Misplaced Pages

Herbert von Karajan

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 68.183.152.105 (talk) at 16:48, 4 September 2009 (→Discography). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 16:48, 4 September 2009 by 68.183.152.105 (talk) (→Discography)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
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." 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.

Biography

Genealogy

Herbert von Karajan was the son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family. The Karajan family is said to have originally been Aromanian or Greek, from the region of Macedonia. His great-great-grandfather, Geòrgios Johannes Karajànnis, 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 1 June 1792, thus the prefix "von" to the family name. The surname Karajànnis became Karajan. 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.

Early years

Herbert von Karajan's parents, Ernst and Marta

Karajan was born in Salzburg, Austria as Herbert Ritter von Karajan. He was a child prodigy at the piano. 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. It was also in 1933 that von Karajan became a member of the Nazi party, a fact for which he would later be criticised, and for which he never expressed any repentance.

In 1934, 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 . 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. 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. According to Winifred Wagner, Hitler decided that 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 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, 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. 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.

Karajan was discharged by the Austrian denazification examining board on 18 March 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 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.

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 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.. Kees Schouhamer Immink, a Philips research engineer and fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, denies the Beethoven connection.

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.

Nazi membership

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Herbert von Karajan" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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.

Karajan's membership of 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, critics such as Jim Svejda have pointed out that other prominent conductors, such as Otto Klemperer, 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.

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 opened his concerts with the Nazi favourite 'Horst Wessel Lied.'" 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.

Jewish musicians such as Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, and Itzhak Perlman refused to play in concerts with Karajan because of his Nazi past. 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. Some have questioned whether Karajan was committed to the Nazi cause given his marriage in 1942 to Anita Gütermann, who had Jewish descent, and was classified by the Nazis as "Mischling". Evidence suggests 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 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.

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.

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."

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. 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

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (April 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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."

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. 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.

In popular culture

This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections or articles. (February 2009)

Discography

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

Another discography was made for the 100th anniversary of Karajan's birth (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 contains two 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."
  • "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. ^ John Rockwell (17 July 1989). "Herbert von Karajan Is Dead; Musical Perfectionist was 81". The New York Times. pp. p. A1. {{cite news}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  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. 115–24.
  4. Letter from Karl-Markus Gauss to Austrian Newspaper Der Standard Template:Hu icon
  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. Retrieved 2007-04-15.
  8. "Herbert Von Karajan-Karajan Family". Karajan Family. Retrieved 2007-04-15.
  9. Branka Lapajne (2008-04-04). "The Shared Slovenian Ancestors of Herbert von Karajan and Hugo Wolf". Retrieved 2008-05-05.
  10. Osborne (1987)
  11. Encyclopædia Britannica Article for Herbert von Karajan
  13. The woman in the footage is Winifred Wagner, a lifetime friend of Adolf Hitler
  14. Osborne (2000), p. 114
  15. 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. ?
  16. Osborne (2000)
  17. Andrews, Deborah (1990). The Annual Obituary, 1989. St James Press. p. 417. ISBN 1558620567.
  18. Osborne (2000); Karajan's deposition is presented in whole as Appendix C.
  19. Lucerne Festival homepage, Karajan Celebration 2008
  20. "Roll Over, Beethoven". snopes.com. 2007-05-23. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
  21. Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (1998). "The CD Story". Journal of the AES, vol. 46, pp. 458-465, 1998. Retrieved 2008-06-19.
  22. Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (1998). "The Compact Disc Story" (PDF). Journal of the Audio Eng. Soc. 46 (5): 458–465 esp. 460. Retrieved 2008-06-19. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laydate=, |month=, |laysource=, and |laysummary= (help); Unknown parameter |quotes= ignored (help)
  24. 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)
  25. Karsten Kammholz (not quite with the accuracy of Prieberg: Der Mann, der zweimal in die NSDAP eintrat; in: Die Welt, January 26, 2008
  26. Osborne (2000), p. 85
  27. http://www.classicalnotes.net/features/furtwangler.html
  28. http://www.classicalnotes.net/features/furtwangler.html#karajan
  29. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/09/classicalmusicandopera.austria
  30. http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm13-8/sm13_8_karajan_fr_en.html
  31. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0902507/bio
  32. BBC Radio 4 broadcast
  33. http://www.amazon.com/Record-Shelf-Guide-Classical-Audiocassettes/dp/0761505911/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240088613&sr=1-2
  36. Richard Kostelanetz. "Review of: Who killed Classical Music, by Norman Lebrecht". Rain Taxi. Retrieved 2007-04-15.
  37. Monsaingeon, p. 143.
  38. Herbert Von Karajan - Visits to Great Britain
  39. Gramophone - News - The world's best classical music magazine
  40. http://www.karajan100anniversary.com/new_products.htm
  41. 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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  • Layton, Robert (1996). Penguin Guide to Compact Discs. London; New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0140513671. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • 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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

External links

Video

Preceded byClemens Krauss Music Director, Berlin State Opera
1939–1945 		Succeeded byJoseph Keilberth
Vienna Symphony Principal Conductors
Berlin Philharmonic
Conductors
Groups
Related
Category
Vienna Staatsoper Directors
Orchestre de Paris Music Directors


Template:Persondata

Template:Link FA

Categories: