Karajan and EMI

Some of the most momentous meetings during EMI’s 110-year history would not have disgraced the pages of a spy thriller. One thinks of Fred Gaisberg waiting for the young Enrico Caruso on the third floor of the Grande Hotel, Milan in April 1902. Despite the fact that London had cabled ‘Fee exorbitant forbid you to record’, the recording equipment was in place, as was the fee, drawn on Gaisberg’s own account. When Gaisberg’s successor Walter Legge ascended the stairs to the eighth floor of an unheated and partly bomb-damaged block of flats in Vienna on a late winter’s afternoon in January 1946 he had nothing with him other than a bottle of black-market whisky. Arriving in what was still technically ‘enemy territory’ with an enterprising array of documents and identities, Legge’s mission was to secure for his company an exclusive contract with the most talked-about conductor among the new generation of Austro-German artists, the 37-year-old Herbert von Karajan. The two men struck up an instant rapport. When a contract was signed three months later Karajan refused to take a copy. ‘I don’t need it. I know you now.’

The recordings Legge made with Karajan between September 1946 and September 1960 – initially in Vienna, then mostly in London with Legge’s own Philharmonia Orchestra, though with important sessions in Milan and Berlin – constitute one of the gramophone’s most remarkable legacies. Quality was taken as read. Both men were perfectionists who never knowingly settled for second best. Both defined ‘style’ as an absence of vulgarity: the refusal to admit to a performance any of those mannerisms or extraneous expressive gestures that become wearisome with repetition. Karajan already possessed a large across-the-board repertory acquired during his apprentice years in Ulm, Aachen and Berlin. Rooted in opera and choral music, it extended deep into the mainstream and contemporary orchestral repertory.

The early Vienna recordings were made in the last days of 78s, yet from the start Karajan and Legge were making recordings that, 60 years on, speak to us still. In autumn 1947 there were two gramophone ‘firsts’: a complete set of Brahms’s German Requiem and during the same sessions – a typical Karajan insight – Richard Strauss’s recently written elegy for a lost civilisation Metamorphosen. There was also a famous Beethoven Ninth.

There is no doubt that Karajan lived through difficult times. He was born in Salzburg six years before the outbreak of the First World War and died only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But he was also lucky. Five years into his contract with EMI, LP appeared. As he put it: ‘Once it had been resolved which form should be adopted, there began a recording activity that came upon us like an intoxication. It was the second, the great period of the gramophone.’

In August 1951, Legge recorded a famous Die Meistersinger conducted by Karajan live at the Bayreuth Festival. Initially released on 34 78rpm discs, it was a last huzzah for the old medium. The first LP on EMI’s Columbia label was recorded by Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker in November of that year. It consisted of Richard Strauss’s Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. An LP of suites from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty became a bestseller, as did recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies. The record of Mozart’s four Horn Concertos which Karajan made with fellow motor-car fanatic Dennis Brain has never been out of the catalogues. There were rarities too. Early Philharmonia recordings that garnered appreciative reviews included symphonies by Roussel and Balakirev and a superb account of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. In 1954 Karajan collaborated with the piano virtuoso Kurt Leimer in a recording of two of Leimer’s piano concertos – recordings that have not hitherto been released outside Germany or Switzerland.

Furtwängler’s opposition to Karajan meant that Vienna and Salzburg were effectively closed to him between 1949 and Furtwängler’s death in 1954. This was no problem to a multilingual, multitalented musician who was as much at home in the French and Italian repertory as he was in his own. He was a superb conductor of the music of Debussy and Ravel and was deeply revered in Italy where he had first been invited to conduct by the legendary Victor de Sabata. Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker were astonished by the depth of Karajan’s involvement with a disc of operatic intermezzi made in London in 1954. Oboist Sidney Sutcliffe remarked, ‘He was completely “sent”. If a bomb had gone off beside him, I don’t think he would have noticed.’

