Post by darkehmen on Jan 26, 2008 23:43:24 GMT 1
The best books on Karajan, I find, are those that provide as generous a selection of the conductor's own statements as possible. He definitely had a gift for the "sound bite" (no pun intended), but more significantly, he explained his aesthetic philosophy very clearly and consistently.
Here are a just a few of what I consider Karajan's most memorable quotes, taken from three of the best publications to date:
From Matheopoulos's Maestro:
"Music begins to be 'manipulated' the moment it is interpreted by a conductor or a soloist and played by an orchestra in a hall with a specific acoustic. All these factors 'manipulate' music and so does the fact that I ask the oboe please to play more piano. And you are manipulating the orchestra for one reason only: to get the sound you want. In the recording studio you are using the equipment at hand for exactly the same reason."
"Sometimes, when I listen to some of my old recordings, I envy painters who can simply burn the pictures they don't like. I cannot."
"Until recently, and especially in ancient civilizations like China, a man was always trying to get old, old, old, because he was then regarded as a sage and everyone had to be silent when he spoke. But now, our times have reversed everything . . ."
"Mahler's music is full of dangers and traps, and one of them, which many fell into, is oversensualizing the thing until it becomes sort of...kitsch."
"I can play with my seventy strings a pianissimo which is much, much more subtle than a chamber orchestra's."
"If you start with almost nothing, people concentrate much more on hearing you. Then when the outbreak comes, it makes a far greater impact."
"No music is vulgar, unless it is played in a way that makes it so."
"From the beginning of my career I told myself, among other things, that I didn't want to take orders from anybody. I have now reached a position where I can do what I choose to do and from the financial point of view this amounts to freedom in choosing the best artistic material available without being concerned about the cost. To me, money in itself has no attraction. But insofar as it allows me to achieve my artistic aims, money is important."
From Osborne's Conversations with Von Karajan:
"The bigger problem for me at the time [in 1955] was the way the orchestra was playing. In Vancouver we began with a Beethoven overture, and the first chord--it was like picking up a sponge, there was no body in the tone. I would have liked to creep to the edge of the podium and disappear. So I said, we must do some basic things. How to play a fermata with full tone. They thought I meant for five seconds but I made them practise holding their tone for twenty or thirty seconds."
"Someone once said to me, 'You are surely not founding an elitist system?'--that's a word that seems very unfashionable these days. I said, 'No, my system is not élitist; it is super-élitist.' All I say is, if someone cannot play in rhythm and has not music within him, we cannot admit him."
[Speaking to the Dresden orchestra] "My agent in Berlin once said to me: 'Wait until you stand in from of the Dresden Staatskapelle. Their playing shines like old gold.' A great deal of the city has been destroyed but you have remained a living monument to Dresden's tradition and culture."
"Quick music sounds dull unless every note is articulated."
"Bruckner's music is primordial."
"He is a composer who cannot really be compared to anyone else. He is in his way like the Erratic Blocks. They are there, they are colossal, they are of another age; and nobody knows how they came there. So it is better not to ask why. This for me is Sibelius."
"I said to the orchestra, 'If there are discords we must always play them as beautifully as we know how.' A discord is not an excuse for ugly music-making, for playing out of tune."
"Today music is an international language; through records and films and television you can reach audiences of millions of people. Bringing music to so many people has been the great satisfaction of my life. Music is no longer something only for those who have the knowledge or the money. That audience still exists but we can also reach out beyond it."
"An orchestra, if it is functioning in the best way, is a creative unit. A group of men and women are coming together to re-create something that is beautiful."
"I have often said to the orchestra, especially to the younger players, 'Do your best, and love what you are doing, because you are allowed to do this thing.' By this I mean, they can do what millions of people cannot do. Many people cannot think of playing music or listening to it until six o'clock in the evening. To be involved professionally in a thing as creative as this is a great privilege and we have a duty to make it in such a way that we can help bring pleasure and a sense of fulfillment to those who are not so fortunate."
