Unique Concertos Works by Glière, Daetwyler, Horovitz, Villa-Lobos, Diemer, and Akiho

By Georg Predota, Interlude 

In its simplest form, a concerto is defined as a musical composition in which one or more solo instruments interact with an orchestra or ensemble. The term concerto is ambiguous because it originated from splicing together two Latin words. “Consere” means to join, or to weave, and “certamen” means competition or to fight. As you can tell, it’s not simply the case that a virtuoso soloist plays extended featured passages and is dutifully accompanied by an orchestra. In reality, it’s more like a marriage or partnership in that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition, cooperation, and independence in the creation of the music flow. The vast majority of all concertos seem to have been written to feature the piano, the violin, and possibly the cello as solo instruments. But that’s not always the case, as composers have explored the timbres, techniques, and virtuoso possibilities of many other instruments as well. In this series, we introduce and present concertos for unique and unusual instruments and combinations. So let’s get started with a concerto for the human voice by Soviet composer Reinhold Glière (1875-1956).

The Young Reinhold Gliére

 Composed in 1943, the Concerto in F Minor for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra unfolds in two movements. Glière does not provide instruction about the type of sounds required, and there are no provisions in the score for actually taking a breath. In the absence of text, musical expression is left entirely up to the soprano. In fact, the whole composition is conceived as though the voice were an instrument of almost limitless possibilities. Composing a concerto for voice is one thing; writing one for Alphorn presents some very special challenges.

Jean Daetwyler: Alphorn Concerto

Jean Daetwyler

The Swiss composer Jean Daetwyler (1907-1994), who had studied with Vincent d’Indy at the Paris Conservatoire, took on that enormous challenge. Traditionally used as a signaling instrument in the alpine regions of Europe, the Alphorn is of phenomenal size. The instrument consists of a straight several-meter-long wooden natural horn of conical bore. The composer writes, “it is very difficult to write music for the alphorn. The instrument, in spite of its size, has only five notes that can be used to write a melody… For me, the alphorn represents solitude, man alone before Nature. With its five notes but above all with its powerful and magnificent sound, the instrument demands of the composer the greatest simplicity in evoking feelings of the deepest truth.”

Alphorns

Joseph Horovitz: Euphonium Concerto

Joseph Horovitz

The non-transposing brass instrument called euphonium was invented in the early 19th century. Its name derives from an Ancient Greek word meaning “well-sounding” or “sweet-voiced.” The instrument was made possible by the invention of the piston valve system, which allowed brass instruments with an even sound the facility of playing in all registers. A number of euphonium variants with either three or four valves were constructed, but the fingerings on the euphonium are the same as those on a trumpet. Often mistaken for a baritone horn, the euphonium produces a darker tone and a gentle sound. It still plays an important role in military and brass bands around the world. While most euphoniums can be played from a sitting position, a slight change in design also allows the instrument to be easily carried while marching. The instrument has always played an important role in ensembles. As such, solo literature was slow to appear and Joseph Horovitz composed the first concerto for the euphonium only in 1972.

The Euphonium and Tuba

Horovitz was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to England in 1938. Throughout his long and productive career, he composed twelve ballets, nine concertos, two one-act operas, chamber music, works for brass and wind bands, film, television and radio, and choral works. His compositions have always been known for their melodic richness, its energy, and its craftsmanship. His Euphonium Concerto set “the benchmark” for future generations of soloists and composers, and Horowitz propelled the euphonium as a solo instrument towards international popularity.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: Concerto for Harmonica

