Recordings

Recorded Music Legacy

Herbert von Karajan created the most extensive recorded music catalogue of any conductor in the history of classical music. With more than 2,000 audio recordings from the late 1930s to the late 1980s and around 200 video productions, his recorded interpretations represent an unparalleled artistic legacy.

The catalogue contains the works of more than 150 composers, the majority from the classical and romantic period, including Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Bruckner. However, the catalogue also encompasses a broad range of early music, modern and operetta works.

Karajan’s recordings were mostly made with three orchestras: the Philharmonia Orchestra (1949–1955), the Berlin Philharmonic (1955–1989), and the Vienna Philharmonic (from the 1950s onwards). In addition, Karajan created many recordings with a broad range of international orchestras, for instance the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the RAI orchestras in Rome and Turin, the La Scala Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and others.

Karajan recorded some of his favorite works multiple times over the decades with changing orchestras, soloists, recording venues, and recording technologies.

The Art of Recording & Technology

In his programmatic text Technische Wiedergabe (Technical Reproduction), Karajan refers to recordings not primarily as the reproduction of performance, but as a means of creating a distinct sound that reflects the conductor’s artistic intention. For Karajan, the studio served as a stimulating creative environment in which musical interpretations could be refined and given lasting form in line with his sound imagination.

 “This form of manipulation, understood in a positive sense, is just as important as conducting itself.”¹

Most of Karajan’s recordings were realized as studio productions, with the recording process taking place in spaces carefully selected for their acoustics such as concert halls, churches, or large halls that were adapted for recording. Since its beginnings, studio recording as an artistic practice involved the exercise of precise navigation of sound and form, both in the musical recording process (e.g. through microphone placement, sound color, spatial perspective) as well as in the subsequent refinement process (e.g., balancing, editing, mixing, and mastering). Karajan involved himself in all stages of the production process to ensure the final recording product reflected his sound ideas. 

From Analog to Digital: The Compact Disc

Over the course of Karajan’s life, recording technology underwent profound change, and he actively followed and supported its development together with producers, sound engineers, and record labels. His earliest recordings, beginning in 1938, were analog shellac productions for the gramophone. From the early 1950s, he recorded extensively for the long-playing record (“LP vinyl record”), initially in monophonic sound (“mono”), where the sound emanates from one position. The introduction of stereophonic sound (“stereo”) recording in the early 1960s fundamentally expanded the spatial and tonal possibilities he had for recording sound. 

In the late 1970s digital recording opened new opportunities to record and adjust sounds. The Compact Disc (“CD”), co-developed by Sony, Philips and PolyGram, became the first standardized and widely accessible format for the reproduction of digital sound. At Karajan’s initiative, the CD was presented to the global public at a press conference in Salzburg on 15 April 1981 together with Akio Morita, Chairman of Sony, and representatives of Philips and PolyGram. In the following years, Karajan helped promote the new format to a global audience and to establish it as the new standard sound carrier. 

▶ Karajan speaking at the World Presentation of the CD in Salzburg (in German)

Among the earliest classical recordings transferred to Compact Disc was Herbert von Karajan’s recording of Richard Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie, recorded in December 1980. The recording was pressed on CD as early as 1981 as part of the format’s experimental and test-production phase and became commercially available with the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982. Digital recording and orchestral multitrack production further extended the artistic possibilities of studio work.

Music Videos

From the 1960s onwards, Herbert von Karajan as the first conductor systematically extended his musical recording work to film and video. Over the course of his career, he realized nearly 200 music films and video productions, through his production companies, in collaboration with international broadcasting and production partners.

Karajan regarded film as a continuation of musical interpretation by visual means. As he stated in an interview, the aim was “not simply to show what happens on stage, but to make the music itself visible.”² Moreover, he understood film and television as ways of reaching audiences at their homes, thus extending the musical experience beyond the concert hall. 

 

Karajan’s Recordings Today

As anticipated by Karajan, recording and playback technologies continued to evolve after his passing, from digital storage media and music downloads to today’s globally accessible streaming platforms.

“But if I am honest I would like to have been born perhaps six or seven years later. I think there will be great developments over the next few years.”³

Karajan’s recordings continue to be remastered using the latest sound technologies and re-released on streaming platforms, as new CD editions, and vinyl records. 

 

Additional materials

  1. Karajan, Herbert von: „Technische Wiedergabe“. In: Endler, Franz (Hrsg.): Herbert von Karajan. Dokumente seines Lebens. Salzburg 1992.
  2. Herbert von Karajan in conversation with John Culshaw, BBC television interview, 1969.
  3. Herbert von Karajan in “Conversations with Karajan” in conversation with Richard Osborne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989

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