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Herbert von Karajan: A biographical portrait
In this fascinating and searching biography, Roger Vaughan has chronicled the life and times of one of the most controversial musical figures of the century. In private life an avid pilot, yachtsman, and racer, Herbert von Karajan has conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for over thirty years. He has led major orchestras in Vienna, Milan, and London, and was, for many years, the presiding genius of the Salzburg Music Festival. He has gained an international reputation as a foremost interpreter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas, particularly those of Mozart and Wagner. After a career spanning more than 60 years, he has been acclaimed "the General Music Director of Europe."
Von Karajan grew up in Austria in the afterglow of the Hapsburg Empire, and his early career coincided with the rise of Nazism in Germany. At the end of the war, despite his desultory attempts to separate the worlds of music and politics, he found himself in personal and artistic limbo. In 1955, when he brought the Berlin Philharmonic to New York City his concerts were picketed; when he returned with the same orchestra in 1983, he was greeted by shouts of "Bravo."
Von Karajan has always taken his moments of relaxation away from the world of music. In the past he has presented a carefully prepared image to the press and it is only now, in his seventh-seventh year, that he breaks away from his lifelong reticence and talks frankly about his family background and the politics of Nazi Germany. The man whose recordings have sold over a hundred million copies through the years shares with us his thoughts about the relationship between orchestra and conductor, conductor and singer, and between creative artist and business executive.
Roger Vaughan spent nearly two years traveling with and observing Herbert von Karajan in Europe and America. His research is meticulous and he has written a balanced biography of a complex man and a musical genius. Vaughan started his writing career at the Saturday Evening Post and later was on the staff of Life magazine. He has published three previous books and is currently editor of the Yacht magazine.
Von Karajan grew up in Austria in the afterglow of the Hapsburg Empire, and his early career coincided with the rise of Nazism in Germany. At the end of the war, despite his desultory attempts to separate the worlds of music and politics, he found himself in personal and artistic limbo. In 1955, when he brought the Berlin Philharmonic to New York City his concerts were picketed; when he returned with the same orchestra in 1983, he was greeted by shouts of "Bravo."
Von Karajan has always taken his moments of relaxation away from the world of music. In the past he has presented a carefully prepared image to the press and it is only now, in his seventh-seventh year, that he breaks away from his lifelong reticence and talks frankly about his family background and the politics of Nazi Germany. The man whose recordings have sold over a hundred million copies through the years shares with us his thoughts about the relationship between orchestra and conductor, conductor and singer, and between creative artist and business executive.
Roger Vaughan spent nearly two years traveling with and observing Herbert von Karajan in Europe and America. His research is meticulous and he has written a balanced biography of a complex man and a musical genius. Vaughan started his writing career at the Saturday Evening Post and later was on the staff of Life magazine. He has published three previous books and is currently editor of the Yacht magazine.
274 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
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February 20, 2019
Roger Vaughan met Herbert von Karajan in St. Tropez when he was writing an article for a sailing magazine. He wasn’t a music expert, so this is something of a bio lite, brimming with anecdotes of Karajan driving fast cars, flying his Falcon 10 jet, sailing his 77-foot yacht. “I was born to command and I can’t change myself,” Karajan asserted, and everything he did was done imperiously, befitting the great-great-grandson of a textile magnate ennobled by Frederick Augustus I of Saxony. Arriving for a recording session with his raincoat over his arm, Karajan offered it to the sound engineer to carry for him. The engineer ignored him; “Karajan never tried that trick again.” Working one day with his film editor, who had informed him of a dinner appointment she wanted to keep, he kept her late. “It was his way of reminding me what was most important,” she said. They quit in time for him to watch Dynasty.
Former Berlin Intendent Wolfgang Stresemann told Vaughan, “He doesn’t understand people – doesn’t trust the people he should trust. He is seventy-five, but he does not have the wisdom of an older man…he has made no progress towards wisdom. This is strange, because as one grows older a certain amount of wisdom is inevitable.”