Heitor Villa-Lobos

The harmonica, also known as the mouth organ, is a free-reed wind instrument developed in Europe in the early part of the 19th century. Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann is often cited as the inventor of the harmonica in 1821, and the first harmonicas produced by clockmakers appeared in Vienna shortly thereafter. Joseph Richter invented the blow and draw mechanism that allows players to activate twenty differently tuned reeds by inhaling and exhaling. These diatonic harmonicas were primarily designed to play folk music, and by mid-century, the instrument was being mass-produced. The invention of the chromatic harmonica by Hohner in 1924 created new possibilities for the instrument, and it appeared in a variety of musical styles, including American folk music, blues, jazz, country, and rock. Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) composed a substantial number of concertos for famous performers. This was certainly the case with the famous harmonica player John Sebastian, who enjoyed a long career as a soloist that started in Philadelphia in the early 1940s. Sebastian commissioned a harmonica concerto from Villa-Lobos in 1955, and he premiered the work in Jerusalem with the Kol Israel Orchestra in 1959. The concerto is packed with technical challenges for the soloist, including octaves and chords, but Villa-Lobos also highlights the powerfully expressive qualities of the instruments. Villa-Lobos and Sebastian are essentially responsible for introducing the harmonica into the concert hall.

Harmonica

Emma Lou Diemer: Concerto in One Movement for Marimba

Emma Lou Diemer

The marimba is a percussion instrument that features a set of wooden bars arranged like the keys of a piano. Resonators are typically suspended underneath the bars to amplify the sound produced by striking the bars with yarn or rubber mallets. The ancestry of the instrument can be traced to Sub-Saharan Africa, and it rapidly spread to Central and South America. Today, marimbas are widely popular around the world and Darius Milhaud introduced the instrument into Western classical music with a Concerto for Marimba and Vibraphone in 1947. Ever since, composers like Leoš Janáček, Carl Orff, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Pierre Boulez, and Steve Reich have found new and exciting ways of using the marimba. That also includes the Concerto in One Movement for Marimba by American composer Emma Lou Diemer. A native of Kansas City, Diemer is a keyboard performer, and she has engaged with an eclectic style of composition. She has composed traditional, experimental, and electronic works using tonal and atonal musical languages. Commissioned by the Women’s Philharmonic of San Francisco, the Marimba Concerto premiered on 21 March 1991 at Mills College with JoAnn Falletta conducting and Deborah Schwartz as the featured soloist. A reviewer wrote, “This was a premiere worth waiting for… A stirring score that explores the colors of the marimba in glorious detail… The composer and soloist have taken an inert instrument of wooden bars and metal tubes and given it a human throat with which to sing. Marimbists around the world have cause to celebrate.”

Marimba

Andy Akiho: Ricochet “Ping Pong Concerto”

Ping Pong Concerto

Andy Akiho is a composer of contemporary classical music. He is a virtuoso percussionist based in New York City, and his primary performance instrument is steel pans. In fact, he took several trips to Trinidad after graduating from college in order to learn and play music. His compositional interest was peeked by participating in the “Bang on a Can” Festivals in 2007 and 2008. Akiho developed a reputation for writing music that makes use of metallic sounds and incorporates elements of theatre. Concertos are generally written to highlight a virtuoso soloist or two, but there are no specifications as to what kind of instruments are to be used. Theoretically, they can be written for anything that produces sound.

Andy Akiho

Such is the case in Akiho’s Ricochet, a triple concerto for violin, percussion, and ping-pong players. Working in his preferred instrumental medium, Akiho incorporates a ping-pong tournament into his concerto score. The violinist opens the piece with a solo and is soon joined by a percussionist who turns the ping-pong table into an instrument. But we quickly realize that a game of ping-pong is the major component. Commissioned by the Beijing Music Festival in 2015, the ping-pong soloists at the premier performance are both accomplished athletes. Michael Landers and Ariel Hsing are the youngest U.S. Women’s and Men’s table tennis champions, and Hsing competed in the 2012 London Olympics. A reviewer wrote, “So riveting was this piece as a visual theatre that no one seemed to keep score.”

Moderato

by Frances Wilson, Interlude

Moderato (It.)
‘Moderate’, ‘restrained’, e.g. allegro moderato (‘a little slower than allegro ’).
adv. & adj. Music (Abbr. mod.)
In moderate tempo……. Used chiefly as a direction.

