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No important conductor of his generation was busier in the recording studios than Herbert von Karajan, a musician fascinated by the media technologies of his time and how they could best be put to use. Karajan made his first recording — of the overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte — in 1938 and his last fifty years later, with a performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera completed just a few months before he died. In between came hundreds of other recordings, a discography that could easily fill a small book.

Those who heard Karajan conduct frequently in the opera house and concert hall might dispute how faithfully these documents reflect the true measure of his music-making, but the conductor himself — a man who usually got what he wanted — seemed more than satisfied with his recorded legacy. And, thanks to the celebratory nature of centenaries — Karajan was born on April 5, 1908 — virtually every disc he made has been reissued recently in one form or another. EMI has certainly done its part by cramming everything the conductor recorded for that company between 1946 and 1984 into two huge anniversary compilations: one set of eighty-eight CDs devoted to orchestral music and the other, seventy-two CDs, containing opera and vocal works. Karajan's other major recording affiliation — to an umbrella organization now called the Universal Music Group, which includes the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels — has not been so ambitious, but most of his work for that conglomerate is also currently available.

Rounding out the picture are select live performances from Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin and Bayreuth that have been cleared for commercial release, some documenting important operas that Karajan never got around to recording in the studio (Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Tannhäuser), others giving us instructive examples of how the conductor treated certain favorite scores at different times in his career. That, along with a generous number of concert and opera videos that Karajan meticulously produced toward the end of his life, presents a detailed portrait of a legendary musician at work as he precisely realizes a carefully thought-out musical philosophy that remains as mesmerizing as it is controversial.

Generalized assessments of musicians as protean and prolific as Karajan can be dangerous, but I find some merit in the conventional wisdom that tells us early Karajan is generally better than late, or that his live performances often offer more gripping statements than the corresponding studio recordings. Certainly a strong argument can be made that the conductor's interpretations, while never less than cogently imagined and ravishingly played, tended to become increasingly mannered, aloof and self-consciously groomed as he aged, robbing the finished product of spontaneity and vitality.

Karajan in the studio
© Siegfried Lauterwasser 2008

That impression has grown on me over the years, based not just on listening to the recordings as they appeared but on live encounters with Karajan's art, starting with his first Berlin Philharmonic American tour in 1955 and ending with his final Carnegie Hall concert in 1989. For me, the high point came with a Ring cycle in Vienna in 1959–60 featuring Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen and Hans Hotter in their prime — now a little discussed and largely forgotten moment in Karajan lore, since these performances, if they were preserved, have never circulated. The symphonic power and throbbing energy, together with the expressive luminosity of the orchestral playing at the Vienna State Opera in those years, were a far cry from the Salzburg Ring cycle that Karajan presented a decade later — a completely rethought, painstakingly realized "chamber-music" conception recorded by Deutsche Grammophon.

Rather than dwell on such still-hotly-disputed recordings, I've selected several Karajan opera sets that seem to me to represent him at his best. What better way to lead off than with the one that so vividly recalls the conductor of the Vienna Ring — his 1952 performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth, long available in the pirate underground but now released in optimum sound on the German Orfeo label and with the official blessing of the Wagner shrine. To say that this interpretation of Tristan is an incandescent reading of the score is to understate the case: it is positively radioactive. Karajan seems to release the music in one gigantic, unbroken breath that is even sustained through the intermissions. Other old-time German conductors schooled in Wagnerian performance practices could also pull off this feat, but few combined continuity and structural design with the sort of instrumental transparency, luminously observed detail, forward-moving drive and sheer lyrical expansiveness that Karajan achieves here.

Little of this is carried over into the studio version of twenty years later, a performance further compromised by a spotty cast and some truly strange off-kilter recording balances. It's a shame that Karajan never got along with the three transcendent Wagner sopranos of his day — Birgit Nilsson, Astrid Varnay and Martha Mödl — and seldom worked with them in later years. Mödl is his Bayreuth Isolde, and she is spectacular, alive to every textual nuance and in complete command of a resplendent voice that was soon to become a most recalcitrant instrument. Ramón Vinay is the noblest of Tristans and also in peak vocal form, while Hans Hotter's heartbreakingly loyal Kurwenal and Ludwig Weber's ebony-hued King Marke remind us that the postwar era at Bayreuth truly was a golden age of Wagner singing.