The great soprano Birgit Nilsson said (quoted in the 2018 documentary Birgit Nilsson: A League of Her Own), “Making music with him was wonderful. But making theatre with him was not so wonderful. Everyone was so reverent with him. I didn't see why you had to be more reverent about Karajan than about everyone else. Sometimes I said what I thought. Once he said, "Frau Nilsson, do that again, but this time with heart. The heart is there where your wallet is." "Then we have at least one thing in common!" I replied. “I had the feeling that he wanted to show us who is in charge. For Götterdammerung he had 82 lighting rehearsals and one orchestra rehearsal. The balance was off. ....A great artist, but a small human being.”
Impossibly dark stage lighting was a habit with Karajan. For The Flying Dutchman at Salzburg, he designed an extremely dark stage with a diffusion screen, to complement the fantasy aspect of the story. But people were having difficulty seeing, and in fact it was too dark to be filmed. For Nilsson’s last collaboration with him, Die Walküre at the Met in 1969, she showed up during rehearsal wearing a miner’s helmet. "Everybody backstage was laughing. Karajan was not laughing."
Late in life Karajan formed his own film production company and began to make films of himself conducting works, spending hours with aides painstakingly planning shots, placing cameras, editing the film. The cameras would not focus on the players’ faces, because they were not photogenic enough – “because they are ugly,” he snapped at Vaughan. If faces appeared they would “be out of focus. This will complete the fantasy that the instrument makes music by itself.”
Married three times, Karajan sometimes strayed. He was drawn to beautiful blond women, whom he put on pedestals, writes Vaughan, and a separate category, women who were “available.” In the first category was the companion of a shady businessman whose money he needed for a tour. He asked an aide to prepare a picnic basket for him, then took her for a ride on his plane. The woman later told the aide that they had checked into a hotel, with separate rooms. Returning to her room, she found Karajan in her bed. He got up and quickly left, explaining that he was compelled to sleep in her bed for awhile – he wasn’t interested in sex with her, she was a romantic ideal.
Karajan conducted without a score (which among great conductors is not unusual) and with his eyes closed (which is). Closed eyes made conducting a more mystical experience for him, but, a music journalist wrote in 1957, [the habit] “sums up the relationship; the men are left with the discontented, vaguely rejected feeling that their personal identity is denied them, that all they mean to Karajan is this or that voice in the winds or strings or percussion.”
Critics were of two minds about Karajan, or maybe one mind split down the middle. There was no denying the beauty, refinement, and perfection of his performances, “total euphony” as one put it, but the rap was that he was a technician more than an artist. Another wrote that there was “so much beauty on the surface and so little music below it.” The critic Andrew Porter wrote in 1974: “When all sense of physical stress has been removed from the playing, when nothing sounds difficult, then the tensions of the music disappear. For Toscanini, for Szell, the Fourth Symphony [of Brahms] was a struggle … When Furtwängler conducted, it became a new adventure, for him, for his players, for the audience. Unexpected and wonderful things might happen in the course of it, and they usually did. In Karajan’s performance, the music never took one by surprise; astonishments were limited to the nonesuch instrumental sound…. Between manner and matter there is a Brahmsian paradox which Karajan resolved too comfortably, settling for manner.”
January 1, 2021
Probably more like 3.5 / 5 stars. I obtained this biography of Karajan because I could not find the Osbourne book at a reasonable price. This book, by Roger Vaughan, is still a very interesting look at the maestro. The book is copyrighted 1986, so it was written toward the end of Karajan's tenure with the Berlin Philharmonic and his passing in 1989. The author was able to follow Karajan for several years in the early 1980s, and gained Karajan's permission to use material for the book.
The portrait of Karajan is not entirely positive. You cannot write a history of classical music, and particularly the advent of recording mediums in classical music, without covering Herbert von Karajan. Karajan was a giant superstar of his time and art, and has a legendary status in the world of classical music. Karajan's musical mentors or models were Wilhelm Furtwangler (his legendary predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic) and Arturo Toscanini (the legendary Italian maestro mostly responsible for bringing classical music to mass audiences in the USA via his famous radio broadcasts in the 1940s and 1950s with the NBC Symphony Orchestra). Karajan had these two mentors with vastly different styles and interpretations of music, Furtwangler rather spontaneous, mystical, allowing musicians more freedom, taking liberties with the score versus Toscanini with a much more disciplined approach, closer to the score, more exacting, more of a task master. Karajan straddled these two styles quite a bit, but also developed his own style of course.