‘Moderato’ is one of those rather ambiguous musical terms, like andante (“at a walking pace”). Literally translated, it means “moderately” – but what does it really mean? At the most basic level, it is a tempo marking, slower than allegretto, but faster than andante. The modern metronome gives a marking of 96 to 100, a very narrow range (and I would always guard against assigning a specific metronome mark to a piece marked moderato, or allegro moderato, or molto moderato.) Like so much else in music, moderato is not just a tempo marking; it also suggests mood and character. It is personal feeling and sense of music, and one person’s moderato might be rather different from another’s, both in terms of tempo and character.

The opening movement of Schubert’s last sonata is marked molto moderato, literally “very moderately”. And taken literally, that could result in a very slow tempo, virtually alla breve (two beats in a bar), which can make the music appear to drag. Schubert also used the German term mässig, implying the calm flow of a considered allegro or “not rushing nor dragging”. There are many, many different interpretations of Schubert’s marking, resulting in some wildly varying lengths of the first movement. Sviatoslav Richter’s is almost self-indulgent at nearly 25 minutes – listening to it, you get the feeling he is thinking about every single note and where to place it; while Maria João Pires brings it in at 20 minutes, which feels both fluid and eloquent.

Of course, all these specific timings are rather meaningless: one would not notice the time passing at a good performance unless one was pedantic enough to sit there with a stopwatch! Creating a sense of the music and conveying mood, colour and shading is more important. When I listen to the piece, I always feel the opening movement suggests a great river broadening into its final course before reaching the sea: unhurried but with continual forward motion. There are moments of “other-wordliness” in this movement as well, which demand sensitive rubato playing and some very finely-controlled pianissimos. There are storms too, but these are short-lived, and do not disturb the overall almost hymn-like serenity of the movement.

In Chopin’s Ballade in G minor, a piece of fluctuating tempos and mercurial moods and textures, the first theme is also marked moderato. Here, I would read this marking as a slower tempo than in the Schubert sonata. The mood is very different too: the key is darker, and the off-beat quaver figures and the rather uncertain harmonies, with the prominent use of diminished and dominant seventh chords to add moments of tension which are not always resolved immediately, create a sense of hesitancy in the music, as if it is not quite sure where it is going. After the fioritura, the opening theme returns, slightly elaborated with a sighing quaver figure, but rather than increase the sense of forward motion, I feel the music becomes more suspended; thus when one reaches the direction agitato, there is a far greater sense of climax. This continues right through to the arpeggiated figures and onwards, in a section marked sempre piu mosso. After the great, memorable second theme is heard, the first theme returns, this time in A minor, and the music returns to the moderato tempo and mood of the opening. Here once again, uncertain harmonies are used to contrive a feeling of suspense, while the insistent repeated low E’s in the bass tether the music even more firmly in one place. This is a useful device for introducing another climax, which seems to suddenly free itself from the restraints of the moderato marking; the restatement of the second theme on a far grander scale than its first appearance.

So, one could argue here that the use of moderato at the opening of the piece, and its reappearance later on, is a very deliberate device which serves to create moments of great tension, suspense and climax.

WOMEN AND THE PIANO: A History in 50 Lives - Susan Tomes

by Frances Wilson, Interlude

Following on from her splendid ‘The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces’, celebrated pianist and writer Susan Tomes now turns her attention to that oft-neglected corner of classical music history – women pianists.

Susan Tomes

Focusing on 50 women pianists – some well-known (Louise Farrenc, Fanny Mendelssohn, Nadia Boulanger, Tatiana Nikolayeva, for example), others less so, or only recently discovered – Tomes traces the lives and music-making of these women across the piano’s history, from the development of the piano in the 18th century to the present day.

