Karajan : Osborne

[Michel]

Whose read it? I just ordered it....

http://www.amazon.com/Herbert-von-Karajan-Life-Music/dp/1555534252

[Bonehelm]

I just orderd it too. 

[paul]

I'm looking forward to reading my copy. I found it used in like-new condition and bought it with a box of other books for $5 total (!) at this unreal book sale here in Princeton.

[Steve]

Hadn't heard of it until now, but I will definitely be ordering a copy. 

[knight66]

I have it, read it and enjoyed it a great deal. It is in the main very sympathetic, though it seems to work hard to get to the bottom of all that Nazi Party membership issue. It is a good read, but I don't remember there being musical analysis of what Karajan thinks about individual pieces of music or how he reaches decisions on interpretation.

Mike

[uffeviking]

I corrected the spelling of the author. Writers don't like to have their name misspelled!

This books is a true biography, the title 'A life in Music emphasises this. Any musicological explanations and insights into the Maestro's thoughts about certain composers and compositions has been avoided, so as not to distract from the author's intent to document the life.

Richard Osborne had to add Appendix B to finally put an end to all speculations and rumours trying to dominate any intelligent discussion of the conductor. We could hear so much of the Nazi Party and von Karajan even here at the classical music forum, I welcome Osborne's appendix B.

[M forever]

This books is a true biography, the title 'A life in Music emphasises this. Any musicological explanations and insights into the Maestro's thoughts about certain composers and compositions has been avoided, so as not to distract from the author's intent to document the life.

I don't think Osborne specifically avoided that. Karajan was not a very verbal person anyway, and he didn't like to talk about composers and music much. He liked to talk about many aspects of his craft, but not really about his interpretations either. He kept saying that he thought about writing a book, a little here and there at a time, which I found hard to picture, but when he had died, there was indeed a chapter about conducting that he had written which is very interesting but it does not talk about musical specifics, more about the dynamic between orchestra and conductor. I don't remember if that is included in the Osborne book.

Karajan's artistic aim was to synthesize all the elements of music making to a point where the music "just happens" somehow, out of itself, following internal forces which come out of the substance of the music itself rather than being applied to it from the outside. But even that was not a "declared" aim, more something he hinted at here and there, something one could gather from some of his views.

He was very interested in concepts like Zen, and unlike Celibidache who spent a great deal of time and effort on lecturing about his own enlightnedness (which more than a few people noticed is kind of a complete contradiction to those ideas), he actually *did* that, he didn't *talk* about it all the time.

Which was one of the reasons he did more or less everything from memory. He was convinced that in order to "understand" a score, it had to be completely internalized. He even *rehearsed* without a score but it was obvious to those who worked with him that he knew every small detail.

It is in the main very sympathetic, though it seems to work hard to get to the bottom of all that Nazi Party membership issue.

Why is that a "though"? As uffeviking pointed out he needed to investgate that throughly

to finally put an end to all speculations and rumours trying to dominate any intelligent discussion of the conductor.

It is apparently a big subject, so it is not "unsympathetic" to investigate that to find out what really happened, especially with the kind of results Osborne came back with.
Although I don't think it changed anything. It is just too tempting for people who don't even know what the "Nazi party" really was to trample around on that.

What I find very interesting about the book is how Osborne puts a lot of what Karajan did and how he did it into the context of his times. Not just the "Nazi" thing, although he paints a fairly detailed picture of the times in which all that happened and how Karajan fit into all that, what role he played or didn't play. He also quotes a lot of contemporary reviews from later decades and points out how immensely fixated even "serious" reviewers were in those times (e.g. the 50s) on the "persona" of he conductor, how they gave a lot of attention to how the conductor looked and came across, how he "impersonated" and "represented" the process of the music making for the audience, much, much more than even today.

That makes it easier to understand that while Karajan did indeed devote some attention to his appearance and the way he "came across" to the audience on the podium, that wasn't something he came up with to make himself "look more interesting". That was totally *expected* from conductors, in the age of the "maestro" which often paid more attention to how a Karajan, a Solti, a Bernstein conducted to *what* they actually conducted.

Overall, a very good, very balanced biography. Not at all uncritical, but Osborne also shows that he respects Karajan's unparalleled achievements in some areas.

The only thing I found a little curious is how abruptly it ends, Karajan dies, he is buried, end of the book. Obviously, it is about his life, so that's where the subject ends, but most biographies write a little more about what happend right after the person's death, how his death was received, what happened to the people and institutions he was associated with.