Filed under: Commentaries, Music | Tags: Deutsche Grammophon, Herbert von Karajan, historical recordings, Karajan Centenary, Norman Lebrecht
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| Herbert von Karajan, Wax Effigy in Miracle’s Wax Museum. Vienna |
For many years Norman Lebrecht has managed to maintain an entirely undeserved amount of attention as the Thersites of the music world, the coarse, obtuse outsider, who doesn’t get the point of the war. Polemics can make almost anything interesting, even Mr. Lebrecht’s warped view of classical music. After letting him sour my existence a few times, I found I was beginning to get bored, and I stopped reading his tirades. In some ways the world of classical music may show a certain fragility that was not apparent a generation ago, but things are not as bad as some people believe. The growth of new institutions, festivals, music schools, etc., and the emergence of immensely gifted young artists like Benjamin Moser, Viviane Hagner, Yevgeny Sudkin, and Jeremy Denk, to name only a few, favors optimism. We should ask ourselves rather why we relish the doom and gloom of writers like Lebrecht and Teachout, as if it were more fun to be sick than healthy, or to cultivate enemies instead of friends. Yes, invective can make a laundry list exciting, but there must be some focused, intelligent judgement and integrity to support it.
When a respected friend sent me a recent article of Lebrecht’s from the Independent I felt I had to read it, and when I saw that his target was Herbert von Karajan, whose centenary is being celebrated this year with re-releases of selected DVDs and CDs, I read on with enthusiasm, thinking that this might finally be a topic on which Lebrecht and I might agree. And if Norman Lebrecht is the Thersites of the classical music world, Karajan must surely be its Agamemnon—far from the most valiant warrior and hardly an Odysseus in intelligence, he knew how to hang on to his edge right up until his final bath. Not that Karajan died a violent death, just a heart attack while working at full tilt at his Alpine retreat.
My first memory of Karajan goes back to his set of Beethoven symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, released in 1962 or 1963. As a very young person, I think it was my first complete set of that basic item. At that time many of DGG’s recordings were only available in the United States as special imports. In New York one had to go to shops like Discophile or to the German importers that used to line East 86th Street to find them. But this set was considered so important by the more informed and plentiful record buyers of that time, that here was something that could be sold profitably in any record store. This surely must have been one of the issues which transformed DGG from an occasional licenser of material to American companies (primarily American Decca) into an international label which exported its own pressings. This Beethoven set was the watershed for Karajan’s world-wide ascendancy, but also the beginning of his decline into the figure which Lebrecht depicts in his caricatural fashion.
Karajan transformed himself from the imaginative and energetic conductor of the fifties into the magisterial authority of the sixties through the eighties. Whether everyone believed it or not, he pretended to set a standard by making himself ubiquitous through his tours with the Berlin Philharmonic and his recordings. His “packaging” became slicker along with his interpretations. The lovely balanced, but clear sound of those 1962 Beethoven symphonies—surely a technological benchmark at the time, along with Mercury’s “Living Presence” recordings and RCA’s “Living Stereo,” which are still highly esteemed today—developed into a more homogenized sound, the “Karajan sound,” which was the most obvious characteristic of his work. There was a luxuriant softness of ensemble, but still precise, with a predominant lush string sound, through which winds added discrete, but rich touches of color. The tempi flowed, but not rigidly. Melodic line, texture, and color, some thought, where in perfect balance. Early on, not so much detail was sacrificed to this polished surface, but soon enough it dissolved into what seemed to be mere poshness. By the early seventies, I and many others had grown tired of it, and Karajan himself seemed to have grown bored with the core classics, the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and the like, delivering slick, mindless run-throughs on his tours, and I stopped going to them. However, he also branched out into new territory, and there is no denying that he found material that excited his interest.
