(b Salzburg, 5 April 1908; d Anif, 16 July 1989). Austrian conductor. He appeared in public at the age of five as a pianist, and studied the piano at the Salzburg Mozarteum while still a schoolboy, but changed his intentions and took further studies in conducting with Franz Schalk at the Vienna Music Academy. His spectacular career was launched when he conducted Le nozze di Figaro on 2 March 1929 at Ulm, where he worked for five years at the Städtisches Theater. Here the limited resources of orchestra and stage apparently influenced his almost obsessive concern with technical perfection in his later approach to conducting and producing. In 1934, at the age of 26, he was appointed Generalmusikdirektor at Aachen (holding that position unitl 1942), and in 1937 a now legendary performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin Staatsoper marked the turning-point in his career. In 1938 he made his débuts with the Berlin PO, the Berlin Staatsoper and at La Scala. Reviews hailed him widely as ‘Das Wunder Karajan’. From 1941 he based himself in Berlin, where his reputation soon rivalled Furtwängler’s.
During the war he was active as Staatskapellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper and as occasional conductor in occupied territories. After the war the question of Karajan’s political affiliations pursued him. He never denied membership of the Nazi party; rather, he insisted it was mere pragmatism, essential to his career, and compared it to joining an Alpine Club. Vaughan and others have documented that he joined the party on 8 April 1933 at Aachen, and again on 1 May 1933 at Ulm, contrary to the 1935 date he long asserted. He spent the last six months of the war in Italy and the next two years appealing for denazification. It was granted in time for concerts with the Vienna SO and Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1947, and resumption of his role at the Salzburg Festival in 1948. From the 1948–9 season he was active at La Scala as producer as well as conductor, and from 1950 he was engaged in extensive recording activities with Walter Legge in London and Vienna. His role as conductor of the Philharmonia (1948–54) saw the re-establishment of his continental reputation.
He conducted the Ring and Die Meistersinger in 1951 at Bayreuth (where he dared to change Wagner’s orchestral seating plan); took the Philharmonia Orchestra on its first European tour in 1952; and made his American début in Washington DC, on a tour with the Berlin PO in 1955, the year in which he succeeded Furtwängler as the orchestra’s principal conductor. He became artistic director of the Salzburg Festival (1956–60), and on 1 January 1957 succeeded Böhm as director of the Vienna Staatsoper, thereby acquiring a musical ‘empire’ which gave currency to the comment that he was becoming ‘the Generalmusikdirektor of Europe’. He sought to keep a link with Milan by mixing the stagione principle of La Scala with the Vienna repertory system, and took increasing responsibility for production in the Ring and other operas, including Fidelio, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Otello and Pelléas et Mélisande. After artistic and administrative disagreements, and believing that traditional methods of opera presentation held little hope for the future, he resigned his Vienna post in 1964.
On 15 October 1963 he gave the inaugural concert at Berlin’s new Philharmonie, a hall built to his specifications. In 1964 he rejoined the directorate of the Salzburg Festival, and in 1967 founded the Salzburg Easter Festival. Using the Berlin PO, he planned to record each year’s productions after the festival performances, film them for television and cinema, and take them to New York (where he made his Metropolitan Opera début in 1967 with his Salzburg production of Die Walküre). His artistic results in this venture brought controversial reactions, and he failed to secure a financially independent basis for it. In 1973 he called on major European opera managements to coordinate their productions to maintain standards, and to halt what he considered to be a decline in operatic presentation. He returned to the Vienna Staatsoper in 1977.
Karajan served as music advisor to the Orchestre de Paris (1969–71), but concentrated his principal work in Berlin and Salzburg and enormously strengthened his influence through tours, and in recordings using the most advanced audio and video technologies. In his lifetime he sold more than 100 million copies of some 800 recordings in concert and opera. The establishment of the Karajan Foundation (1968) led to major conferences and a biennial international competition for young conductors. Although named conductor for life of the Berlin PO in 1967, his last years there were not happy. Increasing alienation from players, his struggle in 1982 to appoint the clarinettist Sabine Meyer and growing ill-health (constant back pain, near-paralysis in the legs, numerous operations) combined with managerial and artistic conflicts to cause his retirement from Berlin in April 1989. He died of a heart attack three months later.
An adherent of Zen Buddhism, Karajan possessed an astounding magnetism, sense of rhythm, acuity of ear, memory for a score’s minutest details and control of his work in all its facets. His finest performances combined, as he once declared, ‘Toscanini’s precision with Furtwängler’s fantasy’. Even so, some critics insisted that Karajan’s commitment to aural perfection came at a cost of spiritual values and intellectual rigour. He favoured a flowing, rounded legato line, elasticity of accompaniment and transparency of sonority, with a flair for exactness and love of effect. Numerous singers testify to his subtlety and consideration as a conductor of opera, although he sometimes persuaded sopranos to undertake roles that were too heavy for them. His large, if fundamentally conservative repertory, much of which he recorded several times, ranged from Bach (which he conducted from the keyboard) through the Viennese Classical composers, the Austro-German Romantics (many regarded him as at his greatest in Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss) and the Second Viennese School to Stravinsky, Henze and Penderecki. For the last three decades of his life no conductor had a greater influence in concepts of sound and texture.
B. Gavoty: Herbert von Karajan (Geneva, 1956)
F. Herzfeld: Herbert von Karajan (Berlin, 1959)
K. Löbl: Das Wunder Karajan (Bayreuth, 1965, 2/1978)
P. de Raedt: Herbert von Karajan (Ghent, 1965)
E. Haeusserman: Herbert von Karajan: Biographie (Gütersloh, 1968, 2/1978)
P. Robinson: The Art of the Conductor – Karajan (London, 1975)
R. Chesterman: Conversations with Conductors (London and New York, 1976)
J. Lorcey: Herbert von Karajan (Paris, 1978)
R. Bachmann: Karajan: Anmerkungen zu einer Karriere (Düsseldorf, 1983)
R. Vaughan: Herbert von Karajan: a Biographical Portrait (London, 1986)
P. Csobadi: Karajan oder die kontrollierte Ekstase (Vienna, 1988)
W. Tharichen: Paukenschläge: Furtwängler oder Karajan? (Zürich, 1988)
F. Endler: Herbert von Karajan: my Biography as told to Franz Endler (London, 1989)
R. Osborne: Conversations with Karajan (Oxford, 1989)
R. Bachmann: Karajan: Notes on a Career (London, 1990)
F. Endler: Karajan (Hamburg, 1992)
K. Lang: The Karajan Dossier (London, 1992)
R. Osborne: Herbert von Karajan: a Life in Music (London, 1998)
GERHARD BRUNNER/CHARLES BARBER, JOSÉ BOWEN