A Film by Robert Dornhelm
Studio: DGG DVD 00440 073 4392 [Distr. by Universal]
Video: Enhanced for 16:9 color and B&W
Audio: PCM Stereo
Length: 92 minutes
Language: German (no subtitles) and English
Rating: ****
When I attended the 1989 Salzburg Easter Festival, only two icons graced the posters and billboards on the streets and in shop windows: Boris Becker and Herbert von Karajan. Karajan (1908-1989) built a legend around himself, leading the life of an active, many-talented musician, as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1954 to the end of his life. But Karajan enjoyed multiple personae as jet-setter, yachtsman, sports enthusiast, family man, former Nazi sympathizer, and film producer-director. “He is a great musician when he is not busy building his empire,” once quipped Bernard Haitink. “A megalomaniac–but an operatic genius,” proffered Boris Goldovsky. “A Machiavelli with the heart and soul of a child,” from Rene Kollo. “Speaking to him was like interviewing a veteran, a general, like Patton,” from Sir Simon Rattle, present music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. This ambitious documentary by Robert Dornhelm, through archive videos, interviews, and Karajan’s own library of concert films, projects a world-class musical personality fascinated by his own myth.
There are so many vivid portraits of Karajan in this intense video, it may be necessary to repeat the film just to focus on a different persona each time. Conductor Mariss Jansons describes a production of Verdi’s Othello; and we see Karajan’s rehearsing the strangling scene with Mirella Freni, choking her on the bed to demonstrate for Jon Vickers; that Karajan considered himself something of an actor amuses several commentators. Some of the early visuals we have show a skinny, dark-haired Karajan before the orchestra at Aachen and then the Egmont Overture from a video archive; at a 1941 Nazi concert he leads Wagner’s Die Meistersinger Prelude, all smiles with various officials after. Richard Strauss exits a concert hall, having watched Karajan work on Elektra, and he calls Karajan “somewhat of a scamp.” We see Rostropovich sawing away at the sheep-fighting scene from the Strauss Don Quixote as Karajan elicits huge, rounded arches: Rostropovich remarks that, according to Karajan, “beauty is not about edges.” Simon Rattle comments many times on Karajan, offering that “Certainly, an artist has a political responsibility. . . .yet there was less bullshit about Karajan than in just about anybody else I’ve met in the music business.” That Karajan may have won a degree of forgiveness seems attested to when Yehudi Menuhin joins Karajan at the keyboard for strains from The Blue Danube and then with a chamber orchestra for Mozart’s G Major Concerto.
Several commentators remark on the Karajan sound: “he had an absolute paranoia about waverings and bad timings in pizzicato passages,” remark both Rattle and Ozawa. “If nothing else,” says Helmut Schmidt and others, “Karajan established a basic pulse in the Berlin Philharmonic and a discipline that went beyond music.” Nowhere in this video does the name of Wilhelm Furtwaengler appear. Rattle: “It’s astonishing how aggressive Karajan’s conducting could be.” We see Karajan patiently working on Schumann’s D Minor Symphony; he sings the orchestral recitativo sections from Beethoven’s Ninth; he keeps honing the first movement to Dvorak’s New World and the last movement of Tchaikovsky‘s Pathetique; but the slashing baton technique, the jabbings, rapier-style to signal entries, the occasional blazing eyes from an otherwise eyes-closed countenance, all confirm a fierce dedication to orchestral discipline. The rubric for this entire film could have been “at the controls”: witness Karajan’s manipulations of the sound-board in the DGG studios. The final 15 minutes juxtapose Karajan and arch-rival Bernstein in passages from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in rehearsal. Christa Ludwig quips that “Bernstein acts out the music; Karajan makes music.” Bernstein sweats: the BPO doesn’t quite give him the sound he wants; he stomps, strains, fumes, starts again, gets frustrated and says forget it. Still, the Adagietto soars and cascades with Bernstein’s especial passion. Karajan never sweats: he commands, points, explains, explains again, jokes, sets his jaw, and he gets what he wants. And yet Simon Rattle puts even Karajan’s authority into perspective: “if you conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, you are a statue that needs to be toppled.”
In the course of Karajan’s artistic career, at Aachen, Berlin, and Vienna, we have extensive footage and stills of Karajan’s domestic life, courtesy of wife Elietta von Karajan and their daughters: reminiscences, footage of the wedding, socials, flying in his private plane over the Alps, exiting from their Porsche, skiing, and particularly, aboard their schooner, with Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe providing a sumptuous orchestral background. Juxtaposed to the Karajans’ home-bliss we have excerpts from Wagner’s Die Walkuere, with a patch-eyed Thomas Stewart intoning Wotan’s Farewell. The quick cut from Karajan’s baton to Wotung, Siegfried’s sword, makes the analogy quite clear. Evgeni Kissin, among the last soloists–although Anne-Sophie Mutter adds several comments on Karajan’s effectiveness, along with excerpts of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto–to perform with Karajan in Salzburg, remembers their Tchaikovsky Concerto: “it wasn’t my will that played; it was as if [Karajan] had released the potential that had been inside me.”
The elderly Karajan, wearing his black–suit, apron, vestment–the blue eyes that had stirred his wife still shining, has become the master of the minimal gesture. The camera anticipates his swan-song, double-focusing his molding the Wagner Love-Death from Tristan und Isolde with sunset over the vast ocean, the hero of our narrative about to enter Eternity. One last look at a youthful, blond boy in a photo, taken around 1916, the Herbert von Karajan who would command so many musical and personal avatars.
— Gary Lemco