From Endler's Karajan: An Autobiography:
"Whenever people say that I am always striving to achieve a beautiful sound, I agree with them, and take it not as a reproach but as a compliment for something I work hard to produce. If people say that I smooth out the corners, my reply is that I believe that in music there is nothing to smooth out. The orchestral sound that people associate with me or which they describe in apparently critical terms arises entirely of its own accord. I ask the orchestra to hold on the every note that the composer has written, sustaining it for its full length and not allowing it to grow weaker before the end of note value indicated in the score. The result, of course, is a somewhat different tonal impression from the one you’ll hear in many other recordings. But I stand by this."
"My so-called beautiful sound is something, furthermore, that I’m convinced by. As all the orchestra players with whom I’ve worked in recent years will confirm, it is basically a reaction against what I’ve elsewhere described as falsifying documents. Just as, in the case of stage productions, I do not understand or appreciate why producers ignore the author’s own instructions, or why they try to make the audience ignore them in favour of their own original ideas, what concerns me at concert rehearsals is simply as correct a rendition of the notes as possible."
"Many of my critics write, and will go on writing, that I conduct too lavishly. That may be so. During my day people have been somewhat extravagant in terms of art and music. I believed this was the right attitude to adopt, and so I’ve supported it. It has something to do with respect towards art, and if this respect is old-fashioned, so be it, I’ve no intention of dissociating myself from it. When I was young, we approached music with a sense of awe and celebrated each such approach as a special event. I can see, of course, that times have changed, that people don’t want to know about respect any longer, and that it is not in keeping with the times to celebrate a concert. People are going to great lengths to make themselves ugly, to wear ugly clothes, and to feel precious little enthusiasm for beauty. I’ve been observing this for years...I know there’s nothing that can be done at present to change all this. But no one can expect me to seek a polite or understanding explanation for this, still less that I should agree with it and conform. I belong to a different age. And what I want to preserve for myself and posterity also belongs to a different age."
I find the final passage especially signficant and profound, a kind of artistic will and testament -- Karajan preseving the aesthetic legacy of the past (using the finest technology of the present) for the culture of the future, a culture that will be more receptive to the artistic heritage of the Western tradition.
I'd be very interested in knowing which of the conductor's quotes other forum visitors find memorable.
Here are a just a few of what I consider Karajan's most memorable quotes, taken from three of the best publications to date:
From Matheopoulos's Maestro:
"Music begins to be 'manipulated' the moment it is interpreted by a conductor or a soloist and played by an orchestra in a hall with a specific acoustic. All these factors 'manipulate' music and so does the fact that I ask the oboe please to play more piano. And you are manipulating the orchestra for one reason only: to get the sound you want. In the recording studio you are using the equipment at hand for exactly the same reason."
"Sometimes, when I listen to some of my old recordings, I envy painters who can simply burn the pictures they don't like. I cannot."
"Until recently, and especially in ancient civilizations like China, a man was always trying to get old, old, old, because he was then regarded as a sage and everyone had to be silent when he spoke. But now, our times have reversed everything . . ."
"Mahler's music is full of dangers and traps, and one of them, which many fell into, is oversensualizing the thing until it becomes sort of...kitsch."
"I can play with my seventy strings a pianissimo which is much, much more subtle than a chamber orchestra's."
"If you start with almost nothing, people concentrate much more on hearing you. Then when the outbreak comes, it makes a far greater impact."
"No music is vulgar, unless it is played in a way that makes it so."
"From the beginning of my career I told myself, among other things, that I didn't want to take orders from anybody. I have now reached a position where I can do what I choose to do and from the financial point of view this amounts to freedom in choosing the best artistic material available without being concerned about the cost. To me, money in itself has no attraction. But insofar as it allows me to achieve my artistic aims, money is important."
From Osborne's Conversations with Von Karajan:
"The bigger problem for me at the time [in 1955] was the way the orchestra was playing. In Vancouver we began with a Beethoven overture, and the first chord--it was like picking up a sponge, there was no body in the tone. I would have liked to creep to the edge of the podium and disappear. So I said, we must do some basic things. How to play a fermata with full tone. They thought I meant for five seconds but I made them practise holding their tone for twenty or thirty seconds."
