Karajan: A New Life

Among the three international superstars of conducting, Sir Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein are almost overly familiar to audiences in the U.S. Herbert von Karajan is a more remote, elusive figure. In 1955 he was appointed conductor for life of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the finest orchestras in the world. In the years since, he has exercised complete control over its rehearsals, working conditions, personnel and guest artists. Today he can say: "I cannot now blame anybody else for not getting the results I want. No excuses. If it's wrong, it's entirely my fault--and that is my greatest joy."

If right, that is his fault and joy too. Such was the case last week as Karajan brought off a bravura musical marathon in New York's Carnegie Hall. In four successive days he unraveled the musical and spiritual mysteries of Brahms' A German Requiem, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, a double bill of the Mozart Requiem and Bruckner Te Deum and the Verdi Requiem Mass. Each of these is a work of immense proportions requiring time and money as well as skill to prepare. The average orchestra in the U.S. will usually do one such score a year. As the world of music has known for a quarter of a century, there is nothing average about Karajan. For this occasion he brought with him not only the Berlin Philharmonic, but 150 members of the Vienna Singverein, a superbly responsive chorus that at various times in its 118-year history has been led by Berlioz, Liszt and Brahms.

So What! As conductors go--and they do go: into their 70s, 80s, even 90s --Karajan at 68 is a comparative youngster. But following serious surgery for a slipped disc last year, his four-day concert of masterpieces seemed all the more remarkable. He takes no medicine and still experiences pain. In an infrequent interview, with TIME Music Critic William Bender, he dispatched the subject of pain fast: "So what! I had a long time to think during seven weeks in the hospital. Now everything is such a joy, the bread I eat, every step. It's a new life."

In the arts it is always risky to equate states of mind with states of body, but Karajan's music did have a new intensity and purposefulness to it. Indeed, Karajan seemed at the peak of his interpretive power. As the slender, autocratic figure took the podium, one missed the old athletic spring. But not in the music. In fact, one could not detect any of the attenuated striving for effect, rather than meaning, that has marred many of Karajan's recordings in the past five years or so.

The Verdi Requiem was a marvel of controlled fervor. Soprano Mirella Freni's concluding Libera me had a rare blend of sweetness and power. The Brahms Requiem seemed cut from velvet rather than the usual broadcloth. Karajan's reading was a subdued rumination, a realization of the deeply personal utterance the composer drew from the Lutheran Bible. In the elegiac "And ye now therefore have sorrow," Soprano Leontyne Price seemed to distill grief and comfort into a burnished flow of melody.

No Tricks. For the Mozart Requiem, Karajan opted convincingly for a large symphonic approach, sweeping the music along with crisp rhythms and an ingenious succession of tempos. Bruckner's Te Deum has a peculiarly spare, even austere ring; Karajan caught that quality by the simple expedient of exposing all its modal harmonies and laying out its violent cross-rhythms firmly and precisely. Best of all perhaps was the Beethoven Ninth. This was one of those uncommon moments in which the strictest adherence to the letter of the score had a liberating effect. Rarely has the scherzo been taken at such a whirlwind pace; rarely has its tricky beat sounded so clearly.

It was the sort of mini-festival that Karajan could take pride in. In the currents of sound at Carnegie could be found not only a forceful musical personality but a remarkably complete one: a man's genius, his scholarship, his temper, his power to charm and the wide range of comparative musical judgments he has formed over a lifetime. He discounts the role of inspiration. "I don't believe in it," he says. "You have to work first. No decisions had to be made when we were pressed for time. After all, I wanted to enjoy it."

There was a time when life was not so well ordered. In the 1950s Karajan's guiding hand could be found simultaneously at the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, La Scala, London's Philharmonia Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. Says he: "I had to do it because I wanted to see what the limits were, and what was nearest to my heart."

Life is simpler for Karajan now. He is a proud and private family man. Leaving the stage after every tumultuous Carnegie ovation, he looked up to the box where his third wife Eliette and their daughters Isabel, 16, and Arabel, 12, stood in rapt admiration.

He is not about to retire to a hearth. Karajan is a burgeoning one-man empire, pulling in a reported $2 million a year. He is constantly in recording studios; next year his third complete recording of Beethoven's symphonies will be released. Then there are the hours spent in film labs working on prints or video tapes of his concert and operatic productions. When he is not filming operas, he is conducting them at the Salzburg Easter Music Festival.

He lives well off the fruits of all this labor. He owns a house in St.-Moritz, rents others in St.-Tropez and Anif, near Salzburg. After his back surgery, he can again pilot a jet (a new Dassault Falcon 10). "The joy of flying has nothing to do with speed," he remarks. "You prepare and do well at the moment. There is enormous satisfaction in organization. That is why I don't play cards. I am afraid when you cannot foresee the outcome."

Karajan's own foundations, which train young musicians and make advanced experiments in acoustical research, are his investment in the future of music. He frets about young singers with beautiful voices and no guidance: "Once the Italian maestros developed singers, but they are gone now."

With all his activities, Karajan can still offer the advice, "Keep one thing in life and forget everything else," and mean it. For him it is "that wall to lean my back on," the Berlin Philharmonic. Such is the trust between Karajan and his musicians that he often conducts with his eyes closed. "I can feel the players better," he says. He gives few entry cues and the vaguest of cutoff gestures. Explains Karajan: "Baton technique is what the people see, but it is all nonsense. The hands do their job because they have learned what to do. In the performance I forget about them. The molding comes when the orchestra and conductor come together in a sort of union. Things happen that are too delicate for words. It is the music that takes you away. It is mystical: you are so concentrated you forget everything else."

The concerts finished, Karajan moved over to New York's Juilliard School to give a three-part master class for aspiring conductors. Pausing during a rapid-fire series of prickly comments ("I am not here to teach you tricks"), he recalled the days when he was a child taking riding lessons. On the night before his first jump he was sleepless with worry. " 'How can I lift this enormous thing up into the air and over the fence?' I thought to myself. Then I realized no one lifts the horse. You set it in the right position and it lifts itself. The orchestra will do the same thing."

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