
Herbert von Karajan (April 5, 1908 – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian conducting, one of the most prominent of the postwar period. Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for many years. ==Life== ===Early years=== He was born in Salzburg, Austria, as Heribert Ritter von Karajan in a Aromanians family that has its origin in Ioannina, Greece. From 1916 to 1926, he studied at the Mozarteum Conservatory in Salzburg, where he was encouraged to study conducting. In 1929, he conducted ''Salome (opera)'' 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 that Karajan joined the Nazi Party; this took place on April 8, 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. 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". He received a contract with Deutsche Grammophon; his first recording was the ''The Magic Flute'' 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 worked with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, and conducted at La Scala in Milan. 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 compact disc digital audio format. He championed the format, lent his prestige to it, and appeared at the press conference announcing the format. The first CD prototypes had a playing time limited to 60 minutes; and it is frequently asserted that the longer 74-minute capacity was chosen in order to encompass Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), and that Karajan's recordings and wishes played some part in this decision. (See the [http://www.snopes2.com/music/media/cdlength.htm Snopes urban reference legends page] for detailed discussion). ===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. ===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 music repertory often attract great admiration (and that many regard his 1962 recording of the Ludwig van Beethoven symphonies as the yardstick for all other performances of these pieces), but there is little affection for his work in Baroque music music or that of the Classical music era. Two arguably representative reviews from the widely-read ''Penguin Guide to Compact Discs'' can be taken to illustrate the point. *Concerning a recording of Richard Wagner ''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 Joseph Haydn "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 contemporary music music, Karajan was criticized for having little of it in his oeuvre (mostly works of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Stravinsky, although he did record Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 twice). ===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 racheting 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. [http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2001fall/lebrecht.shtml] Finally, Karajan was held by some to be excessively egotistical. When he conducted Richard 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. ==Reference== Norman Lebrecht ''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 ==External links== *[http://www.karajan.org/index.html Web site of the Herbert von Karajan Centrum, Vienna] *[http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jameswierzbicki/conductors.htm#3 An obituary essay by James Wierzbicki] *[http://www.gramophone.co.uk/mainforum.asp?messageSectionID=32&threadID=11175&type=chrono A range of opinions from readers of ''Gramophone'' magazine] zh-cn:赫伯特·冯·卡拉扬 1908 births 1989 deaths Conductors Austrian nobility Austrian musicians
== Criticism section == The "criticism" section of this page, IMHO is well written, well documented, and deserves to be there. But I gotta say that it is so long, and there is so little on the other side, that it seems unbalanced to me. I'm not a von Karajan fan and I'm not enough of a classical music cognoscenti to write any balancing paragraphs, but isn't there anyone who could speak ''with sincere and well-informed conviction'' of von Karajan's status as clearly ''the'' towering figure in orchestral music in the closing decades of the twentieth century? I knew an old friend of my parents, now deceased, who was Jewish and escaped from Nazi Germany during the war... who nevertheless loved music and believed firmly that von Karajan was head and shoulders above all other contemporary conductors and truly set the musical standard. User:Dpbsmith 14:18, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC) :I think your remarks are dead on, Dpbs, and I'm sorry I didn't notice them earlier. After an initial episode of venting my own (rather fervent) distaste I've tried to gradually steer the article back towards NPOV. Hopefully, as you said, someone with more positive views will eventually come along and produce a truly NPOV article. Cheers, User:Opus33 00:29, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC) :Still seems kind of biased. I've got a few things I want to add anyway. Karajan's conducting has a quality and depth of musicianship. It is often very polished sounding, having voloptious finesse or intense richness of pathos, etc. and evenly matched hues of tone color and balanced forces of thematic elements. Perhaps a lot of criticism against Karajan comes from the fact that he often treated the demanding environment of the recording studio as an intense kind of kiln from which the piece rises in all it's musical glory later in the concert hall--a means for the perfect live performance. User:65.203.174.134 02:13, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC) == Von and Kara == Just as a piece of trivia, the "von" and "kara" particles in his name are contrasting one to other: * kara means "vasal" or "lower-class" (quite common for Vlachs/Aromanians; see List of Vlachs) * von is used only by German aristocrats. (I'm not sure whether this is encyclopedic enough to be included in the article). :I think it's interesting enough to go in the article. Not knowing anything of such matters, I'm very conscious of the significance of the "Von" but didn't know about the "kara." Go for it. User:Dpbsmith 16:09, 7 May 2004 (UTC) == Family origin == The article currently says that "''he was born /.../ in a Aromanian family /.../''". I've read an [http://www.delo.si/index.php?sv_path=43,50&id=4cf47b0c7ab94391f0afd1fd1ba414c804 article on Karajan] in the Slovenian leading newspaper Delo that says that Herbert's mother Marta Kosmač was indeed Slovenians. Because this is the first time I hear this and because of the general style of that particular article, I didn't want to correct the info in the wiki-article, but I wonder if anyone knows anything more on this issue? --User:Romanm User talk:romanm 11:26, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC) ==Generally acknowledged as greatest of century?== Hmmm... To say this is really going very far out on a limb, I think, given all the negative things critics have said about Karajan's conducting. If my anonymous colleague really wants to put this in the article, perhaps it might be best say that there are lots of individual people who think he was the greatest (see for instance User:Dpbsmith's remarks above), but not imply that this is a consensus. User:Opus33 05:21, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC) :Well said. I also politely disagree that he is "generally acknowledged as greatest of the century" though there are certainly some people who think so. (I'm not one of them.) "One of the..." is certainly accurate. User:Antandrus 05:30, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC) ::Well, if I were to attribute a "greatest" title, it would probably go to Karajan, but generally I think such a title is unfair given the wide variety of artistic genius in conductors of the century, Beecham, Furtwangler, Celibidache, Klieber, Levine, Szell, Reiner, Toscanini, and Klemperer (even Nickisch :-), to name a random few, unless he were very commonly characterized by critics as the greatest, which is doubtful, though towards the end of his life he was voted the conductor's conductor (I'm not entirely sure what that means since it's been a while since I read Richard Osbourne's biography), then I say we satisfy ourselves with "one of the greatest." User:65.203.174.134 01:55, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Didn't Nickisch sort of invent the whole maestro thing? User:Dpbsmith User_talk:dpbsmith 02:25, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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Herbert von Karajan
Herbert von Karajan (April 5, 1908 – July 16, 1989) was an Austrian conducting, one of the most prominent of the postwar period. Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for many years. ==Life== ===Early years=== He was born in Salzburg, Austria, as Heribert Ritter von Karajan in a Aromanians family that has its origin in Ioannina, Greece. From 1916 to 1926, he studied at the Mozarteum Conservatory in Salzburg, where he was encouraged to study conducting. In 1929, he conducted ''Salome (opera)'' 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 that Karajan joined the Nazi Party; this took place on April 8, 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. 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". He received a contract with Deutsche Grammophon; his first recording was the ''The Magic Flute'' 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 worked with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, and conducted at La Scala in Milan. 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 compact disc digital audio format. He championed the format, lent his prestige to it, and appeared at the press conference announcing the format. The first CD prototypes had a playing time limited to 60 minutes; and it is frequently asserted that the longer 74-minute capacity was chosen in order to encompass Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), and that Karajan's recordings and wishes played some part in this decision. (See the [http://www.snopes2.com/music/media/cdlength.htm Snopes urban reference legends page] for detailed discussion). ===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. ===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 music repertory often attract great admiration (and that many regard his 1962 recording of the Ludwig van Beethoven symphonies as the yardstick for all other performances of these pieces), but there is little affection for his work in Baroque music music or that of the Classical music era. Two arguably representative reviews from the widely-read ''Penguin Guide to Compact Discs'' can be taken to illustrate the point. *Concerning a recording of Richard Wagner ''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 Joseph Haydn "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 contemporary music music, Karajan was criticized for having little of it in his oeuvre (mostly works of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Stravinsky, although he did record Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 twice). ===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 racheting 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. [http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2001fall/lebrecht.shtml] Finally, Karajan was held by some to be excessively egotistical. When he conducted Richard 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. ==Reference== Norman Lebrecht ''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 ==External links== *[http://www.karajan.org/index.html Web site of the Herbert von Karajan Centrum, Vienna] *[http://pages.sbcglobal.net/jameswierzbicki/conductors.htm#3 An obituary essay by James Wierzbicki] *[http://www.gramophone.co.uk/mainforum.asp?messageSectionID=32&threadID=11175&type=chrono A range of opinions from readers of ''Gramophone'' magazine] zh-cn:赫伯特·冯·卡拉扬 1908 births 1989 deaths Conductors Austrian nobility Austrian musicians