It would be wrong to imply that everything Karajan recorded in his latter years came out sounding impossibly studied, self-regarding and still-born. One triumphant late project is a performance of Strauss's Salome made in 1977–78 and starring Hildegard Behrens (another soprano who soon fell out with the conductor). The beauty of this fastidiously shaped interpretation lies in the sheer absence of lurid excess or souped-up melodrama. Strauss famously advised conductors to treat the opera as if it were Mendelssohn fairy-music, and Karajan takes him at his word — at least during the opening scenes, which are delineated with extraordinary grace, nuance and instrumental subtlety. There is plenty of orchestral power held in reserve, though, and the drama relentlessly builds to a shattering climax. The elegantly refined atmosphere may strike some as an inappropriately "safe sex" approach to Salome, but I can't imagine another performance that more potently realizes the perfumed decadence of Wilde's dramatic poem or the dazzling invention of Strauss's brilliantly colored score.

Karajan and Leontyne Price, in a recording session for Carmen in Vienna, 1963
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Late Karajan opera recordings could also be bedeviled by eccentric casting decisions, but that is not the case here. The columnar beauty of José van Dam's bass-baritone is ideal for Jochanaan's lyrical pronouncements, while both Herodes (Karl-Walter Böhm) and Herodias (Agnes Baltsa) prove that actually singing these roles is more effective than barking out the notes on pitch. It was still early in the day for Behrens — she had not yet tackled Brünnhilde, a role that would later severely compromise her vocal resources — and as Salome her soprano sounds consistently free, agile, expressive and secure. She and Karajan apparently agreed to view Salome as an essentially simple, childlike and unthinkingly ruthless creature, an innocent teenager whose chilling fascination lies in her utterly unscrupulous desire for beauty. As Karajan's biographer, Richard Osborne, shrewdly points out, elements of the coolly calculating Salome revealed here — "the intelligent spoilt child, the ruthless aesthete" — lurked within the conductor's own psyche, and one can readily believe it while listening to this consummately played, thrillingly sung interpretation of Strauss's operatic tone poem.

Karajan's tastes in Verdi mainly centered on the masterpieces of the composer's maturity and old age, and he left multiple recordings of them all. Listeners who prize Verdi's generosity of spirit and probing insights into human behavior are advised to look elsewhere, but there are other rewards in the conductor's somewhat abstract approach to this music. Aida perhaps fares best, partly because the opera itself is such a pure distillation of Verdian music drama, almost classical in its direct treatment of character portraiture, interior conflict and theatrical pageantry. Here is one opera that seems to inspire an instinctual response from Karajan, and for once his second version, with the Vienna Philharmonic dating from 1979, trumps the first, an early stereo spectacular recorded twenty years before with the same orchestra.

Few other Aida conductors understand or delineate the opera's clash of private anguish with public political power better than Karajan did, and in the brief prelude on the 1979 performance the motives denoting the gentle strength of Aida and the implacably dehumanized Egyptian priests magically meet to give us the kernel of the drama. In Karajan's hands the music emerges as an exquisitely sculptured miniature of the entire opera as it will shortly unfold, a musical world miles removed from the conductor's best Wagner interpretations but one just as surely, logically and seamlessly imagined. Unfortunately the cast here is a major problem. In 1959, Karajan had Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi, the former a bit past her best by then, perhaps, and the latter a lighter Radamès than one might want, but still more plausible in this music than his Aida and Radamès of twenty years later, Mirella Freni and José Carreras. For all their distinctive qualities, the latter pair never commanded the sort of vocal weight and declamatory authority that most Verdi connoisseurs will expect to hear in this opera.

Freni's signature role, of course, was Mimì in La Bohème, and it was the famous Zeffirelli–Karajan production at La Scala in 1963 that made her a star. Karajan's association with the opera began early in his career, in 1930, when the twenty-two-year-old maestro conducted a production in Ulm. One can only imagine what that must have sounded like, surely bearing little resemblance to his "official" studio recording made with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1972. That recording now has a status almost as iconic as the legendary recorded versions led by Arturo Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere in 1896, and Thomas Beecham, who claimed that his genial interpretation was based on extensive conversations about the opera with Puccini himself.

