Perhaps the only conductor of this century to create as much of a personal mystique as Toscanini was the late Herbert von Karajan. Yet the two could not have been more different: One was hot-blooded and Italianate, the other Teutonic and phlegmatic in comparison. Like Toscanini, von Karajan was both a consummate musician and a true superstar - a jet-setter fond of wearing black leather jackets on the cover of his albums. The combination of his steely mane of hair and the dark, casual clothes lent him an imperial, almost Wagnerian, aspect. Even the maestro's connections with the Nazi party early in his career added to the mystique: Could such a feeling, sensitive man have belonged to the Nazi party?
Von Karajan ruled one of the World's greatest orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic - although his relationship with it became tempestuous in his later years. At the prestigious Salzburg Festival von Karajan's words were commands, virtually engraved in stone. He gravitated to music that was weighty, important, and deeply profound: Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Mozart, (Richard) Strauss, Brahms, and Verdi.
His discography is larger than any other conductor's, resulting in a recorded legacy that is astonishingly rich, befitting a man who took great pains to make himself both a “name” and extraordinarily wealthy. The lion's share of his recorded work was done mostly for Deutsche Grammophon, although there are a substantial amount of entries in the EMI-Angel catalog. There were some early discs for London, including to my mind the finest all-around La Boheme (London 421, 049) with Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni and an imposing Boris Godunov with Nicolai Ghiaurov, yet to be released on compact disc. (All recordings discussed here and the numbers given are for compact discs.)
Overwhelming Beauty
The greatest von Karajan recordings hail from the early part of his career. His traversals of Richard Strauss remain overwhelmingly beautiful: a bumptious and moving Ariadne auf Naxos (Angel 69296); the heartrending Der Rosenkavalier (Angel 49354) with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, but not the later and much duller version with Anna Tomova-Sintow (DG 423850); the Gorgeiously panting Salome (Angle 49358) that introduced a young singer named Hildegarde Behrens to the operatic world.
Yet the Salome, which is from his later period, is, in a sense, too gorgeous, lacking a percussive rawness that, say, the Solti version with Birgit Nilsson (London 414 414) has in spades. Salome gets the von Karajan gloss which, to mix a metaphor, can be called an aureate glow of sound. You hear it in the immense, symphonic works such as his last set of Beethoven symphonies (DG 415 066) or the live recordings are more about von Karajan than they are about the works themselves. However, a new reissue of the Brahms Requiem from 1947 (Angel 61010) has all the grandeur, passion, and mystery that eludes so many other conductors.
The recording of the great tone poems such as Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Don Juan, and Till Eulenspiegel elegantly remind us that these are indeed tone poems, and the tone is never sacrificed for big, splashy effects. When von Karajan has understood the composer, as he does in Strauss' Ein Heldenleben (DG 415 508), perhaps because he saw it as self-referential the way Strauss himself did, there's a true meeting of
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