As Tomes points out in her introduction, the piano is “an instrument that anyone can play, irrespective of gender”, yet until fairly recently, women pianists and composer-pianists were overlooked, under-represented in concert programmes and recordings, and generally consigned to the background in classical music history.

In some ways, the reasons for this are simple: women pianists lacked access to formal music training, were excluded from performance opportunities, and were even at a disadvantage to men due to the size of the instrument, the piano’s keys being designed for men’s typically larger hands. Additionally, women often had significant obligations to the home and family. And yet, despite these limitations, women continued to play, perform, and compose their own music. 

Pioneers, in a number of ways, women pianists carved their own paths within a male-dominated profession. They travelled independently and helped to shape the modern piano concert as we know it today, including playing from memory (Clara Schumann), performing cycles of complete works (Wanda Landoswka/Bach’s Goldberg Variations), premiering new works and reviving historical works, bringing lesser-known and rare repertoire into concert programmes and recordings, and commissioning new music. They were involved in recording, broadcasting, presenting TV programmes about music, creating educational initiatives, devising concert series….and much more – all against a background of, at best half-hearted support, at worst, antagonism, resentment, and open sexism. 

These enterprising women, 50 of whom are presented in this book, helped to expand and diversify the profession, gradually debunking the notion that the male approach to a career as a concert pianist was not the only way. These women were not imitators of male pianists but artists in their own right, with their own musical integrity, authority, and identity.

This highly readable, meticulously researched, and elegantly crafted book takes a chronological approach, beginning with French keyboard player Anne-Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy and ending with Nina Simone, jazz pianist, singer and civil rights activist. For each woman pianist featured, the author gives biographical details, notes their significant performances, recordings or compositions, and demonstrates how they have each contributed to the world of the piano.

The introductory chapters explore some of the reasons why women were sidelined, including social mores and prejudices, and how men became ascendent in the profession. The closing chapters examine where we are today with regard to female musicians, including the effect of equal rights legislation, the rise of piano competitions, shifting attitudes within the profession and audience perceptions, and the influence of teachers. For this section of the book, Susan Tomes spoke to a number of female pianists working today to reveal some surprising insights, and the barriers and limitations which women still face today in a highly competitive global profession. 

At a time when the current discourse in classical music – and indeed in society in general – is focused on equality and inclusion, this book is an important, valuable contribution to the debate and a rich celebration of the essential role of women in the history of classical music and the piano in particular.

Playlist: Water Games

by Frances Wilson, Interlude

‘Water games’ is one translation of Jeux d’eau by Maurice Ravel, others being Fountains and Playing Water.

Shipwreck

Each is equally apt: in this piece Ravel brilliantly evokes “the splashing of water and by the musical sounds of fountains, cascades and rivulets” (Ravel) through shimmering figurations, cascading arpeggios and other fluid textures. It’s a masterpiece of Impressionism and was the well-spring for other water-inspired piano music by Ravel, namely Une barque sur l’océan from Miroirs and Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit. 

Fountain in Villa d’Este, Tivoli

But the forerunner of these pieces was undoubtedly Franz Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, which, like Jeux d’eau, evokes the sparkling play of fountains and the fluidity and brilliance of water. The Villa d’Este boasts an extraordinary system of fountains, with some fifty-one fountains and nymphaeums, 398 spouts, 364 water jets, 64 waterfalls, and 220 basins, fed by 875 metres of canals, channels and cascades, and all working entirely by the force of gravity, without pumps.

Reflections on water

Debussy was also a master of depicting water in music. Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water). Here Debussy imitates not just the sounds of water – droplets and burbles, splashes and raindrops – but also reflections, the pictures that float upon the surface.

n. The Lone Wreck, from The Tides by English composer William Baines, is a dramatic tone poem which paints a haunting picture of an abandoned ship deep in the ocean, complete with the calls of sea birds.

