was only too apparent in his approach to conducting that work.

In popular culture

Karajan's DG recording of Johann Strauss' An der schönen, blauen Donau (The Blue Danube waltz) was used by director Stanley Kubrick for a sequence in the science-fiction film A Space Odyssey (film) (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 arguably became more identified with space stations (as depicted in the film) for subsequent generations than with the dances for which the composer intended it. Kubrick also used Karajan's Decca recording of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra for the opening sequence of the film, thereby giving Strauss's piece a wider fame than it had hitherto had. Some years later, Kubrick used again Karajan's recordings, this time Bela Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in The Shining. Nevertheless, one should note that, even though many people erroneously assume the contrary, due to both Kubrick's preference for the use of classical music in his films as well as Karajan's mediagenic popularity, the version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony used in the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange is not Karajan's now-famous 1963 DG recording, but rather Ferenc Fricsay's contribution to the same label.

Media

Link to Online Video of Karajan conducting Beethoven's 5th Symphony, rare old 1966 video - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2219310962212012112

References

Raymond Holden, The Virtuoso Conductors: The Central European Tradition from Wagner to Karajan (2005), Yale University Press, ISBN 0300093268
Norman Lebrecht The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power (2001) Citadel Press, ISBN 0806520884
Ivan March, Edward Greenfield, and Robert Layton Penguin Guide to Compact Discs, ISBN 0140513671
Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan (1998), Chatto & Windus (London), ISBN 0701167149

External links

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