A good deal of the first part of the book is devoted to Karajan's rise as a young star in his native Austria, but also working his way through the ranks of provincial and national orchestras in Germany. His talent was immediately obvious, and he quickly earned a great reputation among audiences and critics alike. At some point he became the assumed heir of the Berlin Philharmonic, the crown jewel orchestra in all of classical music. That's not to say there weren't many political maneuvers involved, of course there were. Furtwangler eventually became threatened by Karajan's rising star, and especially after WWII Furtwangler tried his best to keep Karajan off the podium in Berlin. Meanwhile, Karajan was fostering a wonderful relationship with that other stellar orchestra of the German speaking world, the Vienna Philharmonic. The structure and organization of the Vienna being what it is, more independent than the Berlin, and without a permanent conductor or director, made it a good place for Karajan to build his reputation.
Of course WWII interrupted Karajan's rise to a significant extent. Unlike other well known conductors and artists in the Third Reich, Karajan DID become a member of the Nazi party. Later he would claim he only did it to advance his career, he had no sympathy with Nazi idealogy. Whether that was true is still unclear. But later Karajan totally renounced and distanced himself from the Nazis, but the Allies still did everything they could to prevent him from conducting after the war ended due to his affiliation. Karajan hid in Italy for a while, and then gradually worked his way back into the good graces of the Allies. Once again, he was in great demand and he returned to the limelight in Vienna and Berlin. In the meantime, he had established a relationship with La Scala opera house in Milan. Many of his most gripping and successful recordings were made during this post war time, and it was a time when he was still building his career rather than later when he was resting on his laurels a bit. Karajan was a workaholic, and once he learned to fly himself (he was a certified pilot) and bought his huge yacht, he would shuttle himself between Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg. He was a major influence and manager in making the Salzburg Festival one of the premier music festivals in the world. Karajan was one of the first to recognize the power and impact of recording technology and the ability for the gramophone to bring music to the masses. He would go on to record hundreds of records with the BPO, VPO, and La Scala on many record labels, but primarily Deutsche Grammophon and EMI. Just before taking over the Berlin, he spent some very fruitful years with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as well. This also endeared him to English speaking audiences.
The book does delve into Karajan's relationship with others, and he is portrayed somewhat as a little boy in a grown man's body in the sense that he liked fast sports cars, fast airplanes, and being a sportsman with skiing and later learning to captain a boat in races. He liked new technological inventions in audio and visual arts and filmmaking. At times I was a bit surprised at how the author didn't sugar coat his view of the maestro. Karajan was not really a "warm" person, and could come across as distant, cold, detached, and clinical. Especially in his later years, and especially in his dealings with the Berlin Philharmonic management, he could be dictatorial, childish, defensive, and impersonal. He was a difficult person to deal with on the whole, and like many famous conductors, he developed a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant.
But there is no denying Karajan's greatness as an artist. He had a clear vision for how he wanted things done, and was unsparing in his approach to working with the great artists in the world of opera and classical divas and soloists. If you didn't meet his standard, you were gone. He had a very high standard of excellence that he wanted met, and he was single minded in making it happen. Whether his productions were actually good is still up for argument, many found him to be unimaginative, too traditional, unwilling to accept input from others, rather staid and inflexible in staging and direction. Regardless, all the greatest artists in the industry wanted to work with him because of the powerful aura he had created around himself.
