Herbert von Karajan

The training academy Karajan founded for the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1972 is renamed the Karajan-Akademie. Young musicians study there with members of the orchestra; many of them later join its ranks. The Salzburg Festival's Young Conductors Award (since 2010) and the Easter Festival's Karajan Prize (since 2015) continue the work of his foundation.

Karajan-Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker

A hundred years after his birth, the Institute coordinates a worldwide "Karajan Year" with exhibitions, concerts and new editions of his recordings. Since 2007 the archive in Salzburg has been open to researchers, and its databases of concerts, recordings and photographs are the foundation of this site.

As successor to the Herbert von Karajan Centrum she had opened in Vienna in 1995, Eliette von Karajan establishes the not-for-profit Eliette and Herbert von Karajan Institute in Salzburg. It preserves and presents his artistic estate, supports music education and researches the effects of music. In 2006 the Karajan Archive moves from Vienna to Salzburg.

About the Karajan Institute

Herbert von Karajan dies of heart failure at his house in Anif, aged 81, during a meeting with Sony president Norio Ohga. The day before he had rehearsed Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, the production that was to open the Salzburg Festival; it is taken over by Georg Solti. He is buried the next day in the churchyard of Anif, without public ceremony.

On New Year's Eve Karajan conducts his last concert in the Philharmonie, with Yevgeny Kissin in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. In the autumn he had filmed Bruckner's Eighth with the Wiener Philharmoniker in Vienna, and in May given his last concerts in Japan, the country that had revered him since 1954.

For the first and only time Karajan conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker's New Year's Concert, broadcast around the world. Kathleen Battle sings "Frühlingsstimmen", the only vocal soloist the concert has ever had. The recording becomes one of the best-selling classical records. In April he opens Berlin's 750th anniversary celebrations with the Philharmoniker.

In December the orchestra celebrates thirty years under Karajan with Debussy and Ravel. The New Year's Eve concert with Ravel's Boléro, filmed by his company Telemondial, closes the year; Karajan recorded the work three times, always with the Berliners. In the autumn he had been ill again for months.

The dispute over the clarinettist Sabine Meyer had escalated: at Whitsun Karajan replaced the Berliners with the Wiener Philharmoniker, and the Berliners in turn stayed away from the summer festival. After a clearing-the-air meeting he opens the Berliner Festwochen with Bach's Mass in B minor. The year also brings the last digital Beethoven cycle, his fourth, and the Four Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Only months after an operation on his spine, Karajan rehearses Der Rosenkavalier for the summer festival wearing a neck brace; from now on he conducts seated or holding a rail. He receives the German Record Prize, UNESCO's International Music Prize and the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and founds Télémondial in Monaco to film his repertoire under his own control.

Karajan engages the 23-year-old clarinettist Sabine Meyer for the Berliner Philharmoniker; at the end of her probation the players vote overwhelmingly against her. The quarrel, public from January 1983, becomes a two-year rift between conductor and orchestra. In the same year his live Mahler Ninth, recorded in the Philharmonie, wins the Gramophone Award.

During the Easter Festival, at Karajan's invitation, Sony's Akio Morita and Norio Ohga and Philips present the Compact Disc Digital Audio System to the press. Karajan, an early champion of digital recording, declares that everything else is "gaslight". Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, which he had recorded digitally with the Berliners in December 1980, becomes the first classical title on CD. That summer he sails his maxi yacht Helisara to third place in the world championship off Sardinia.

Berlin celebrates Karajan's 25th anniversary as chief conductor. In the studio he adopts digital recording with Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and Wagner's Parsifal, and in December the Alpine Symphony. His first appearance in Beijing with the orchestra had come in the autumn of 1979, during a tour of Japan and China.

Karajan's own staging of Verdi's Don Carlo, first seen at the summer festival in 1975, comes to the Easter Festival with Mirella Freni, Agnes Baltsa, José Carreras and Nicolai Ghiaurov; he had recorded it with the same cast in Berlin the previous autumn. In the summer he films Bruckner's Eighth with the Wiener Philharmoniker in the abbey church of St Florian.

The 70th birthday brings honorary doctorates from Salzburg and Oxford, the latter shared with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. In Munich he films Das Rheingold, playing every role himself in rehearsal. In September he suffers a stroke at a rehearsal in Berlin; Sylvia Caduff, whom he had encouraged as a student, steps in and becomes only the second woman to conduct the Berliner Philharmoniker. With the fourteen-year-old Anne-Sophie Mutter he records Mozart violin concertos, the start of a long collaboration.