It may be that Karajan created a caricature of himself in focusing on the qualities which “branded” him, but he did have genuine musical gifts which make some of his work valuable today, as vulgar as his ambitions were. The principle of these is his understanding of compositional structure, which is amply apparent in his early Beethoven recordings and probably his late ones as well, but which, in their time, was truly impressive when he approached Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich, and the Second Viennese School. Of his recordings these are the most interesting, even today, and his set of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern was in its time a most welcome alternative to what had been previously available. Since then Boulez, Dohnanyi, Eötvös and others have gone further with this repertory, but Karajan’s only modestly Procrustean musicality in this repertoire is still to be valued, just as there is a great deal to be learned from his recordings of the Ring Cycle, as smoothed-out as it is. On the other hand, am I that much attracted to it? Do I make much effort to revisit them? No, not at all. Today I’m more interested in the likes of Thierry Fischer, Pappano or Elder, and if I look back it will be to Furtwängler, Walter, Klemperer, or, in Karajan’s generation, Jochum or Fricsay. And there’s a whole middle generation in its maturity which needs none of Karajan’s hype to communicate with us: that of Colin Davis, Charles Mackerras, and Claudio Abbado. If you listen to one of Karajan’s old recordings after hearing them, you are immediately aware of his pretensions and affectations. It’s true that his work of the 1950’s was better. If you want to hear Karajan at his best, dig up his 1950 Meistersinger from Bayreuth, his Vienna Carmen from 1954 or his famous St. Matthew Passion of 1950. And there are some splendid recordings from his later years, like his great Shostakovich Symphony No. 10. At one time Karajan helped some of us to understand Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but do we need him today? No, not really.
In his conclusion Lebrecht said, “For music lovers, there is not much to celebrate. Once the centenary is over, we will drop the curtain once and for all on a discreditable life that yielded no fresh thought and upheld no worthwhile human value. Karajan is dead. Music is much better off without him.” Instinctually, I felt like cheering for the old sourpuss, that is, Lebrecht. I’ve tried to point out some of Karajan’s virtues, which are by no means unique. His work should, I think, shrink down to size as an exploitative, commercialized secondary plot in the history of performance, while Furtwängler and Boulez will always remain essential—both composers. As Lebrecht observes, Karajan’s suppression of other conductors, especially in connection with the BPO, was well-known. On the other hands, we can hardly complain about the recorded legacy of the major conductors during Karajan’s peak years of influence, Giulini, Jochum, Böhm, and Fricsay, for example, and access to the podium of any major orchestra is fraught with political problems. Music directors and principle conductors have not been noted for their collegiality.
Perhaps because of Karajan’s detestable political sympathies during the Third Reich we may be inclined to connect his authoritarianism with Hitler’s. On the contrary we should look to the western, democratic world for that. Toscanini, who made himself at home there early, astounded audiences with his forceful, driving performances and his colleagues with the extraordinary fees he could command. Toscanini’s influence on the musical world from the 1920’s onwards was incomparable. Karajan derived his particular sound from Furtwängler’s, which was deeply ingrained in the Berlin Philharmonic in any case. While Karajan may have wanted to bury Furtwängler under ground, he wanted to make Toscanini’s stardom and earning power his own. He succeeded, although, if you compare the recorded legacy, that his talents were but a shadow of Toscanini’s, as they were of Furtwängler’s. Yes, Lebrecht is right to blame him for his influence on performance style and the politics of music. He points out that Karajan made the Salzburg Festival a resort for the rich and powerful, and I have no doubt that Karajan heightened this unfortunate and inartistic trend. On the other hand, I doubt that Salzburg was ever a terribly democratic institution, unlike its imitator, the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood.
We Americans should be grateful that we have weaned ourselves from Toscanini, as popular as his old recordings remain, and with reason. It’s not easy to sell recordings of any kind today, even Nicola Benedetti or Hilary Hahn. We can’t blame Deutsche Grammophon for trying to capitalize on recycled product. But I’d never use such a vile expression for Klemperer, Rudolph Serkin, Schnabel, Furtwängler, Myra Hess, Walter, or any of the other grand old hands.