I would argue that Karajan stretched himself too thin, and thought himself to be greater than he was in reality. In his interpretations, Karajan was often looking for beauty and harmony in sound at the expense of emotion or creativity. For me, his recordings are almost too beautiful, too clinical, lacking in substance, too slick, or too much on the surface. Of course, that is a generalization, but there are only a handful of recordings of his that I believe truly rise to greatness. There is a sense that live performances led by Karajan were big events, and at least initially well received. But the lustre wore off after a while because he was so predictable. The Berlin Philharmonic "sound" that became synonymous with Karajan was that the sound was expertly blended and balanced where all instruments were perfectly in sync with the others. While this was certainly a brilliant legacy, it doesn't necessarily translate into greatness in specific works.
Karajan's career mirrors that of Leonard Bernstein in terms of their peak years and often competing recordings of the core repertoire. Their styles could not have been more different. While Karajan was rather introverted, Bernstein was a great extrovert on the podium and that emotional energy often translated onto their recordings. One might say Bernstein was over the top the other direction, and that also did not always serve the music well. But what they had in common was their self-promotion (intentional or not), and their sense of building something great. They both had their strengths and deficits, but what they both left to us in the way of a recorded legacy is massive. If Karajan's ego was somewhat larger, it was fed by the adoring audiences in Berlin and Vienna.
Toward the end of his life, similar to Bernstein, Karajan because very self-indulgent in his recordings and insisted on re-recording much of the core repertoire again with the new digital medium that came around in the 1980s. He recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies four times. It is his second cycle in the early 1960s, which was his first cycle with the Berlin, that is his finest. Many of Karajan's best performances are from the 1950s and 1960s, and for me he was at his best earlier in his career. There are fine productions from later in his career, but once he started valuing beauty over substance and became more self-indulgent, the interpretations suffered.
Many of these impressions I had prior to reading this book, and they were largely confirmed by Vaughan. As a musician and as an artist, Karajan's ability was prodigious. There is no doubt he had a deep and profound understanding of music like few in history. He also had a great ability to identify greatness in other artists. But Karajan's ability to communicate was not as keen, and his priorities were not always in line with the composers' priorities. I sense he was very calculating in building his image, and was extremely clever at doing that. But again, that didn't translate into greatness very often. Too often he and his charges did not achieve the depth that was required by certain works, and some interpretive nuances and subtleties were glossed over or powered through without sensitivity.
I do wish the author would have focused more on the music, and less on Karajan's hobbies and interests. The author admits at the start he is not a musician and doesn't know too much about classical music. To me this is a drawback of the book, as I would have liked to have heard more anecdotes about how Karajan conducted, how he interacted with his orchestras, his thoughts about specific composers or compositions etc. The author writes very well, but focuses on some aspects of Karajan's life I really had less interest in. But it is a valuable portrait nonetheless.
One part I particularly liked was Vaughan's description of how Karajan "returned" to the Vienna Philharmonic after many years of absence to conduct Brahms German Requiem in the early 1980s. The description of how everything seemed to come together on this one occasion with the performers, the recording, the orchestra, it just all clicked in creating a monumental performance that was transcendent and magical. It led me to seek out that recording again to find out if I heard those same qualities and indeed it is a magisterial performance of a work that was dear to Karajan. I wish the book had included more of these kinds of stories.
The portrait of Karajan is not entirely positive. You cannot write a history of classical music, and particularly the advent of recording mediums in classical music, without covering Herbert von Karajan. Karajan was a giant superstar of his time and art, and has a legendary status in the world of classical music. Karajan's musical mentors or models were Wilhelm Furtwangler (his legendary predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic) and Arturo Toscanini (the legendary Italian maestro mostly responsible for bringing classical music to mass audiences in the USA via his famous radio broadcasts in the 1940s and 1950s with the NBC Symphony Orchestra). Karajan had these two mentors with vastly different styles and interpretations of music, Furtwangler rather spontaneous, mystical, allowing musicians more freedom, taking liberties with the score versus Toscanini with a much more disciplined approach, closer to the score, more exacting, more of a task master. Karajan straddled these two styles quite a bit, but also developed his own style of course.
