As a music-obsessed teenager in a culturally-limited American city I was challenged by the task of finding classical records. If a well-stocked record store in town existed, I didn't know about it. I was constrained to bicycling range, which meant that the local Target was my primary supply. The pickings were paltry, consisting only of recent releases by the big labels. The only thing more modest than Target's selection was my budget. I learned quickly where to focus, and in particular, what to avoid.
Target was just cool enough to carry some of the latest Deutsche Grammophon releases, which were dramatically more tantalizing than the everyday stuff from Columbia Masterworks or RCA Victor. Those yellow shields across the top with their German titles, the European orchestras and conductors; they bore potent witness to that sophisticated musical world that seemed so infinitely remote from my suburban blandness. Eventually I took a deep breath and bought one — Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, in the Brahms 2nd Symphony.
This LP was my first exposure to the Brahms symphonies, and to Karajan. Everything about the record thrilled me down to my toes — the piece, the performance, the multi-lingual program notes, the lush recording, the high-class pressing itself. Deutsche Grammophon and Karajan were, to me, the epitome of sonic class and high-end musicianship. I've never completely lost that opinion, truth be told.
Karajan would have been 100 this year had he lived, and in observance of his April 8 birthday, 2008 has been a Karajan year par excellence. His primary labels — EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, and Decca — have put out handsome sets of his voluminous recordings. Articles have popped up hither and yon, some of them heaping praise on the man and his music, others roundly condemning both. He's been getting press like Paris Hilton gets press, except that he's dead and she's not. Now, people don't get this worked up over other deceased front-rank conductors such as, say, Eugene Ormandy. What made Karajan so controversial?
Part of it is personal — his Nazi party membership, his dictatorial control over several major European opera houses and orchestras, his remote aloofness, his wealth, his power. But Karajan's musicianship and conducting come in for some brickbats as well. Much of that carping concerns the inflexibility of his orchestral sound, especially during his last decade. But what comes across as static and stultifying to one listener may be heard as sustained opulence to another. Consider this pair of articles from the London Telegraph, one negative, one positive. For downright fire-and-brimstone condemnation, here's a whopper.
Karajan left us an astounding legacy of recorded music. His discography includes gold-standard versions of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Sibelius; he was one of the great opera conductors of the century — consider the Aida with Renata Tebaldi, Pelleas et Melisande with Frederika von Stade, the Dresden Meistersinger, or the major Mozart operas with Schwarzkopf, Gobbi, and Simoneau. He's routinely charged with slighting contemporary music, but it's a bum rap. He was no Koussevitzky or Bernstein, to be sure, but nonetheless he did his share. Only a very dedicated musician could have endured the endless, enervating frigidity of Carl Orff's 'De temporum fine comoedia', but —if anybody cares — Karajan left us an immaculately executed premiere (and only) recording.
He was a well-rounded musician, one whose style perhaps reflects the values of the pre-WWII era, but who was at home in a much wider repertoire than most of his contemporaries. For those who associate Karajan primarily with Germanic literature, it's worth remembering that he was an outstanding interpreter of both Sibelius and Debussy. As he grew older his range narrowed, but he could create astonishing performances right up to his very last days, capping his recording career with a spellbinding Bruckner Seventh Symphony.
I'll let the carpers and pickers and naysayers carp, pick, and naysay. I just keep on listening to his half-century recorded legacy, fascinated by just how much music-making it is possible to carry out in one lifetime. Happy Birthday, Maestro, even if I'm a bit late to the party.
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