Herbert von Karajan
== Criticism section == The "criticism" section of this page, IMHO is well written, well documented, and deserves to be there. But I gotta say that it is so long, and there is so little on the other side, that it seems unbalanced to me. I'm not a von Karajan fan and I'm not enough of a classical music cognoscenti to write any balancing paragraphs, but isn't there anyone who could speak ''with sincere and well-informed conviction'' of von Karajan's status as clearly ''the'' towering figure in orchestral music in the closing decades of the twentieth century? I knew an old friend of my parents, now deceased, who was Jewish and escaped from Nazi Germany during the war... who nevertheless loved music and believed firmly that von Karajan was head and shoulders above all other contemporary conductors and truly set the musical standard. User:Dpbsmith 14:18, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC) :I think your remarks are dead on, Dpbs, and I'm sorry I didn't notice them earlier. After an initial episode of venting my own (rather fervent) distaste I've tried to gradually steer the article back towards NPOV. Hopefully, as you said, someone with more positive views will eventually come along and produce a truly NPOV article. Cheers, User:Opus33 00:29, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC) :Still seems kind of biased. I've got a few things I want to add anyway. Karajan's conducting has a quality and depth of musicianship. It is often very polished sounding, having voloptious finesse or intense richness of pathos, etc. and evenly matched hues of tone color and balanced forces of thematic elements. Perhaps a lot of criticism against Karajan comes from the fact that he often treated the demanding environment of the recording studio as an intense kind of kiln from which the piece rises in all it's musical glory later in the concert hall--a means for the perfect live performance. User:65.203.174.134 02:13, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC) == Von and Kara == Just as a piece of trivia, the "von" and "kara" particles in his name are contrasting one to other: * kara means "vasal" or "lower-class" (quite common for Vlachs/Aromanians; see List of Vlachs) * von is used only by German aristocrats. (I'm not sure whether this is encyclopedic enough to be included in the article). :I think it's interesting enough to go in the article. Not knowing anything of such matters, I'm very conscious of the significance of the "Von" but didn't know about the "kara." Go for it. User:Dpbsmith 16:09, 7 May 2004 (UTC) == Family origin == The article currently says that "''he was born /.../ in a Aromanian family /.../''". I've read an [http://www.delo.si/index.php?sv_path=43,50&id=4cf47b0c7ab94391f0afd1fd1ba414c804 article on Karajan] in the Slovenian leading newspaper Delo that says that Herbert's mother Marta Kosmač was indeed Slovenians. Because this is the first time I hear this and because of the general style of that particular article, I didn't want to correct the info in the wiki-article, but I wonder if anyone knows anything more on this issue? --User:Romanm User talk:romanm 11:26, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC) ==Generally acknowledged as greatest of century?== Hmmm... To say this is really going very far out on a limb, I think, given all the negative things critics have said about Karajan's conducting. If my anonymous colleague really wants to put this in the article, perhaps it might be best say that there are lots of individual people who think he was the greatest (see for instance User:Dpbsmith's remarks above), but not imply that this is a consensus. User:Opus33 05:21, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC) :Well said. I also politely disagree that he is "generally acknowledged as greatest of the century" though there are certainly some people who think so. (I'm not one of them.) "One of the..." is certainly accurate. User:Antandrus 05:30, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC) ::Well, if I were to attribute a "greatest" title, it would probably go to Karajan, but generally I think such a title is unfair given the wide variety of artistic genius in conductors of the century, Beecham, Furtwangler, Celibidache, Klieber, Levine, Szell, Reiner, Toscanini, and Klemperer (even Nickisch :-), to name a random few, unless he were very commonly characterized by critics as the greatest, which is doubtful, though towards the end of his life he was voted the conductor's conductor (I'm not entirely sure what that means since it's been a while since I read Richard Osbourne's biography), then I say we satisfy ourselves with "one of the greatest." User:65.203.174.134 01:55, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Didn't Nickisch sort of invent the whole maestro thing? User:Dpbsmith User_talk:dpbsmith 02:25, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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