"Someone once said to me, 'You are surely not founding an elitist system?'--that's a word that seems very unfashionable these days. I said, 'No, my system is not élitist; it is super-élitist.' All I say is, if someone cannot play in rhythm and has not music within him, we cannot admit him."
[Speaking to the Dresden orchestra] "My agent in Berlin once said to me: 'Wait until you stand in from of the Dresden Staatskapelle. Their playing shines like old gold.' A great deal of the city has been destroyed but you have remained a living monument to Dresden's tradition and culture."
"Quick music sounds dull unless every note is articulated."
"Bruckner's music is primordial."
"He is a composer who cannot really be compared to anyone else. He is in his way like the Erratic Blocks. They are there, they are colossal, they are of another age; and nobody knows how they came there. So it is better not to ask why. This for me is Sibelius."
"I said to the orchestra, 'If there are discords we must always play them as beautifully as we know how.' A discord is not an excuse for ugly music-making, for playing out of tune."
"Today music is an international language; through records and films and television you can reach audiences of millions of people. Bringing music to so many people has been the great satisfaction of my life. Music is no longer something only for those who have the knowledge or the money. That audience still exists but we can also reach out beyond it."
"An orchestra, if it is functioning in the best way, is a creative unit. A group of men and women are coming together to re-create something that is beautiful."
"I have often said to the orchestra, especially to the younger players, 'Do your best, and love what you are doing, because you are allowed to do this thing.' By this I mean, they can do what millions of people cannot do. Many people cannot think of playing music or listening to it until six o'clock in the evening. To be involved professionally in a thing as creative as this is a great privilege and we have a duty to make it in such a way that we can help bring pleasure and a sense of fulfillment to those who are not so fortunate."
From Endler's Karajan: An Autobiography:
"Whenever people say that I am always striving to achieve a beautiful sound, I agree with them, and take it not as a reproach but as a compliment for something I work hard to produce. If people say that I smooth out the corners, my reply is that I believe that in music there is nothing to smooth out. The orchestral sound that people associate with me or which they describe in apparently critical terms arises entirely of its own accord. I ask the orchestra to hold on the every note that the composer has written, sustaining it for its full length and not allowing it to grow weaker before the end of note value indicated in the score. The result, of course, is a somewhat different tonal impression from the one you’ll hear in many other recordings. But I stand by this."
"My so-called beautiful sound is something, furthermore, that I’m convinced by. As all the orchestra players with whom I’ve worked in recent years will confirm, it is basically a reaction against what I’ve elsewhere described as falsifying documents. Just as, in the case of stage productions, I do not understand or appreciate why producers ignore the author’s own instructions, or why they try to make the audience ignore them in favour of their own original ideas, what concerns me at concert rehearsals is simply as correct a rendition of the notes as possible."
"Many of my critics write, and will go on writing, that I conduct too lavishly. That may be so. During my day people have been somewhat extravagant in terms of art and music. I believed this was the right attitude to adopt, and so I’ve supported it. It has something to do with respect towards art, and if this respect is old-fashioned, so be it, I’ve no intention of dissociating myself from it. When I was young, we approached music with a sense of awe and celebrated each such approach as a special event. I can see, of course, that times have changed, that people don’t want to know about respect any longer, and that it is not in keeping with the times to celebrate a concert. People are going to great lengths to make themselves ugly, to wear ugly clothes, and to feel precious little enthusiasm for beauty. I’ve been observing this for years...I know there’s nothing that can be done at present to change all this. But no one can expect me to seek a polite or understanding explanation for this, still less that I should agree with it and conform. I belong to a different age. And what I want to preserve for myself and posterity also belongs to a different age."
I find the final passage especially signficant and profound, a kind of artistic will and testament -- Karajan preseving the aesthetic legacy of the past (using the finest technology of the present) for the culture of the future, a culture that will be more receptive to the artistic heritage of the Western tradition.
I'd be very interested in knowing which of the conductor's quotes other forum visitors find memorable.
