Karajan's video legacy - with Richard Osborne

·44 min·4 clips

Herbert von Karajan's filmed concerts, now on Stage Plus, reveal insights from his biographer Richard Osborne.

A film catalogue becomes a life story. James Jolly opens with Karajan's video legacy now available through Stage Plus: filmed concerts, opera videos, documentaries, albums, and the Telemondial catalogue. Osborne starts with the date that stayed with him, the 6th of April, 1962, when he heard Karajan conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in London after the orchestra's Soviet tour. That memory brings the politics of the moment along with the sound. The episode treats the films as more than archive filler. They show stamina, control, and orchestral relationships under stress. Strauss gets the first serious look. The Metamorphosen excerpt makes the case for seeing Karajan as well as hearing him, without turning preservation into a shrine. Osborne is choosy about the later films. He points to the Pathétique Symphony from January 1984 in Vienna and hears the same current that ran through Karajan's conducting 20 or 30 years earlier. Then the conversation reaches the Sabina Meyer break. Her resignation under pressure from bullying inside the orchestra nearly cracks the video project apart. Karajan is furious, and Berlin is tense through the summer. Vienna helps keep the Telemondial work going until the end of September, when the public repair arrives through Karajan's proposed B minor Mass. Whether anything really healed is another matter. Osborne remembers asking Lothar Schellenberger, then principal oboe and one of the figures named in the dispute, whether things went back afterward. The answer is firm: the performances held because Karajan was still strong and the orchestra would not accept slack playing. Pictures at an Exhibition comes off as a fantastic return to a familiar Karajan warhorse. The final stretch stays uneven. Bruckner Eight in 1988 sits alongside wonderful performances and a few Beethoven films Osborne finds weaker than the earlier cycles.

As heard by us

A biographer links Karajan's filmed legacy with orchestra politics and recording technology.

Herbert von Karajan's screen legacy is framed through biographer Richard Osborne's memories, starting with a 1962 Vienna Philharmonic concert in London and moving through Telemondial, the Berlin and Vienna orchestras, and the conductor's final film in 1988.

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