Night gondola in Venice, Italy

The Barcarolle, or “boat song”, inspired by the songs of Venetian gondoliers, seeks to portray the rocking motion of the sea and the rise and fall of waves. Chopin’s Barcarolle is perhaps the most famous work in this genre. Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondolier’s Song in f-sharp minor from his Songs Without Words is dark and atmospheric, suggesting nighttime on the Venetian lagoon.

Liszt was also adept at portraying the motion of the ocean. In his Legende No. 2, St. Francis of Paola walking on the waves, the waters roll and bubble beneath the saint’s feet as he crosses the Straits of Messina.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Britten transports us to more serene waters in Sailing from his Holiday Diary suite. The wind gets up in the middle section, tossing the boat about, before calm is restored.

Charles Villiers Stanford

by Georg Predota, Interlude

“Heaven must be in me before I can be in heaven”

As a composer, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) might not be a household name, but he is remembered as a teacher of several generations of British composers at the RCM and Cambridge University. However, there is a clear disconnect between how he was celebrated in his day, and how posterity has decided to look at him.

Charles Villiers Stanford

Villiers Stanford was highly lauded during his lifetime as an exceptional composer of large works for chorus and orchestra, and he received a knighthood on the occasion of King Edward VII’s coronation. Posterity, however, has been less kind. The musicologist Robert Stove writes, “Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has not so much been neglected, but posterity has derived malicious satisfaction from ostentatiously yawing in his face.” 

Centenary of Death

Villiers Stanford died 100 years ago, on 29 March 1924, and he untiringly campaigned for a national opera, as he saw “opera as a vital catalyst in Britain’s musical renaissance.” He was a mover and a shaker, but his music became associated with Victorian fustiness, worthy if ultimately inconsequential.

As Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote, “in Stanford’s music the sense of style, the sense of beauty, the feeling of a great tradition is never absent. His music is in the best sense of the word Victorian, that is to say, it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts and Matthew Arnold.”

Critical Assessment

Charles Villiers Stanford as a boy

Villiers Stanford was a busy man. He composed roughly 200 works, including seven symphonies, about 40 choral works, nine operas, 11 concertos, and 28 chamber works. And this is in addition to songs, piano pieces, incidental music, and organ works. Stanford’s technical competence was never in doubt, as the composer Edgar Bainton wrote, “Whatever opinions might be held upon Stanford’s music, and they are many and various, it is always recognised that he was a master of means.”

It’s been suggested by countless critics that Stanford’s music lacked passion. In his operas, critics found music that ought to convey love and romance but fails to do so. His church music is “a thoroughly satisfying artistic experience, but one that is lacking in deeply felt religious impulse. And while Stanford had a real gift for melody often infused with the contours of Irish folk music, he never emulated comic operas but produced oratorios that “only occasionally matched worthiness with power and profundity.”

Beginnings

Charles Villiers Stanford

Born on 30 September 1852 in Dublin, Charles Villiers Stanford was the only child of the city’s most eminent lawyer. He grew up in a highly stimulating cultural and intellectual environment, and his childhood home was the meeting place of countless amateur and professional musicians. In fact, his father was a capable cellist and singer, and his mother an able pianist, with various celebrities such as Joseph Joachim visiting the home.

Stanford showed early musical promise, and he took violin, piano, and organ lessons. His teachers were of the highest calibre, including former students of Ignaz Moscheles. And he clearly had plenty of talent. He gave his first piano recital for an invited audience at the age of seven, presenting works by Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Mozart, and Bach. Long before the age of twelve, “he could play through all fifty-two Mazurkas by Chopin on sight,” and his earliest composition attempts emerged at the age of eight.

Cambridge and Leipzig

Charles Villiers Stanford’s parents

Not entirely unexpected, Stanford’s father wanted his son to enter the legal profession. Finally, in 1870, Stanford was able to gain the consent of his parents to pursue a career in music. He won an organ scholarship at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and immersed himself in various musical activities. He composed prodigiously and was elected assistant conductor to the Cambridge University Musical Society.

