Product Description
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This is an 82-CD box set of Karajan s complete Deutsche
Grammophon s from 1959 to 1970 (excluding opera). Now
available for the first time in the United States!
The box set includes; Original cover art, a lavish,
richly-documented 200-page book in English, German, and French
with newly-commissioned articles. With extra Karajan showcard
portrait and memorabilia from the archives.
Review
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The older I get, the more I revere him
Jürgen Otten interviews the Berlin Philharmonic s legendary
concertmaster Thomas Brandis
Herr Brandis, if we re to believe Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the
subject of our interview was a demigod.
Let me start off by telling a nice story. Last night I couldn t
and suddenly found myself sitting in my living room in
front of the TV. A concert with the Scala Orchestra and Chorus
was being broadcast, conducted by ert von Karajan. It was the
Verdi Requiem, one of his big numbers. I was so spellbound that I
listened to the very last note, until almost half past two at
night. But it was worth it: Karajan was fabulous. I don t think
anyone can conduct the Verdi Requiem with such calm discipline,
such coherence and concentration, as Karajan did. I once saw it
done by Leonard Bernstein. He was a fidgety bundle of nerves; all
you see is the conductor. Karajan was often accused of
play-acting the part of the conductor, but that wasn t true at
all. Still, the La Scala Chorus and Orchestra didn t thrill me as
much as the performance we gave him with the Berlin Phil.
You ve probably heard the famous Karajan joke. Bernstein, Böhm
and Karajan are sitting together arguing who s the greatest
conductor on earth. Bernstein says that God appeared to him and
said, It s you! Böhm replies that that s not very likely because
God appeared to him and told him, It s you! At which point
ert von Karajan drily adds, I said nothing of the sort!
Now, the bit about Karajan s divinity is true in that he never
admitted a mistake. He just never did anything wrong. More than
that, he had a unique aura that ensured him a special status. He
had no friends in the orchestra; he never used the familiar form
of address with any musician. And he was right not to: that way
no one felt envious.
Was it something like this: the demigod on one side and the
orchestra on the other, separated by a scrim?
No, Karajan had many human traits. One proof is a letter he sent
to me on 12 March 1983 after I d announced my departure from the
orchestra. He thanked me in the warmest terms for my empathy as
concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. He never expressed his
feelings like that in public. But to me one thing is certain: the
older I get, the more I revere him, for two basic reasons. First,
anyone who s got all of Wagner s operas in his head and by that I
mean both the music and the words and who conducts them all from
memory has simply got to be a genius. Second, rather than
conducting every Bruckner symphony like an act of worship, he
viewed Bruckner as a Romantic. Besides, I don t think there s
anyone today who can conduct a Bruckner Eighth like Karajan.
What about the grand old men Günter Wand, Sergiu Celibidache and
Eugen Jochum? Weren t they all major Bruckner conductors?
I heard Karajan and Celibidache in Bruckner s Fifth and Ninth one
after another, and I preferred Karajan by far. Celibidache s
strength lay more in French music, in Debussy and Ravel, and in
Brahms as well.
Getting back to Karajan: you joined the Berlin Philharmonic as
concertmaster in 1962, when he d been its principal conductor for
seven years. Was anything left of the typical Furtwängler sound
at that time, or had Karajan already established his own
distinctive sound?
He was forced to continue along the path Furtwängler had taken if
only because we always entered late. There was a good reason for
that: it increased the tension. Beethoven s A major Symphony, for
example, always began after the beat. That came from Furtwängler,
who always had such a vague beat.
It wiggled down from on high?
Exactly.
Did Karajan have a perfect beat?
He always made very round movements because he wanted to avoid
rigidity. But even so his beat was clear. The German conductor
with the best beat of --Jürgen Otten interviews the Berlin
Philharmonic s legendary concertmaster Thomas Brandis
Lord of the Baton
by Klaus Geitel
It s as exciting as ever and impossible to overlook: Hans
Scharoun s Philharmonie concert hall in Berlin. Here ert von
Karajan erected a musical monument that beggars comparison. The
old Philharmonie had burnt to the ground in the war, on 30
January 1944. Shortly before the demise of this hallowed musical
edifice, originally built as a skating rink, a film was made
inside its walls. It featured Will Quadflieg as the orchestra s
rueful concertmaster returning to wander pensively through the
scenes of his earlier triumphs. These accidental images are all
that remain of the building on Bernburger Strasse, a place that
became my home from home beginning in autumn 1939. For 50 marks I
d been able to buy a subscription ticket to the ten Furtwängler
concerts in the upcoming season. At the last minute the men on
the Berlin Philharmonic s subscription list had been called up
and put in uniform, leaving a spot free for me. I enjoyed every
minute of it.
Things were no different with Scharoun s highly controversial
Philharmonie at the edge of the Tiergarten, a building that
stands spectacularly on what is known today as
ert-von-Karajan-Strasse. That it could be built at all was
basically made possible by Karajan s unflinching commitment to an
architectural design that radically parted ways with every
convention. When Vladimir Horowitz came to Berlin decades later,
hand in hand with his wife Wanda Toscanini, she roundly
procled, after a brief tour of the hall, that her husband
would surely never play there. Here everyone looks down at him
rather than looking up to him as it should be. But in the end
Horowitz, the seasoned veteran, virtually fell in love with the
hall and with his boundless rtunities to flirt with the young
people seated on the concert stage.
From the beginning to the end of his career with the Berlin
Philharmonic, all this was and remained perfectly inconsequential
to Karajan. He didn t care in the least whether the audience
looked up to him or not. The only thing he cared about was that
all his motions were clear, distinct and unerring to the
musicians on the concert platform. That was sufficient. He was
amazingly devoid of vanity. Brilliance for its own sake was not
his cup of tea. His performances had to be as gripping as
possible; nothing else mattered. He detested any form of
chumminess with the audience or anyone else. He probably felt
more like a guardian of the music he d selected, analyzed,
rehearsed and was now bringing to life, eyes closed in rapture.
His baton alone guided the musicians on to the sole correct path
he wanted them to take. No other viewpoint was tolerated beneath
his artistically eloquent thumb. He was a musical dictator of
genius. But he wasn t born that way, nor did it fall into his
lap. It had cost him infinite effort and labour before suddenly
one day, for the sole purpose of annoying Furtwängler, the
newspapers spoke of The Karajan Miracle . Herr K. , as
Furtwängler called him, grew to become a veritable bugbear to the
elder man.
When Karajan was a highly successful general music director in
Aachen, Heinz Tietjen, the managing director of the Berlin State
Opera, perspicaciously retained him for his famous company in the
German capital. As if that weren t enough, in late October 1938
he let him conduct Wagner s Tristan und Isolde, the fons et origo
of musical profundity, and a work that every conductor concerned
about his reputation inevitably cled prima facie as his
personal property. To assign Tristan to, of all people, a barely
30-year-old upstart, the youngest general music director in
Germany, and this at the Berlin State Opera, was taken by many as
a slap in the face to Berlin s musical hierarchy. Standing at the
pinnacle of that hierarchy for over fifteen years had been
Furtwängler, --by Klaus Geitel