Thirteen years after his resignation, Karajan returns to the house with Il trovatore, followed within days by Le nozze di Figaro and La bohème. In Munich he receives the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. His second Beethoven cycle with the Berliners, recorded in the Philharmonie in 1975 to 1977, is released; it wins a Grammy.

Verdi's Don Carlo, staged and conducted by Karajan, opens at the summer festival and will be revived until 1986. In the winter that follows a spinal condition nearly costs him his life and ends in back surgery; he blames a fall from a tree at the age of twelve. He returns to the podium, but the illness never quite leaves him.

Karajan founds the Salzburger Pfingstkonzerte: three orchestral concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker on the Whitsun weekend, the seed of today's Whitsun Festival. In August he conducts the world premiere of Carl Orff's De temporum fine comoedia at the summer festival, and in November Berlin makes him an honorary citizen.

Karajan founds the Orchester-Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker, in which young musicians train with members of the orchestra; ten of its scholars join the Philharmoniker in his lifetime. The same year the Council of Europe adopts his arrangement of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as the anthem of Europe. At Easter he stages Tristan und Isolde, which he had just recorded in Berlin for EMI.

With the Ring complete, Karajan turns the Easter Festival to Beethoven: his Fidelio with Helga Dernesch and Jon Vickers, in which he demonstrates every role to his singers. The summer festival of 1970 had brought his Otello with Vickers and Mirella Freni; in Dresden he records Die Meistersinger with the Staatskapelle, and in Berlin films the Eroica. In 1970 his foundation also launches an international meeting of youth orchestras.

The Herbert von Karajan Foundation holds its first international conductors' competition in Berlin; the Finn Okko Kamu wins. The same year the foundation attaches a research institute for experimental music psychology to the University of Salzburg, and Karajan takes the Berliners to Moscow for the first time. In Salzburg he conducts the Orchestre de Paris, whose musical adviser he has become.

On his 60th birthday Salzburg makes Karajan an honorary citizen, "in particular as founder of the Easter Festival"; the state gives him its ring of honour, Deutsche Grammophon its golden gramophone. He founds the Herbert von Karajan Foundation in Berlin to support young conductors and research into the effects of music, builds his house in Anif south of Salzburg, and films Beethoven's Ninth in Berlin as both conductor and director. At Easter the Ring continues with Das Rheingold.

Karajan founds, finances and runs his own festival: at Easter the Berliner Philharmoniker come to Salzburg to play one opera and three concerts, the only place where they play opera from the pit. Die Walküre, conducted and staged by Karajan with sets by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, opens the first festival; the Ring is completed over the following three years. In November the same production marks his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in May he gives a concert for Pope Paul VI in Rome.

Karajan stages Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov with Nicolai Ghiaurov in the title role, one of a series of large productions he directs himself in the Großes Festspielhaus: Il trovatore in 1962, Elektra in 1964, Carmen in 1966. In the same year the first talks about an Easter festival of his own begin.

After years of friction with the ministry and his co-director Egon Hilbert, Karajan leaves the Vienna State Opera; his last Fidelio performances turn into demonstrations by his supporters. He will not conduct in the house again until 1977. In January his second daughter Arabel is born, with the Berliner Philharmoniker as godparents, and in the summer he joins the directorate of the Salzburg Festival, where he remains until 1988.

Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker inaugurate Hans Scharoun's new hall at Kemperplatz, the orchestra in the middle and the audience around it, soon nicknamed "Circus Karajani". Beethoven's Ninth is preceded by a ceremony with Boris Blacher's fanfares. The same month Karajan records Brahms's First and Fourth for Deutsche Grammophon, and in November Carmen in Vienna with Leontyne Price.

In the church in Dahlem that serves as the orchestra's recording studio, Karajan completes the nine Beethoven symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker, begun in 1961. Released as a boxed set in 1963, the first conceived and sold as a cycle, it sells a million copies within a decade and makes the conductor and his orchestra the best-known in the world. In Vienna he stages Fidelio and records Tosca for Decca; in summer he visits Bayreuth as a guest.