A good deal of the first part of the book is devoted to Karajan's rise as a young star in his native Austria, but also working his way through the ranks of provincial and national orchestras in Germany. His talent was immediately obvious, and he quickly earned a great reputation among audiences and critics alike. At some point he became the assumed heir of the Berlin Philharmonic, the crown jewel orchestra in all of classical music. That's not to say there weren't many political maneuvers involved, of course there were. Furtwangler eventually became threatened by Karajan's rising star, and especially after WWII Furtwangler tried his best to keep Karajan off the podium in Berlin. Meanwhile, Karajan was fostering a wonderful relationship with that other stellar orchestra of the German speaking world, the Vienna Philharmonic. The structure and organization of the Vienna being what it is, more independent than the Berlin, and without a permanent conductor or director, made it a good place for Karajan to build his reputation.
Of course WWII interrupted Karajan's rise to a significant extent. Unlike other well known conductors and artists in the Third Reich, Karajan DID become a member of the Nazi party. Later he would claim he only did it to advance his career, he had no sympathy with Nazi idealogy. Whether that was true is still unclear. But later Karajan totally renounced and distanced himself from the Nazis, but the Allies still did everything they could to prevent him from conducting after the war ended due to his affiliation. Karajan hid in Italy for a while, and then gradually worked his way back into the good graces of the Allies. Once again, he was in great demand and he returned to the limelight in Vienna and Berlin. In the meantime, he had established a relationship with La Scala opera house in Milan. Many of his most gripping and successful recordings were made during this post war time, and it was a time when he was still building his career rather than later when he was resting on his laurels a bit. Karajan was a workaholic, and once he learned to fly himself (he was a certified pilot) and bought his huge yacht, he would shuttle himself between Berlin, Vienna, and Salzburg. He was a major influence and manager in making the Salzburg Festival one of the premier music festivals in the world. Karajan was one of the first to recognize the power and impact of recording technology and the ability for the gramophone to bring music to the masses. He would go on to record hundreds of records with the BPO, VPO, and La Scala on many record labels, but primarily Deutsche Grammophon and EMI. Just before taking over the Berlin, he spent some very fruitful years with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as well. This also endeared him to English speaking audiences.
The book does delve into Karajan's relationship with others, and he is portrayed somewhat as a little boy in a grown man's body in the sense that he liked fast sports cars, fast airplanes, and being a sportsman with skiing and later learning to captain a boat in races. He liked new technological inventions in audio and visual arts and filmmaking. At times I was a bit surprised at how the author didn't sugar coat his view of the maestro. Karajan was not really a "warm" person, and could come across as distant, cold, detached, and clinical. Especially in his later years, and especially in his dealings with the Berlin Philharmonic management, he could be dictatorial, childish, defensive, and impersonal. He was a difficult person to deal with on the whole, and like many famous conductors, he developed a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant.
But there is no denying Karajan's greatness as an artist. He had a clear vision for how he wanted things done, and was unsparing in his approach to working with the great artists in the world of opera and classical divas and soloists. If you didn't meet his standard, you were gone. He had a very high standard of excellence that he wanted met, and he was single minded in making it happen. Whether his productions were actually good is still up for argument, many found him to be unimaginative, too traditional, unwilling to accept input from others, rather staid and inflexible in staging and direction. Regardless, all the greatest artists in the industry wanted to work with him because of the powerful aura he had created around himself.
I would argue that Karajan stretched himself too thin, and thought himself to be greater than he was in reality. In his interpretations, Karajan was often looking for beauty and harmony in sound at the expense of emotion or creativity. For me, his recordings are almost too beautiful, too clinical, lacking in substance, too slick, or too much on the surface. Of course, that is a generalization, but there are only a handful of recordings of his that I believe truly rise to greatness. There is a sense that live performances led by Karajan were big events, and at least initially well received. But the lustre wore off after a while because he was so predictable. The Berlin Philharmonic "sound" that became synonymous with Karajan was that the sound was expertly blended and balanced where all instruments were perfectly in sync with the others. While this was certainly a brilliant legacy, it doesn't necessarily translate into greatness in specific works.