Yes, dammit, Norman, you’re right about Karajan, and you’re right about those meaningless musical awards presented to musicians who are so well known they don’t need them. My premise is that classical music is healthier than you say, and if it is, it can surely bear some scrutiny, especially in its weakest area, commercial classical recordings. Deutsche Grammophon have done a fairly decent job of selecting and packaging the work of the major artists of their halcyon days. Their “Original Masters” retrospective boxes of Furtwängler, Fricsay, Kempff, Jochum, Schneiderhan, the Amadeus Quartet, even the young Karajan are exemplary, and even the Karajan centenary crop includes a solid 10-disc survey, Herbert von Karajan, Master Recordings, along with various fluff products, “deluxe limited editions,” combining disiecta membra of various sorts on CD and DVD, indiscriminate hodge-podges of Italian opera overtures, movements from ballets, concertos and symphonies, all thrown together. If this is the only way classical music can be made accessible—sorry, marketed—to new listeners, these are truly sad times.
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From Charles Warren, via e-mail:
The Karajan piece was interesting. I was quite a Karajan fan in college and grad school days, sustained by the Beethoven recordings, Schubert Great C-Major, some Brahms, the Ring, Sibelius… It doesn’t mean so much to me any more. In the early 70s I did attend performances in New York City: a Bruckner Eighth that was really exciting and lifted me out of a depression (about academic life, love life)…it was just much more immediate and intense than anything I was used to hearing. I thought, if people can do this, then life is worth living.
Another concert had a Brahms Third which was rather stiff and chilly, then a first Symphony that was hot, intense, flowing, organic, compelling, really made the piece seem better than I had thought it was. Near the end of his life I missed New York performances people raved about: the Mahler Ninth with Berlin, the Bruckner Eighth with Vienna. I agree with you about fifties recordings: Meistersinger, etc. Another good one is a Bayreuth Tristan with Ramon Vinay and Moedl. I haven’t run across the Matthew Passion.
Some later Karajan recordings I liked - the set of last six Mozart symphonies, from the 70’s, and later the Magic Flute, and Debussy’s Pelléas.
I read the interesting biography by Richard Osborne, which says K. was very committted to the St. Matthew Passion and insisted on doing it every year in Aachen in the 30’s despite Nazi opposition to religious celebrations. I don’t think he really sympathized with the Nazis: for such a public figure, nobody heard such sentiments. I think he was a somewhat nervous homosexual, highly ambitious kid, who just signed the papers as he was told and closed his mind to everything but music and his career—blameable enough. Strangely, in 1943 or 44 he married a partly Jewish woman from a prominent Berlin publishing family and was told at the registry that it would mean expunging him from the Party roles, and he just said so be it. Then they fled over the Swiss border, when it appeared she would be arrested. At war’s end they were separated, and he was living in poverty in Vienna. The rest is history, as they say.
Lebrecht has his points about big business versus art, but I never felt good about him, partly because he completely dismisses Bruno Walter, as a “hypocrite” (???!!).
Comment by berkshirereview May 23, 2008 @ 10:37 pmYes, absolutely. The intent of my posting was to point out the instances in which Karajan actually did make a substantial and unique contribution, and there are many. It was his authoritarian image that was obnoxious, and the claim to quality in music, as if the music were part and parcel of the luxury goods advertised in German concert programs. The second Mme. Karajan virtually walked out of one of them.
And Lebrecht, too, has his points, although, I believe, he has tried to foment a lot of needless, unfounded scandals along with the truth.
Comment by berkshirereview May 23, 2008 @ 10:48 pmAnd yes, Bruno Walter!
