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April 2008 ~ Issue One of BooksMonthly ~ Return to the Cover page

HERBERT Von KARAJAN

Herbert von Karajan - 1908-2008 - Celebrating the Centenary

In 2008 the musical world observes the 100th birthday of one of the most widely respected performing musicians of the past century. Born in Salzburg on 5 April 1908, Herbert von Karajan influenced fellow musicians and public taste for generations through his live appearances and recordings with many of the world’s greatest orchestras and opera ensembles – and especially with the Berliner Philharmoniker which, as its principal conductor for over 30 years, he moulded into an ensemble of peerless power, tonal beauty and stylistic flexibility.

To launch the “Karajan Year” festivities, Deutsche Grammophon has prepared the present special limited edition CD/DVD. It contains some CD first releases – Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 5 and the Bach Double Violin Concerto (with Christian Ferras and Michel Schwalbé, never before released in any medium) – as well as the 1964 recording of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The DVD contains highlights from the 2008 video releases (described below), including opera scenes and excerpts from concert works by Brahms, Leoncavallo, Rachmaninov, Suppé, Tchaikovsky and Wagner, as well as a complete performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Herbert von Karajan’s status as the most prominent, and best-selling, of all Deutsche Grammophon artists continued unabated well after his death in 1989, and the label’s “Karajan Year” CD releases will bring his interpretations to an ever-broadening audience. Among the first of these releases will be a selection of famous “Karajan Master Recordings” from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, issued in a box set containing 10 CDs in digipacks. These specially priced CDs, with works including the Beethoven Violin Concerto (featuring Karajan’s most famous protégée, Anne-Sophie Mutter), Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto (with Sviatoslav Richter), the Mozart Requiem, symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, Debussy’s La Mer, Ravel’s Boléro, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and many more, will also be available individually. Several items have been newly remastered for this release (Beethoven Violin Concerto, Brahms, Schubert, Stravinsky). The single CDs retain the original cover artwork; and the set comes with a 36-page colour booklet that includes a newly commissioned essay, along with many photos and illustrations.

Karajan’s chief English-language biographer Richard Osborne has described the young conductor as “a hypnotic presence on the rostrum, the gestures a good deal wilder than they would become in later years. There was no doubt that he was arrogant and ambitious. But he was also, even as a young boy, a totally dedicated servant of music, working long hours to master his trade and building up a vast repertoire from all periods, much of it known by heart.”

Speed was a leitmotif in Karajan’s life, and he became a symbol of drive, dynamism and innovation. As early as his debut on 22 January 1929 at the Salzburg Mozarteum, a critic wrote: “It was like being attached to a high-tension line and having 40,000 volts shot through us.” In 1938, as a 30-year-old music director in provincial Aachen, he was catapulted to fame with his electrifying interpretation of Wagner’s Tristan at the Berlin State Opera – the headline of one review read “The Karajan Miracle” – and shortly thereafter signed his first recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft.

Nowhere was Karajan’s tireless dedication to music manifested more clearly than in his unparalleled recording activities. Launched with the 1939 release of the overture to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, played by the Berlin Staatskapelle, this phenomenally intense aspect of his career came to an end on 23 April 1989 with a live recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony from his final concert, given with the Wiener Philharmoniker less than three months before his death. In the course of that half century, Karajan amassed a huge discography, most of it in collaboration with the Berliner Philharmoniker, which in 1955 appointed him to succeed Wilhelm Furtwängler as its principal conductor.

Having secured a lifetime contract with his Berlin orchestra, Karajan spent several years rebuilding it in a way “that preserved the full-bodied German sound and the physical intensity of the playing, but which also made the orchestra a supremely flexible exponent of the music of such great non-German composers as Verdi, Puccini, Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius and Honegger” (Richard Osborne).

In 1959 he signed another important contract, a new exclusive agreement with Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft. Over the next 30 years, as the company’s chief conductor, Karajan made some 250 recordings for the Yellow Label, covering a substantial portion of the standard concert repertoire with the Berliner Philharmoniker. In 1961 the conductor with his new, young orchestra and his record company embarked on an unprecedentedly ambitious project: Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies set down and marketed for the first time ever as an integral cycle. Released in 1963, it proved to be one of the most successful projects in classical recording history.

The Beethoven cycle would become a mainstay of his studio career. To mark the sesquicentenary of the composer’s death in 1977, Deutsche Grammophon released Karajan’s second traversal of the “Nine” with the Berliner Philharmoniker. “One of the signs of a great piece of music,” Karajan is quoted as saying in Roger Vaughan’s 1986 biography, “is that it will never come to the end of interpretation. It is like a deep well. You can dip and dip and never come to the end of it.”

With the advent of digital recording and the compact disc in the early 1980s, he recorded the Beethoven cycle yet again with his Berlin musicians. He and the Philharmoniker made one of the company’s very first digital recordings – Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1980 – and were also featured in its first CD title to go into mass production, Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony in 1982. Karajan was, of course, famously passionate about new recording technologies, including the visual media. One of the objectives of his later career was that of documenting his most important interpretations on film.

As a natural consequence, one of the major focuses of Deutsche Grammophon’s celebration of the conductor’s centenary in 2008 will be on DVD. During the first half of the year, the following Unitel Herbert von Karajan video titles will be released:

•     Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1974/78), directed by Karajan himself, with Jeanine Altmeyer, Brigitte Fassbaender, Peter Schreier, Zoltán Kelemen and the Berliner Philharmoniker 1968 films from La Scala, Milan of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (staging by Giorgio Strehler) and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (staging by Paul Hager) with Jon Vickers, Firenza Cossotto, Gianfranco Cecchele, Raina Kabaivanska, Rolando Panerai and Peter Glossop with the Berliner Philharmoniker: Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, the four Brahms symphonies and Ein deutsches Requiem, Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies, and “Karajan in Concert” – favourite works by Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, Liszt, Mascagni, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Rossini, Richard Strauss, Suppé, Verdi, Wagner and Weber with the Wiener Philharmoniker: Bruckner’s Symphonies nos. 8 & 9 and Te Deum

•     A Karajan documentary

Karajan was, of course, as widely acclaimed for his work in the theatre as he was in the concert hall, and in March 2008 one of his most famous opera interpretations, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in the legendary Salzburg production from 1965, with Nicolai Ghiaurov as Boris, Nicolai Ghiuselev as Pimen, Sena Jurinac as Marina and Gerhard Stolze as Grigory, will be released as a 3-CD Festspiel-Dokumente (with libretto).

And finally, as Karajan, the devotee of the latest technological developments, would surely be delighted to know, a selection of his classic recordings, “Karajan Masterworks – His Greatest Tracks”, will be made available as a special download project. In addition, the complete Karajan catalogue will be available online from Deutsche Grammophon’s new web shop, including more than 20 out-of-print CDs available now as downloads only. A century after his birth, in the “Karajan Year” of 2008, the legacy of this extraordinary man and musician not only lives on but surely will gather new momentum.

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