Karajan's career mirrors that of Leonard Bernstein in terms of their peak years and often competing recordings of the core repertoire. Their styles could not have been more different. While Karajan was rather introverted, Bernstein was a great extrovert on the podium and that emotional energy often translated onto their recordings. One might say Bernstein was over the top the other direction, and that also did not always serve the music well. But what they had in common was their self-promotion (intentional or not), and their sense of building something great. They both had their strengths and deficits, but what they both left to us in the way of a recorded legacy is massive. If Karajan's ego was somewhat larger, it was fed by the adoring audiences in Berlin and Vienna.
Toward the end of his life, similar to Bernstein, Karajan because very self-indulgent in his recordings and insisted on re-recording much of the core repertoire again with the new digital medium that came around in the 1980s. He recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies four times. It is his second cycle in the early 1960s, which was his first cycle with the Berlin, that is his finest. Many of Karajan's best performances are from the 1950s and 1960s, and for me he was at his best earlier in his career. There are fine productions from later in his career, but once he started valuing beauty over substance and became more self-indulgent, the interpretations suffered.
Many of these impressions I had prior to reading this book, and they were largely confirmed by Vaughan. As a musician and as an artist, Karajan's ability was prodigious. There is no doubt he had a deep and profound understanding of music like few in history. He also had a great ability to identify greatness in other artists. But Karajan's ability to communicate was not as keen, and his priorities were not always in line with the composers' priorities. I sense he was very calculating in building his image, and was extremely clever at doing that. But again, that didn't translate into greatness very often. Too often he and his charges did not achieve the depth that was required by certain works, and some interpretive nuances and subtleties were glossed over or powered through without sensitivity.
I do wish the author would have focused more on the music, and less on Karajan's hobbies and interests. The author admits at the start he is not a musician and doesn't know too much about classical music. To me this is a drawback of the book, as I would have liked to have heard more anecdotes about how Karajan conducted, how he interacted with his orchestras, his thoughts about specific composers or compositions etc. The author writes very well, but focuses on some aspects of Karajan's life I really had less interest in. But it is a valuable portrait nonetheless.
One part I particularly liked was Vaughan's description of how Karajan "returned" to the Vienna Philharmonic after many years of absence to conduct Brahms German Requiem in the early 1980s. The description of how everything seemed to come together on this one occasion with the performers, the recording, the orchestra, it just all clicked in creating a monumental performance that was transcendent and magical. It led me to seek out that recording again to find out if I heard those same qualities and indeed it is a magisterial performance of a work that was dear to Karajan. I wish the book had included more of these kinds of stories.
May 22, 2023
While significantly more satisfying than ‘My Autobiography’, Franz Endler’s openly ghost-written opus in which Karajan moves heaven and earth to avoid giving up a single piece of information about himself, Vaughan’s contribution to the literature of Karajan remains problematic. The main issue is that the relatively short (264-page) narrative is an uneasy amalgam of at least three different stylistic/tonal approaches: there’s Vaughan’s account of watching the Maestro rehearse ‘Der Fliegende Holländer’ in Salzburg and ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ in Vienna; there’s Vaughan the yachtsman enthusiastically fawning over Karajan’s love of expensive boats, fast cars and avionics; and there’s the Vaughan who is able to take his own ego out of the equation and pen a decent biographical account of Karajan’s troubled past and meteoric career. While all of these approaches work to a greater or lesser degree (the Salzburg and Vienna interludes suffer from a tendency to turgid travel writing and snitty asides that were probably conceived as Mark Twain style witticisms but just make him sound like a bit of a dick), they never gel cumulatively. The structure is wonky. Too many passages lose themselves in tangential meanderings while Karajan drifts out of focus. Vaughan struggles to weigh his evidently meaningful relationship with the conductor against the business of capturing him as a subject warts-and-all. When he gets it right, Vaughan turns in some commendably effectively and moving prose. At other times, he comes across as boorish and chauvinistic. The overall result is frustrating but the book contains enough first-hand detail that it remains an essential read for anyone with a serious interest in Karajan.
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