Alongside Berlin, Karajan records with the Wiener Philharmoniker for Decca in the Sofiensaal: Also sprach Zarathustra, Aida, Die Fledermaus and, in September 1961, Holst's The Planets. At the Wiener Festwochen he conducts before Nina Khrushcheva and David Oistrakh. In the autumn of 1959 he had taken the Wiener Philharmoniker on a world tour through India, the Philippines, Japan and the United States.

Clemens Holzmeister's new Festspielhaus, built into the Mönchsberg with a stage of unprecedented width, opens with Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier under Karajan, who had pressed for the hall and shaped its auditorium. His contract as the festival's artistic director runs out in the autumn, but as conductor and director he remains its dominant figure. A month earlier his first daughter Isabel was born; the Wiener Philharmoniker are her godparents.

After his divorce from Anita, Karajan marries Eliette Mouret, a model from Nice he had met on the Riviera the year before; she will share the remaining thirty years of his life and later found the Institute that bears both their names. The same month he signs a five-year contract with Deutsche Grammophon whose first project is the Beethoven symphonies. In May he had conducted the Wiener Philharmoniker on Austria Day at the World's Fair in Brussels.

Karajan opens his directorship with Die Walküre, which he both conducts and stages, the first of many productions of his own. He brings in international singers, performs Italian operas in the original language and exchanges ensembles with La Scala. In the autumn he takes the Berliner Philharmoniker to Japan for the first time; in April he records Bruckner's Eighth with them for EMI.

The day after La Scala's guest performance of Lucia di Lammermoor with Maria Callas at the Vienna State Opera, Karajan's appointment as its artistic director is announced. In March he had signed as artistic director of the Salzburg Festival; in Berlin his contract as chief conductor is made "for life". With the Philharmonia Orchestra in London he records Falstaff, Der Rosenkavalier with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Strauss's Four Last Songs.

When Wilhelm Furtwängler died on 30 November 1954, Berlin asked Karajan to take over the Philharmoniker's first tour of the United States, which he accepted on the understanding that he would succeed him. The tour opens in Washington and reaches Carnegie Hall on 1 March amid protests over his Nazi past. In April, on his 47th birthday, the orchestra elects him chief conductor and artistic director. In the autumn he tours America again, with the Philharmonia.

Karajan conducts the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, the beginning of a lifelong bond with Japan, where he will return with the Berliners eleven times. In December, with the RAI orchestra in Rome, he conducts Beethoven's Ninth and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. A month earlier Wilhelm Furtwängler has died in Baden-Baden.

As chief conductor of the Wiener Symphoniker and head of the Singverein, Karajan performs Bach's Passions and records the Mass in B minor for EMI. In London the Philharmonia Orchestra, which Legge built around him from 1948, has become his principal recording orchestra: Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and between 1951 and 1955 his first complete Beethoven cycle.

Karajan conducts Wieland Wagner's new Tristan und Isolde with Martha Mödl and Ramón Vinay, which opens the 1952 festival. It is his last appearance on the Green Hill: incompatible ideas about staging, and his growing commitments elsewhere, keep him from returning. In May he had made his debut with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

At the first post-war Bayreuth Festival under Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, Karajan conducts Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, recorded live by EMI, and the second cycle of the Ring in Wieland Wagner's austere new production, with Astrid Varnay, Martha Mödl and Hans Hopf. His contract gives him the entire musical preparation of singers and orchestra.

With the Wiener Philharmoniker and the singers of the Vienna ensemble, Karajan records Le nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte for EMI, the first of his many complete opera recordings. After the 1949 festival he had withdrawn from Salzburg for a while; the summers are now spent in Lucerne, where he also teaches conducting.

The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde makes Karajan its concert director, with a cycle of his own with the Wiener Symphoniker and the direction of the Singverein for life. In April he conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in London for the first time, in August Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Mozart's Figaro at the Salzburg Festival and his first concert at the Lucerne Festival, where he will return nearly every summer until 1988. In December Figaro, on a guest visit of the Vienna State Opera, is his operatic debut at La Scala.

After the Allied authorities lift his performance ban, Karajan returns to public concert life with Bruckner's Eighth and the Wiener Philharmoniker in the Musikverein. In the same weeks he records for EMI, with Legge producing, Brahms's German Requiem, Strauss's Metamorphosen and Beethoven's Ninth. The clearance does not apply to Germany, where a Munich engagement planned for 1948 falls through.