Comment by berkshirereview May 23, 2008 @ 10:49 pmFrom Huntley Dent, via e-mail:
My immediate reaction to Michael Miller’s commentary on the Karajan centenary [Oh no! He’s not back again, is he? - May 2, 2008] was rather choleric, but I’ve settled down a bit since then and can write this from a relatively balanced perspective. I bought those 1962-63 Beethoven symphonies, too, which by the way are in such bad sound that three remasterings later, including the most recent in SACD, they remain boomy and muddy. I’m not sure where you heard them praised. But Karajan’s quasi-hypnotizing style didn’t appeal to me back then. I dropped out until the mid-80s. Since then — don’t be shocked — I’ve bought his entire EMI output from 1947 until the early Eighties, all his Decca recordings (which are relatively few), a huge chunk of his DG catalogue, and many highlights from the historical archives. As a result, I incline toward his English biographer, Richard Osborne, in believing that Karajan was among the greatest conductors of the century. And not just in the Fifties, that canard notwithstanding.
Since a reverential regard for Karajan was common in his heyday but sneered at now — not by you but by taste-benumbed pygmies like Norman Lebrecht — I won’t fight upstream. Time levels out these matters. Sheerly in the interest of offering your readers access to less well known great recordings, along with many that belong on every serious collector’s shelf, here’s a long list of my favorites. Its length may convince you that I suffer from Karajan monomania. Not at all. I rarely turn to Karajan’s Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bartók, or Stravinsky (with a few exceptions like his wonderful Haydn Creation). I’m distressed by his later Beethoven cycles from the 70s and 80s, which as you point out sound slick and bored. I’m not often convinced by Karajan as accompanist for Mutter, Weissenberg, Anda, Ferras, Kremer, Kissin, and other soloists he favored (again, with some outstanding exceptions like the Beethoven Triple Concerto with three great Russians).
Carlos Kleiber used to get enraged when he heard anyone disparage “the Karajan sound,” insisting that such a profound musical mind had to be judged one performance at a time. I beg of you and other detractors to stop branding Karajan as at best a careerist and at worst a semi-charlatan. Subordinate your prejudices to the high opinion that you have of Kleiber, a vast admirer of the older master. (One could also fill a volume of encomiums from all the great singers who considered Karajan the pre-eminent opera conductor of his generation.)
Now to the list. It’s not an olla podrida. I’ve limited it to Karajan’s very best — in my opinion, of course.
Bach: B minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion (historical, EMI)
Beethoven: Sym. #9 (with the Vienna Phil, historical, EMI)
Nine symphonies (first stereo cycle, 1962-63, DG — the best remastering is the latest hybrid SACD)
Egmont incidental music (DG)
Piano Concertos #4 and 5 (with Walter Gieseking, historical, EMI)
Triple Concerto (with Richter, Oistrakh, and Rostropovich, EMI)
Missa Solemnis (a Karajan speciality, available in multiple versions on DG and EMI, plus some live accounts, the best being from the 1958 Salzburg Festival on EMI)
Fidelio (with Vickers and Dernesch, EMI)
Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra (DG)
Brahms: Four symphonies (multiple cycles, with great performances in all of them, beginning in the immediate post-war era with Sym. #2, a speciality that he recorded at least six times, for EMI, Decca, and DG. I greatly admire Karajan’s way with Sym. #3, also)
German Requiem (another speciality, beginning with perhaps the greatest, a post-war historical issue from Vienna, on EMI)
Bruckner: Nine symphonies (many duplications for DG and EMI, beginning with a historical Sym #8 — the work he repeated most often, ending with a sublime valedictory performance from Vienna just before he died, on DG. Unmissable, too, are the Fourth and Seventh on EMI, and especially an incomparable Ninth from the Sixties, on DG)