Like all the best conductors, Karajan played so-called ‘light’ music with the same passion, precision and style he brought to more heavy-duty repertory. His Philharmonia recordings of the Offenbach/Rosenthal Gaîté Parisienne, the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, and his very last recording with the orchestra, the 1960 ‘Philharmonia Promenade Concert’, remain classics to this day.

The collection of all Karajan’s opera and choral recordings in Vol.2 of the ‘Complete EMI Recordings’ is a particularly happy idea since it is these areas of the repertory where Karajan learned his craft and which are central to his conducting genius. Nowadays he is associated with an ‘old-fashioned’ Bach style but in the 1950s he alternated performances of Romantic power and depth with those that prefigure latter-day ‘period’ practice. ‘The principal qualities of Karajan’s reading are lightness, absolute clarity of sound and rhythmic buoyancy, all of them qualities that many performances miss,’ observed The Record Guide of Karajan’s famous 1953 EMI recording of the B minor Mass. The Gramophone’s Alec Robertson described it as ‘a landmark in the history of the gramophone’.

Where the 1950s opera sets are concerned, one never ceases to be amazed by the quality of the casts, the finely perspectived recordings (even in mono), and the conducting. Three of these recordings – Così fan tutte, Hänsel und Gretel, Ariadne auf Naxos – are unique in that Karajan neither re-recorded them nor subsequently conducted them in the opera house. Die Fledermaus, Falstaff, and Der Rosenkavalier were returned to but these 1955–6 recordings remained unsurpassed. Legge’s ‘company’ of singer-performers was unique at the time. It included Tito Gobbi, Christa Ludwig, Rolando Panerai, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, Giuseppe di Stefano and, of course, Maria Callas with whom Karajan made celebrated recordings of Il trovatore and Madama Butterfly as well as the legendary live Lucia di Lammermoor.

During the second phase of Karajan’s association with EMI (1969–84), opera recordings were linked with productions at the Salzburg Easter Festival which he had founded in 1967. They included Otello and Tristan und Isolde with Jon Vickers, what Leonard Bernstein later described as ‘the best Don Carlo and the best Salome I ever heard’, and a memorable and still underrated Aida with Freni and Carreras. Karajan’s live 1951 Bayreuth Meistersinger was complemented by a golden-toned studio recording made in Dresden in 1970. And in Berlin in 1978 he finally recorded an opera which had preoccupied him for decades, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

The music of Bruckner and Sibelius also featured strongly in these years. Anyone in search of the ‘real’ Karajan – the mountain man, solitary by nature, patient and far-seeing, as opposed to the sophisticated professional who conducted an astonishing array of music astonishingly well – need look no further than his conducting of the music of these two composers. The fact that neither was much in fashion in the postwar world was of no concern to Karajan, so absorbed was he in music that was beyond time and fashion. His early Philharmonia recordings of Sibelius’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies were greatly admired by the composer himself. There was no greater interpreter of either composer in the postwar era.

Richard Strauss famously venerated Mozart. Karajan venerated both: Strauss as a composer and as a conductor, Mozart as a fellow Salzburger and universal genius. Most conductors have a single Mozart style, Karajan had half a dozen. The urbanity of his 1953 Così fan tutte and his 1960 Berlin recording of Symphony No.29 contrasts interestingly with the full-bodied majesty of the recordings of the last six symphonies he made in Berlin in 1970, a widely acclaimed set that included a rare chance to hear Karajan at work in rehearsal. As for Strauss, no year went by when Karajan did not return to his music. In 1973, he brought the rarely played Symphonia domestica into his repertory; two years later he made his second recording of Don Quixote, the Strauss tone poem he revered above all others.

The final two decades of Karajan’s life were divided by two watersheds: the near-fatal spinal condition which required life-saving surgery in 1975, after which he returned to work with renewed dedication and intensity, and the disputes with the Berlin Philharmonic which followed the close of the orchestra’s centenary year in 1982, from which he barely recovered. Indeed, it was with the Vienna Philharmonic – an old love newly rekindled – that Karajan made his last recording for EMI in 1984, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter.

© RICHARD OSBORNE, 2008