Herbert von Karajan, Maestro for the Screen (Documentary) (2008)
Director: Georg Wübbolt
Studio: ArtHaus Musik 101 459 [Release date: 10/27/09] [Distr. by Naxos]
Video: 1.77:1 for 16:9 color & 4:3 B&W
Audio: German PCM Stereo
No region code
Subtitles: German, French, English, Spanish, Italian
Extras: Previews of other ArtHaus DVDs, Illustrated booklet
Length: 52 minutes
Rating: *****
Karajan was totally obsessed with videotaping his own musical performances to preserve them for the ages. The results are the many now-DVDs in the series subtitled “His Legacy For Home Video.” He was convinced he was the greatest conductor on earth, and in making these films (mostly with his own money) he felt he was building a monument for future generations to cherish. This documentary, recently made for German TV, is the story of how Karajan became his own film director.
He was a powerful conductor – many Europeans considered him the Music Director of all Europe – but he had a huge ego, was tyrannical, possessive, and as the essay in the printed booklet suggests in its title, a control freak. Among the interviews with players of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, his later cinematographer, his film editor and his personal secretary, are descriptions of what it was like to work with or under him. One could converse with him about other subjects, and he was very helpful with personal concerns of friends and co-workers, but you couldn’t suggest anything contrary to his thinking when having anything to do with music. He had a violent temper, and would just say “Then I’ll leave.” – the most disastrous words to be heard from him.
Karajan was a nut about everything technical. He owned and loved fast cars and airplanes, but when TV producers originally talked to him about telecasting his performances he said neither the image nor sound quality were up to his standards. Then the Berlin Philharmonic toured Japan, where they were telecast and seen by three million viewers – when they only reached three thousand in the concert hall. People on the street stopped them afterwards. Karajan was smitten. He began a long relationship with Sony – one of their CEOs became a close friend and he had all their latest equipment installed in his home.
The videotapes and broadcasts by Leonard Bernstein were another stimulus to Karajan’s fixation on recording his own legacy. He considered Bernstein his adversary. Karajan hired such film directors as George Cluzot for his first efforts, but they had a falling out. Among other directors he used one who pulled out all the stops in flashy shots and editing that attempted to visually emulate the structure of the music being played. They did Beethoven’s Sixth, and some excerpts are in the documentary – enough to make me want to see the whole thing, but also enough to realize it was way over the top and a distraction from the music performance. However, the reason Karajan blew his stack over the result (and attempted to re-edit it for broadcast) was primarily because it didn’t have nearly enough closeups of himself conducting! He even prerecorded performances and shot closeups of himself miming his conducting to cut into the actual performances (which of course all required the players to silently mime their playing to a prerecorded track). After one director pointed out to him it didn’t look good in his closeups to always have his eyes shut, the conductor made a strong effort to keep them open more. He conceived the idea of filming the whole work with cameras first one one side of the hall, and then on another day on the other side of the hall. His penchant for dramatic backlighting and silhouettes came from his model for the dramatic presentation of classical music – Disney’s Fantasia. Those backlit silhouette shots of Stokowski shaking hands with Mickey Mouse evidently really turned him on.
As a result of his work with various film and TV directors, as well as his Sony connections, Karajan eventually learned enough about the presentation of classical music via the media that he became his own perfectionist director and controlled every detail of productions from his own Telemondial studio. He built up a library of video presentations of the classics which will continue to enthrall music lovers for generations, with Maestro Karajan as the very obvious star on the screen. Many of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians began to hate the willful conductor towards the end of his very long tenure with them, but on the other hand they loved the money that rolled in for them from the royalties. His editor reveals that after Karajan’s death in 1989 he personally destroyed all the original footage at Karajan’s orders, so that no one could later re-edit or use it in another presentation. The documentary doesn’t touch on Karajan’s past relationships with the National Socialists, but there’s plenty of both negative and positive revelations here. There have been other DVD profiles of Karajan, but they didn’t concentrate on this important area of his being a pioneer in the visual presentation of classical music on the home screen.
— John Sunier