Karajan's final thoughts on La Bohème, at least as they are embodied in this plush performance, have inspired mixed feelings, to say the least: some adore it, some loathe it, and others find themselves caught in a perplexed state of love-hate. When no one is looking, few listeners will be able to resist the sheer lusciousness of it all, the opulent instrumental textures and the almost indecent lingering plastique of the lyrical phrasing. After a while, though, the whole opera begins to sound overblown, heavy and even a bit dull when presented in a spirit that makes so little of the music's youthful freshness and immediacy. Freni and Pavarotti manage to inject a bit of animation when the conductor's tempos are not holding them back, and this famous partnership makes a glorious sound. But Karajan has completely discarded the innocence and glowing vibrancy that one hears on the 1965 video preservation of the Zeffirelli production, let alone in a Vienna performance captured in the house two years earlier. Even for such an enthusiastic admirer as Osborne, compared to those La Bohèmes in the theater, this preening Berlin version amounts to little more than "a sterile artifact."



With Maria Callas at La Scala for his 1954 production of Lucia di Lammermoor © E. Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala

Karajan's way with Mozart's mature operas has never been to my taste, no matter at what point in his career he addressed them. The performances became progressively ponderous as the years passed, and by the time of his 1985 Don Giovanni recording, it seemed as though a dead hand was weighing down the music and crushing all the life out of it. I do continue to harbor a soft spot for the 1954 Così Fan Tutte, however, which at least has a lightness and wit to animate the glossy surfaces, along with a few classic vocal performances to treasure, especially the liquid beauty of Léopold Simoneau's aristocratic Ferrando. Still, the performance's sleekly sophisticated veneer seems very much at odds with the mysterious ambiguities that make this opera so eternally fascinating.

Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss — those were clearly Karajan's operatic gods, and his excursions into other repertory came infrequently. One happy exception was Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, and he probably would never have bothered looking in that direction had it not been for Maria Callas. Lucia, Madama Butterfly and Il Trovatore were the fruits of their brief collaboration in the mid-1950s, and of the three the Donizetti opera is perhaps the most amazing.

The most readily available documentation of their Lucia is included in the big EMI opera box, a live performance (September 29, 1955) from the Berlin Städtische Oper of an imported production seen the previous year at Milan's La Scala. Here, Karajan gives audible proof of how uncannily he could adjust to the moment and why so many singers found his rapport with them to be positively telepathic. Once, after a spat, Callas apparently sang an entire performance with her back to Karajan; as the conductor later informed the amazed diva, he still managed to follow the soprano's phrasing flawlessly simply by watching the rise and fall of her shoulders. As for Callas, her two studio recordings and various live performances of the opera are treasurable documents, but her Lucia was never more hauntingly articulated, technically assured or musically sovereign than on this magical evening in Berlin.

When examining Karajan's lifelong work in opera, even a work as central as Lucia seems like something of a detour for him. With very few exceptions, the conductor focused on the undisputed masterpieces of the opera repertory, rather than reviving worthy neglected works that fascinated other conductors, let alone seeking out and preparing new operas by prominent young composers. Even as an apprentice in the provincial opera houses of Ulm and Aachen, Karajan seldom wasted his time on passing novelties that were liable to have brief lives, although there are a few works that he puzzlingly set aside and never returned to once he could pretty much set his own agenda.

Why Karajan never again conducted Arabella after presiding over a production in Ulm in 1934, less than a year after the opera's premiere, remains a mystery and definitely our loss, especially since he adored every note Strauss wrote. La Traviata was also virtually ignored after he became a world celebrity, save for another La Scala–Vienna joint venture in 1957, which turned out badly. (It had been planned for Callas, but their stormy professional relationship was over by then.) Another Verdi classic, Rigoletto, never materialized at all, although Il Trovatore remained a favorite to the end of his life.

Some of the stranger omissions in Karajan's performing repertory, both live and on disc, can surely be explained by circumstances, but on the whole he went where he felt the call, and his musical instincts seldom betrayed him. What he left us on records and video can be infuriatingly willful much of the time, but the results are never less than provocative, and when the elements were all in the right place, simpy miraculous.

PETER G. DAVIS is the author of The American Opera Singer from 1825 to the Present and has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and Opera.

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