Michael Walsh - They Wanted Him Everywhere 汉译

Herbert von Karajan

In a technocratic age, Herbert von Karajan cut a Byronic swath. Daredevil race-car driver, accomplished airplane pilot, keen yachtsman, expert skier, amateur gymnast, yoga devotee, Zen Buddhist and, above all, the greatest conductor of the postwar period, the aristocratic Karajan was the epitome of the artist as hero. His death last week at his home near Salzburg at 81 left the world of music a paler, more plebeian place.

A lithe, compact figure with penetrating blue eyes and a melodramatic shock of swept-back hair, Karajan was a commanding figure on the podium. He achieved a preternatural level of performance with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which under his direction became the best in the world. His readings combined the whiplash precision of Arturo Toscanini with the metaphysical interpretive sweep of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Rough edges were refined away, and textures were blended until they were seamless; the musicians listened to one another responsively, as if they were playing chamber music.

Some critics, mostly Americans, found the results calculated and mannered, but they missed the point. “I first achieve rehearsal perfection — complete mastery of detail and mechanization,” Karajan explained. “Then I let the men play freely during the actual performance, so that they are making the music as much as I am — sharing the emotion which we all have together. “He conducted without a score and with his eyes closed, the better to visualize the perfect sound he held in his mind.

Until he stepped down as music director of the Berlin Phil-harmonic hi bitterness and acrimony earlier this year, Karajan had wielded unsurpassed power. Between 1955 and 1964, he was simultaneously conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and artistic director of both the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera. The Philharmonic Orchestra in London was created for him, and Karajan was a regular at La Scala in Milan. His far-reaching influence became the subject of jokes. Sample: Karajan jumps into a cab, and when the driver asks, “Where to?” the conductor replies, “It doesn’t matter. They want me everywhere.

In front of an orchestra, the hawk-featured Karajan radiated Prussian authority. Appearances, however, could be misleading, and Karajan liked to claim he had no German blood in his veins. He was born is Salzburg, but his mother was a Serb, and his paternal ancestors were of Greek origin, textile merchants who left Macedonia for Saxony nearly three centuries ago. For services to the Holy Roman Empire, Karajan’s great-great-grandfather was knighted; he Germanicized the family name from Karajannis to Karajan.

First trained as a pianist, young Herbert was pushed by his physician father to study science at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute from 1926 to 1928. But the lure of art was too strong to resist, so Karajan also attended the Vienna Academy of Music, qualifying as a conductor. He got his first conducting post in 1929 at Ulm. The theater was tiny, the stage minuscule, and the orchestra could muster only 24 players. Unfazed, Karajan managed to stage such major works as Strauss’s Salome and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.

In 1933, with Hitler in power, Karajan joined the National Socialist Party and remained a member for more than a decade. Later he claimed that joining the Nazis was a condition of his employment at his next post, in Aachen, but Karajan did not become conductor of that city’s opera until 1934. Although he was denazified in 1946, he could never quite escape the onus of his Faustian bargain.

After the war, das Wunder Karajan, as one newspaper had hailed him, quickly emerged as the leading young conductor in West Germany. There was a memorable Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1951 and 1952, which ended abruptly when he crossed swords with Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, over the staging; Karajan never went back. In 1955 he was named to the Berlin post, succeeding Furtwangler.

Karajan was unsurpassed in the romantic repertory. His Bruckner symphonies had the lofty moral certainty of Gothic cathedrals, his Strauss tone poems exploded with uninhibited high spirits, and his Beethoven symphonies had the force of direct revelations from the composer. He was just as convincing in opera. Karajan’s 1967— 70 Deutsche Grammophon recording of the Ring is one of the glories of the phonograph; his 1971 version of Die Meistersinger with the Dresden State Orchestra may be the most vital operatic recording ever made. While his murky stagings — including an aborted Ring at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1967—1968 — were not on the same high level, they nevertheless reflected his passionate belief in the validity of opera as drama, as well as his insistence on controlling every aspect of his productions.

His success brought him great reward. He kept homes in St. Moritz, St. Tropez and Salzburg and flew his own plane. He married three times; with his last wife, the French-born Eliette, he had two daughters. But toward the end of his career, Karajan ran into unexpected difficulty with the traditionally male Berlin Philharmonic when he tried to appoint a woman as principal clarinetist. Karajan eventually backed down, and the dispute was patched tip, but it left lingering distaste. He was bothered by ill-ness, had undergone several back operations, and limped as the result of a fall in 1978. But he continued, undaunted. Once on the podium, the years and the pain melted away. The eyes would shut, the hands would rise, and the magic would begin again.