Hernert von Karajan, whose hundredth anniversary is being marked this year, is one of the most important conductors of the past century and, most likely, presents himself as one of the brightest symbols of the recently departed epoch.
When Karajan only began his career, the era of the great conductors, who inherited the traditions of the nineteenth century — Karl Muck, Franz Schalk, Richard Strauss and Leo Blech — was coming to a close. When Karajan achieved the culmination of his artistic activities, in the 1950-1960s the great conductors of the post-romantic era — Furtwangler and Walter — passed away. The era of the grand Romantic conducting had gone forever. The devoted and rapturous public of that era had gone — it was replaced by the generation of baby-boomers, attacked by mass culture and, following the words of Ardrno, not fathoming of “how could it be possible to write poetry after Auschwitz”. The philharmonic halls and theaters of pre-war Europe had gone for good. What became a symbol for these changes was the building of the Berlin Philharmonic Society, the orchestra of which was directed by Karajan up to his last days, which was destroyed to its foundations and restored completely: the famous pentacle of Friederich Scharoun. The new post-war epoch, in addition to the musical avant-garde and its interest in historical instruments, Beatles-mania, the atomic bomb, the sexual revolution and post-modernist philosophy, brought along an entirely different approach towards the art of large symphony orchestras. Karajan, similarly to his contemporaries (who were, in many ways, his rivals), George Szolti, Sergiu Celibidache and Leonard Bernstein, came to face with entirely new realities of musical perception. First of all, each one of them in their profoundly original manner started exercising a remarkable preciseness in their rendering of even the minutest details of orchestral adornment of the music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was more adapted towards the tastes of the audiences of that time as well as for the acoustics of the new halls. Similarly to an avant-garde composer, who gave attention to the smallest touch of sound, Karajan worked on the world-famous symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner as well as Richard Strauss’ symphonic poems, presenting them as enticing musical narrations, glittering with brilliant, albeit somewhat cold colors. The captivating spontaneity of the pre-war performances, where these details and side-effects had been left to the previous listener, who was better educated musically, to complement in his perception, gave way to the legendary perfectionism, which is most frequently remembered in connection to Karajan.
This approach of Karajan made a special impression in the opera theater, where his era witnessed the total elimination of lack of precision, approximation and conditionality of rendition of operatic scores. Just as Zeffirelli became one of the leaders of the renewal of opera staging, so his partner, the musical director of performances, Herbert von Karajan, assumed the leading positions in the renewal of the principles of orchestral conducting. Needless to say what an impression was made by the appearance of Karajan at the conductor’s podium during La Scala’s tour in Moscow in 1964 at the Bolshoi Theater!
Of course the artistic endeavors of this type were easier to carry out than at a concert hall. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the long-playing records, invented in the late 1940s, as well as the stereorecordings which followed them, played such an important role in elevating Karajan to the rank of the first maestros of the world. Karajan made himself known to the world in 1947, when Walter Lege, the outstanding producer at the EMI record company, organized a recording of Brahms’ “German Requiem” in the half-starved Vienna, occupied by Soviet and American armies. The album with the then-standard 78 rpm records was quickly distributed throughout the entire planet in an immensely large run and established the beginning of Karajan’s most extensive discography, comprising — if transferred onto contemporary technology — over 100 compact discs of recorded music. And this is limited only to recordings, carried out in studios!
Many recordings, made from Karajan’s concerts with various orchestras, are still waiting for their hour of dissemination. In honor of the outstanding conductor’s centennial anniversary, the “Melodiya” company is rereleasing recordings made during Karajan’s tour of Moscow 1968. This was Karajan’s third visit to the USSR during the course of five years. For the first time, as has already been written, Russian audiences were able to acquaint themselves with the maestro’s live performances during the tours of “La Scala”. The second time that Karajan came was during the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The tour with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra became the culmination of the conductor’s popularity in Russia, though, simultaneously, they created a rather interesting discussion, reminding of the controversies around such touring conductors as Hermann Scherchen.
On one hand, among the lay music lovers who knew Karajan from the gramophone recordings, predominantly of operas, which inscribed him during the height of his power, in the 1950s and 1960s there arose a cult of the conductor, similarly to the way it was in many other countries. In the spring of 1968 prior to the conductor’s concerts in the Large Hall of Moscow Conservatory policemen on horses guarded the entrance to the hall, checking back crowds of enthusiasts. For those lucky people who were able to find their way through to the concerts, each one of them became one of the strongest impressions of their youth which they still recount up till now: nothing of the sort had ever been heard by either the Moscow or the Leningrad audiences. General admiration was also evoked by Karajan’s opera performances, as well as his fantastic mastery of detail and his purely cinematographic mastery of changes of plans and proportions, which gave insight into the integral perception of the compositions he conducted. On the other hand, the vast majority of the Soviet listeners towards the end of the 1960s were not yet used to such an approach: we were still living in the epoch of post-romantic conducting, exemplified by such conductors as, for instance, Yevgeny Mravinsky. Hence, the responses to the last tour of Karajan, which appeared in the official Soviet press, were quite varied in their evaluations. Karajan, similarly to Scherchen (who in many ways was ahead of his epoch in his punctuality) were accused, four decades prior to that, of dryness and excessive moderation, whereas his love of detailed work and highlighting of separate episodes, according to some opinions, was detrimental to the integrity of the musical conception. In an article, published in “Sovetskaya muzyka” — the largest musical magazine in the USSR — specially acrid criticism was levied at Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben” and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. This seemed very paradoxical, as it was particularly in these programmatic and, in many ways, coloristic compositions, separated between each other by almost a century, the construction of musical thought itself, if one could express it thus, enabled Karajan to demonstrate his picturesque theatrical skills in all their glory! The evaluation of the performance of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was unequivocal, likewise: its “Viennese Classical” style (according to the composer’s own words) could not be more suited to the approach of the conductor, the compatriot of Mozart and Beethoven — nonetheless, its second movement turned out to be too “harsh” and “mechanical”. The least contentious of all was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, surprisingly enough, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto.
At the present time it is strange to read the pages of these old reviews: what seemed to be controversial forty years ago acquired during the course of time in the USSR and then in Russia the status of an irrevocable law, a sort of “golden standard” to which orchestras aspire and which seems not only hardly to be unattainable, but even… almost outdated. Time goes forward, but the wave of interest towards the romantic style of conducting of the beginning of the previous century, which appeared shortly after the death of Karajan in 1989 and just recently reached Russia, has considerably shaken the positions of the idols of the 1950s-1970s — Karajan, Szolti and Bernstein… in our days the recordings of Karajan do not present themselves any more an absolute, flawless standard as was the case as recently as two decades ago. However, upon listening to them — especially those that were made of live recordings, which installed the moment of the direct creation of music in the presence of the audience, the reaction of which remained inscribed onto the gramophone tape — one cannot but marvel up to the present day at the conductor’s artistry, the orchestra’s polished performance and the perfection of conception, all of which at times seem to approach the level of genius…
