Karajan Centenary article in Die Zeit

[gp1972]

I was in Berlin at the weekend and picked up a very interesting magazine supplement published by Die Zeit (a quality German weekly paper) on von Karajan. It has a number of good articles (in German) on the Maestro's career and life, with pictures. There are contributions from journalists and fellow musicians. It seems more comprehensive than any of the coverage in the UK press. Some excerpts are on the paper's website:

www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/index

One article that caught my eye was an attempt to discover the "trail" of von Karajan in Berlin. The writer comments on the remarkable lack of Karajan mementos in the city, extraordinary considering his achievements with the Berlin Philharmonic. I was at the Philharmonie on Saturday and was struck by the absence of permanent memorials - the only one I noted was the location of the building on Herbert von Karajan Strasse.

I'm still reading the article (my German is a bit rusty), but was surprised to discover that he had no house in Berlin - he stayed at a suite in the Kempinski hotel. Perhaps his presence was always fleeting, arriving to rehearse and conduct then leaving to return to his home in Austria.

The magazine is well worth getting hold of. I could attach some scans to this website, but need to check the copyright implications. I will add posts on the other articles once I have translated them.

[~Linda~]

Welcome to the Forum and thank you for your very interesting contribution about the articles in "Die Zeit".

I look forward to reading your future posts on the subject.

[Rosy]

Hi, gp1972 !

Welcome in the forum created by the eclectic Linda!!!

It's the true. Karajan didn't resisted far from his Salzburg, from his Anif.........from the mountains he loved very much, from the Nature; in fact , his villa, to Anif, had a trasparent wall, so when he studing, looked at the mountains..

P.S. His villa was very similar to the house of his childwood.
There, he was serene, near his family

Thank you for your post

Best Wishes

Rosy

[darkehmen]

Thank you for the link, but I'm extremely wary of the articles in that magazine. A cursory glance indicates that they seem very political in nature. For all of Gramophone's self-congratulatory put-downs in its January issue, at least the magazine more or less left politics to one side. (That's a good thing.)

It's nice to know about this, but I expect that it will be like most of the Karajan articles of late -- political attacks, or faux-musical discussions that are actually political attacks under a different name.

[gp1972]

You may be right. My German is too rudimentary to allow me to pick up the subtelties of the text without careful reading (and heavy use of the dictionary!). One article I will read closely is an interview with Nikolaus Harnoncourt - the gist of it appears to be that NH actually has a relatively sympathetic view of HvK, but contemporary media misquotation stirred up emnity between the two conductors. There are also comments from (inter alia) Anne Sophie Mutter, Christa Ludwig, Christian Thielemann and Sabine Meyer.

The Gramophone magazine articles were a very mixed bag. Two things are, I think, inexcusable:

Peter Quantrill's comment "Among his upwards of 500 recordings, few are now mentioned, fewer still recommended..." Yet my Gramophone 2007 Classical CD Guide lists no less than 77 Karajan recordings within its pages - more than by any other artist. In the same volume, 10 out of the "100 Great Recordings" are by Karajan. And this in a guide that favours new recordings and is more summarised than the Penguin equivalent. This is typical sloppy British journalism.

Worse, however is David Gutman's review of the "Karajan: The Music, The Legend" box set, which captions a photograph with the words "Karajan: a first-class second-rate conductor?". This review was an opportunity for Gutman to impose his worthless opinions on the public and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the reivew. All the old cliches about fashions in performing style were trotted out in an attempt by an insignificant person to belittle a great man.

He had a go at the Bach double concerto as well (also featured on the CD that came with the magazine). I actually really liked this - it has been one of my favourite works since I was a kid, and Karajan directed it with a wonderful sense of rythmic flow and vigour. I wonder why it has never been released before? And I couldn't hear Christian Ferras's "idiosyncratic vibrato" either - perhaps I have a better hi fi than Gutman.