Te Deum (DG)
Debussy: La Mer (analogue, not digital, DG)
Pélléas et Mélisande (EMI)
Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (live, with Maria Callas, EMI)
Dvorak: Cello Concerto (with Rostropovich, DG)
Grieg: Piano concerto (with Walter Gieseking, historical, EMI)
Haydn: Die Schöpfung (two contemporary readings, studio and live from Salzburg, DG)
Holst: The Planets (two stunning versions in demonstration sound, DG and Decca)
Humperdinck: Hansel und Gretel (with Schwarzkopf and Grummer, historical, EMI — a smiling, utterly charming account but in rather poor sound)
Mahler: Sym. #9 (two readings, studio and live, done within a year of each other, DG)
Mendelssohn: Five symphonies (great across the board, DG)
Mozart: Piano Concerto in C, K. 467 (with Dinu Lipatti, historical, EMI)
Marriage of Figaro (two unsatisfactory studio accounts, one historical without dialogue for EMI, the other a humorless drudge in stereo for Decca, give little hint of the vivacious, quick-witted, and amazingly accurate live account pirated from the Vienna State Opera, with Freni and Van Dam at their best — it’s cheap and reasonably good-sounding on Opera d’Oro)
Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov (with Nicolai Ghiaurov, in the Rimsky-Korsakov edition, Decca)
Prokofiev: Sym. #5 (a great one-off performance, DG)
Ravel: Orchestral works (exquisitely done for EMI)
Puccini: Madame Butterfly and La Boheme (glorious accounts with Pavarotti and Freni, Decca)
Madame Butterfly (historical, with Maria Callas, EMI)
Tosca (with Leontyne Price, Decca, later with Ricciarelli and Domingo, DG)
Turandot (a magnificent account on DG, despite Ricciarelli’s painful title role)
Schoenberg: Orchestral works (brilliant, large-scale accounts of Verklärte Nacht, the Five Pieces, the Variations for Orchestra, the chamber symphonies, etc., DG)
Shostakovich: Sym. #10 (the only work Karajan recorded, in two magnificent versions, analogue and digital, DG)
Schumann: Four symphonies (great across the board, DG)
Piano concerto (with Walter Gieseking, historical, EMI, along with an equally great issue with Dinu Lipatti, EMI)
Sibelius: Seven symphonies (masterful throughout Karajan’s career, beginning with a historical Fourth praised by the composer as the greatest he had ever heard. Nearly complete cycles exist on DG and EMI — for unstated reasons, Karajan never recorded the Third)
Tone poems (DG and EMI)
Strauss, Johann: Waltzes, polkas, etc. (Karajan was a natural, vivacious, high-spirited conductor of the Strauss family, with incomparable collections spanning every phase of his career, beginning in post-war Vienna, EMI, Decca, and DG)
New Year’s Day concert, 1987 (live, with Kathleen Battle in Vienna, DG — Karajan’s valedictory to the Strauss family and a touching memento)
Strauss, Richard: Tone poems (a vast and sumptuous recorded output, beginning with the first Metamorphosen on LP, continuing almost to the end of Karajan’s career. The Also Sprach Zarathustra used in “2001: A Space Odyssey” remains an exceptional reading, now remastered on Decca. But all the Strauss done for Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal with the Vienna Phil., ranks high in Karajan’s discography. Add to that the Don Quixote with Rostropovich on EMI and a stunning Alpine Symphony on DG from the early digital era, best heard in the remastered “Karajan Gold” series)
Ariadne auf Naxos (with Schwarzkopf, historical, EMI — one of Karajan’s two or three greatest opera sets)
Der Rosenkavalier (with Schwarzkopf, EMI — a groundbreaking set from the early stereo era)
Salome (with the young Behrens, EMI)
Die Frau ohne Schatten (somewhat abridged, live from the Vienna State Opera, DG)
Four Last Songs (with Janowitz, DG)
Oboe Concerto (DG)
Stravinsky: Apollo (DG)
Tchaikovsky: Ballet excerpts (two sumptuous collections, on Decca and DG)
Rococo Variations (with Rostropovich, DG)
