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By Simon Morgan, Agence France-Presse
VIENNA: Austria, which hosted Mozart’s 250th
birthday celebrations in 2006, is decking itself out this year for
another musical extravaganza—the 100th birthday of another famous
musical son, conductor Herbert von Karajan.
The birthday itself, April 5, is being marked by
a special ceremony in the Mozart House museum of Karajan’s home
town of Salzburg.
Nevertheless, the “Herbert von Karajan Jubilee
Year” has actually been underway since the beginning of the year.
In January, there was a memorial concert in
Salzburg’s famous Grosses Festspielhaus concert hall, with the
Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg under its chief conductor Ivor Bolton
playing exactly the same program with which Karajan had made his
professional conducting debut on January 22, 1929.
At Salzburg’s Easter Festival—set up by
Karajan in 1967 as a vehicle for his orchestra, the Berlin
Philharmonic—there was a concert by two of the maestro’s
proteges, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and conductor Seiji Ozawa, in
a program of Karajan favorites, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and
Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.
The Berlin Philharmonic, whose chief conductor
he was from 1955 until his death in 1989, is performing birthday
concerts in Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.
Vienna’s legendary Musikverein concert hall is
staging a three-part Karajan cycle of concerts, with both the Berlin
and the Vienna Philharmonics.
There will be a special Karajan Festival in
Lucerne, Switzerland, and Salzburg’s Summer Festival will also pay
homage to the “maestro of all maestros”.
The other orchestras Karajan worked closely
with—the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra—all have special memorial
concerts lined up in New York, London and Munich.
Record labels Deutsche Grammophon, EMI and Sony
are unearthing and repackaging their countless and often legendary
Karajan recordings and DVDs.
There will also be a deluge of books about the
conductor, including one by his widow, Eliette von Karajan, entitled
“Mein Leben an seiner Seite” (My life at his side).
And a new documentary by Robert Dornhelm has
been released on DVD.
Born in Salzburg on April 5, 1908, Heribert
Ritter von Karajan studied piano, harmony and composition at the
Mozarteum in Salzburg between 1916 and 1926 and then conducted at
Vienna’s Academy for Music and the Performing Arts between 1926
and 1929.
It was his music-loving father, a doctor, who
gave the 20-year-old Karajan his first break, hiring the Mozarteum
Orchester Salzburg for his debut concert in January 1929. The
manager of the Ulm theatre heard the concert and invited Karajan to
become Kapellmeister in the southern German city, a position he held
until 1933.
After that followed his appointment as
Germany’s youngest-ever general music director in Aachen in 1935.
It was during this time that Karajan joined the
Nazi party, the NSDAP, a move which would greatly boost his
career—his international breakthrough came with a performance of
Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Berlin State Opera in
1938—but would see him banned by the Allies from conducting after
World War II.
The ban was lifted again in 1947 and soon
afterwards Karajan began working at music festivals in Salzburg and
Lucerne.
He was named chief conductor of the Berlin
Philharmonic in 1955, an appointment that was turned into a
life-long tenure just a year later.
Karajan’s fascination with technology—his
love of fast cars, jets and yachts lent him the image of a jet-set
playboy—led him to pursue ever-better recording techniques.
A performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
was one of the first to be captured on compact disc, given his
friendship with Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, the company that
invented the CD.
But many of his critics complain that
Karajan’s drive for perfectionism made his recordings and
performances cold and frigid.
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