Conductor, born in Salzburg, C Austria. He studied there and in Vienna, and conducted at the Städtisches Theater, Ulm (192833), at Aachen (19348), and at the Berlin Staatsoper (193842). After the war he was banned from working by the Russian occupation authorities until 1947, having been a member of the Nazi Party (193342), but in 1955 he was made principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and it is with this orchestra that he was mainly associated until his resignation in 1989. He also conducted frequently elswhere, and was artistic director of the Salzburg Festival (195660) and of the Salzburg Easter Festival (from 1967).
| 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. 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.
Early years
Herbert von Karajan was born in Salzburg as 'Heribert Ritter von Karajan (ref R Osborne's biography mentioned below).
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, Germany. 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. 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. 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.
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.
In 1948, Karajan became artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna.
Karajan and the compact disc
Karajan played an important role in the development of the original compact disc digital audio format (circa 1980). It is often asserted that the established standard of seventy-four minutes was achieved in order to adequately encompass Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 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.
Politics
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 and Arturo Toscanini fled from fascist Europe at the time. 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.
Musicianship
There is widespread agreement that Karajan had a gift for extracting beautiful sound from an orchestra. 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...However, it has been argued by critic and commentator Jim Svejda that Karajan's style pre-1970 did not seem as calculatedly polished as his later style. 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.
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 ... About Karajan's recording of Haydn's "Paris" symphonies, the same authors wrote, "big-band Haydn with a vengeance ...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.
Professional behavior
Some critics, particularly British critic Norman Lebrecht, charged von Karajan with initiating a devastating inflational spiral in performance fees. 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, pianist Richter asked Karajan if they could go over a passage again, to which Karajan replied "No, now it is time for pictures".
Finally, Karajan was held by some to be excessively egotistical.
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 2001: A Space Odyssey (with Kubrick animating the sequence to match the prerecorded music—the opposite of the usual practice for soundtracks). 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 Béla 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
Karajan conducting Beethoven's Symphony No. 21 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvJqiURF0hc
Karajan conducting Beethoven's Symphony No.
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