Sym. #6 “Pathetique” (another Karajan speciality, recorded at least six times, beginning in the historical era. I especially like an early stereo version with the Philharmonia Orch., EMI)
1812 Overture (DG)
Verdi: Otello (with Vickers and Freni, EMI)
Falstaff (with Gobbi and Schwarzkopf, historical, EMI — equalled only by Toscanini’s classic account)
Il Trovatore (with Callas and Di Stefano, historical, EMI — one of Callas’s greatest Verdi roles. Plus a live Vienna State Opera performance with Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli, best heard on DG)
The following operas are not always with the best casts but rate high for Karajan’s contribution:
Don Carlo (with Carreras and Freni, EMI)
Aida (with Carreras and Freni, EMI, or with Tebaldi and Bergonzi, Decca)
Otello (with Del Monaco and Tebaldi, Decca))
Messa da Requiem (a Karajan speciality, recorded multiple times for EMI, DG, and various live accounts. The best live one is from Salzburg with Leonie Rysanek, best heard on EMI. Unfortunately, a glorious one with Leontyne Price and the young Pavarotti is in poor sound on a VHS tape, now transferred to an equally poor DVD)
Overtures and preludes (DG)
Wagner: Overtures and preludes (many versions throughout Karajan’s career, the most spectacular being on EMI with the Berliners. Also a live concert with Jessye Norman on DG, Karajan’s valedictory to Wagner on disc)
Die Walküre, Act III (with Astrid Varnay, historical from Bayreuth, EMI)
Die Meistersinger (with Schwarzkopf, historical from Bayreuth, in rather poor sound, EMI)
Tristan und Isolde (with Martha Mödl and Ramon Vinay, historical from Bayreuth, best heard on Orfeo, which obtained the master tapes from Bavarian Radio. A magnificent and underrated stereo account with Vickers and Dernesch is on EMI)
Parsifal (two accounts, studio and live. The live one is from the Vienna State Opera on RCA/BMG with a great cast despite a less than thrilling Fritz Uhl in the title role and rather dull sound. The studio one also features a strained Peter Hoffmann as Parsifal but is in every other respect one of Karajan’s greatest opera recordings, DG)
Ring cycle (done almost parallel with Solti’s famed cycle for Decca, Karajan’s for DG was uneven in the extreme. But the Walkure is to my mind the greatest on disc in the modern era, and the Rheingold nearly equals it, despite an over-parted Fischer-Dieskau as Wotan)
Webern: Orchestral works (DG)
Et al. — Two almost unknown facets of Karajan’s talent were ballet (a complete Giselle on Decca) and light pops (mostly with the Philharmonia for EMI – try a sparkling Chabrier’s Espana). Because of EMI’s English roots, he also did some odd one-offs of British composers: Walton Sym. #1– live from Italy! – Vaughan Williams Tallis Variations, and a smattering of Britten from London).
His Stravinsky was inexplicably sparse — no Petrushka, for example, and two ill-conceived Le Sacres, plus a live Oedipus Rex from Italy in dim pirated sound. He never explored Berlioz much beyond Symphonie Fantastique, which he recorded three times, none very successful to my ears, although some critics favor the first account with the Philharmonia, on EMI.
As for opera, one of Karajan’s strongest suits, there are tantalizing but dim-sounding pirated versions of La Traviata and Elektra, two works he never took into the studio. He was admired in operetta, but the stereo Merry Widow done for DG seems flat and humorless, and Die Fledermaus for Decca, acclaimed in its day, feels too weighty now. Three recordings of Carmen all fell short for various reasons, the best being a live 1954 account done in concert, yet it, too, lacks for stage drama and features Simionato as an Italian heroine clearly uneasy with French style. But it’s hard to resist one guilty pleasure — Leontyne Price as a sultry, smoky Carmen paired with a sobbing Franco Corelli whose French is so bad that it seems like an unknown language. [Post your opinion on the Berkshire Artsblog.]
Comment by berkshirereview May 31, 2008 @ 7:57 pm