Cleared by the American authorities in December 1945 on the strength of his own account of his party membership, Karajan conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker in the Musikverein. A week later he meets Walter Legge, producer at EMI's Columbia label and founder of the Philharmonia Orchestra, who becomes the most important partner of the next decade. In March the Soviet authorities ban him from public appearances; he records for Legge, studies scores and works anonymously at the Salzburg Festival.

Karajan conducts the Staatskapelle for the last time in Berlin, then flies with his wife to Milan and waits out the end of the war there and at Lake Como, studying scores. In 1944 he had made one of the first experimental stereo recordings, the finale of Bruckner's Eighth, for Berlin radio, and had been placed on the "Gottbegnadeten" list that exempted artists from military service.

Karajan's Aachen contract ends in the spring, and in June the Berlin State Opera does not renew his opera contract; he keeps the symphony concerts of the Staatskapelle until 1944 and records Mozart symphonies in Turin. Divorced from Elmy Holgerloef, he marries Anita Gütermann, heiress of the sewing-thread firm, whose Jewish grandparent makes the marriage a liability under the regime.

For the composer's 75th birthday season Karajan conducts a new production of Elektra at the State Opera in the presence of Richard Strauss. As Staatskapellmeister he is also sent abroad for German cultural propaganda: to Paris with the Aachen choir and orchestra in December 1940 and with the State Opera in May 1941, to Rome, Madrid, Amsterdam and Bucharest.

Karajan signs his first record contract with Deutsche Grammophon and records the overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte with the Staatskapelle Berlin, the first of more than 800 recordings. Tchaikovsky's Pathétique with the Berliner Philharmoniker follows in 1939. In April 1939 Hitler confers on him the title Staatskapellmeister, which puts the Staatskapelle's symphony concerts in his hands.

Karajan conducts Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera for the first time, the house he will direct twenty years later.

Engaged in Aachen in 1934 after a trial performance, Karajan becomes Generalmusikdirektor of the Stadttheater and the municipal concerts at 27, the youngest in Germany, with a large orchestra and chorus at his disposal for the first time. He conducts Tannhäuser for Hitler's birthday in April 1935 and choral works for the party's district rally in June; the post is the foundation of his career inside the Nazi state.

At a private soirée during the festival, partly in the open-air theatre of the Mirabell Gardens, Karajan conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker for the first time, in Debussy and Ravel. His Ulm contract has run out; in June a trial performance in Aachen brought him the post of first Kapellmeister there.

In Max Reinhardt's production of Goethe's Faust in the Felsenreitschule, the 25-year-old conducts Bernhard Paumgartner's incidental music, his official debut at the festival he will dominate for three decades.

For three years Karajan directs the international conducting courses of the Mozarteum in the summer. In August 1931 he hears Toscanini conduct Parsifal and Tannhäuser in Bayreuth, an experience he counts among the decisive ones of his youth.

A guest performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the Stadttheater Ulm brings the engagement as first Kapellmeister from the autumn. In April he conducts his first opera in the Salzburg Festspielhaus, Strauss's Salome. In Ulm he conducts everything from Rigoletto to Lohengrin, plays football in goal for the theatre team and tennis in Salzburg.

After the Matura at the Salzburg Gymnasium, with a thesis on thermodynamics and combustion engines, Karajan enrols at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna for mechanical engineering, and at the Academy of Music: piano with Josef Hofmann, conducting with Alexander Wunderer and Franz Schalk. The engineer's interest in machines, cars, aeroplanes and recording technology never leaves him.

At a Mozart celebration of the conservatory, conducted by Bernhard Paumgartner, the ten-year-old plays Mozart's Concert Rondo in D major. Since 1916 he has studied at the Mozarteum: piano with Franz Ledwinka, harmony with Franz Sauer, composition and chamber music with Paumgartner, who encourages him to conduct.

Heribert von Karajan is born as the second son of Dr Ernst von Karajan, head of surgery at the St. Johanns-Spital, and his wife Martha, née Kosmač. The family descends from the merchant Georg Karajan, who came to Vienna from Kozani in Macedonia in 1767; his great-grandfather Theodor Georg von Karajan was a philologist and president of the Academy of Sciences. The piano lessons begin at the age of four.