Mighty Karajan
One hundred years after his birth and nearly 20 since his death, Herbert von Karajan's (pictured, below right) reputation is, inevitably, in something of an eclipse. How could it have been otherwise, given the almost suffocating eminence that surrounded the Austrian conductor in his later years? In the healthier and more diverse musical climate of 2008, it is all but impossible to recreate the sense of authority that Karajan and his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra exuded for so long. Yet the Karajan centenary—which falls on 5th April—is not just an opportunity to reflect on how much has changed for the better in the music world; it is also a chance to remind oneself just how good Karajan and his orchestra were.
Getting a ticket to hear Karajan was like getting a ticket to the cup final. I know this because I still possess both my only cup final ticket (Liverpool vs Leeds in1965) and my first Karajan ticket, to hear him conduct Brahms symphonies in the Royal Festival Hall in 1974. I have three memories of that concert. The first was the breathtaking sound of the Berlin Phil, a sound whose richness and texture was overwhelmingly more magnificent than anything I had heard before. The second was the economy of movements and gestures that Karajan required to inspire those burning Brahmsian phrases from his players. And the third was of wandering around during the interval in almost Faustian distress, telling myself that I would never attend such a wonderful concert again.
Not everything that Karajan performed and recorded was of the same quality or interest. His Berlin Phil recordings of Bach, Mozart and even his massively popular Beethoven sound increasingly like encrusted antiques to modern ears. But his Berg, his Debussy, his Strauss (J and R), his Wagner and even his Prokofiev still stand the test of time.
There is much to criticise, of course. Not even his many biographers can persuade me that Karajan was either a nice or a good man, which would not matter so much if were not for the time and place—Nazi Germany—in which he laid the foundations of his career, or for the remote Kane-like grandeur in which this aristocrat of the podium increasingly insisted on living. Not for nothing was he dubbed the music director of Europe. "Mozart came from Salzburg, the birthplace of Herbert von Karajan," as an Austrian joke had it.
The truth is that power mattered too much to Karajan and he had it for longer than was good for him. The 21st century is not in a hurry to empower another like him. Other great conductors of his era could be intolerable and worse, but they did not sit at the centre of European orchestral life or seek to dominate the recording industry to the extent that Karajan did.
Perhaps the Sunday Times critic David Cairns got it right when he said that "Karajan can be represented as the embodiment of the totalitarian spirit in music, riding to power on the techniques and cravings of the hi-fi era. But if he has often seemed the adversary of the music (particularly when it is Beethoven's), it is at the very highest level. There are times when one is forced to concede that he is the greatest conductor of the age."
The Guardian triumphs again
In 2006, the National Youth Orchestra—whose chairman is Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian—organised a classical musical quiz evening to raise funds for its tremendous work. At the end of an inebriated and competitive evening at the Royal Opera House, the team which I captained, the Guardian, emerged rather too easily as the winners. Shamefully but inevitably, there were cries of "fix" (it wasn't, I promise). In February, the NYO ran the quiz evening again. This time the competition was much stiffer. Among two dozen teams from newspapers, opera houses, agents and music publishers there was a team of conductors, with a positively Karajanesque determination to dominate, headed by no less a quartet of baton-wavers than Colin Davis, Mark Elder, Carl Davis and Thomas Adès. Radio 3, captained by the Proms director Roger Wright, fielded a crack team including such broadcasting luminaries as Chi-chi Nwanoku, Donald Macleod, Rob Cowan and James Jolly. And the result? Another victory for the legendary Guardian team. The prize baton sits on my desk for another year as I write. Radio 3 came a rather grumpy third.