On the recommendation of Sir William Sterndale Bennett, Stanford spent the last six months of both 1874 and 1875 in Leipzig. He studied piano with Robert Papperitz and composition with Carl Reinecke. As Stanford reported, “Of all the dry musicians I have ever known, Reinecke was the most desiccated. He had not a good word for any contemporary composer, he loathed Wagner, sneered at Brahms, and had no enthusiasm of any sort.” To round off his continental study tour, Stanford spent some time in Berlin, working with Friedrich Kiel. “I learned more from him in three months,” he writes, “than from all the others in three years.” 

Back in Cambridge

Stanford returned to Cambridge in January 1877, and he quickly became known as a conductor and composer. For one, he conducted the first British performance of Brahms’s First Symphony, and he completed his own First Symphony and the oratorio The Resurrection. He quickly followed up with his Second Symphony and the Piano Quintet, and as the organist at Trinity, he composed “some highly distinctive church music.”

At the age of 35, Stanford was appointed professor of music at Cambridge, with his students including Coleridge-Taylor, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and Ireland. By all accounts, he was not an easy teacher. He only taught in one-on-one tutorials, and “when students went into the teacher’s room, they came out badly damaged.” Apparently, Stanford’s teaching did not follow a prescribed plan or method. “His criticism,” as reported by a former student, “consisted for the most part of “I like it, my boy,” or “It’s damned ugly, my boy” (the latter in most cases).”

Royal College of Music

Stanford joined the staff of the newly inaugurated RCM as a professor of composition and conductor of the orchestra in 1883. He exerted considerable influence on a long list of students, and he instigated an opera class with an annual production. A scholar writes, “Stanford’s enthusiasm for opera is demonstrated by his lifelong commitment to a genre in which he enjoyed varying success.”

Stanford also took on the conductorship of the Bach Choir, the Leeds Philharmonic Society, and the Leeds Triennial Festival. He received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Leeds, and was knighted in 1902. Stanford continued to be active as a composer as well, but his music was gradually eclipsed by the young Edward Elgar. As Stanford was known as a hot-tempered and quarrelsome man, confrontations quickly ensued with Stanford writing, “Elgar, cut off from his contemporaries by his religion and his want of regular academic training, was lucky enough to enter the field and find the preliminary ploughing done.”

Thoughts on Music and Composers

Charles Villiers Stanford’s Piano Trio

In his writings on music, Stanford frequently uses visual metaphors and references to painting and sculpture. His ideas on the subject can be reduced to simple statements. “A piece of music can survive bad texture and instrumentation, but never bad melody or design.” As he famously wrote, “Colour, the god of modern music, is in itself the inferior of rhythmic and melodic invention, although it will always remain one of its most important servants. Fine clothes will not make a bad figure good.”

In the musical culture war of the period, Stanford always sided with Brahms and against the modernists, although he had a great admiration for Wagner. He counted Berlioz and Liszt as lesser practitioners of the musical art, and he most bitterly objected to the music of Richard Strauss. Concerning Debussy and the new French School that emerged in the 1890’s, Stanford was deeply ambivalent.

Stanford was tormented by musical and aesthetic dichotomies at the end of his life. Always wrestling with his status in relation to Irish and English culture, he experienced what Yeats described as “my hatred tortures me with love, my love tortures me with hate.”

On This Day 5 April: Herbert von Karajan Was Born

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Herbert von Karajan is frequently hailed as the greatest living conductor of orchestral music. And while his conducting method is one of total authority and power, many critics have praised his emphasis on the perfection of sound, “note-perfect expressions of sheer, pure beauty.” For many music aficionados, colleagues, and critics, Karajan was “the greatest, the last great maestro. Karajan was the exception; no one can do it like he can. He is so egocentric, so clever, he uses all of his immense power to do the things he wants.”

Herbert von Karajan, 1938

And the music critic Martin Bernheimer called him “the last of the old-school European supermen of music… a genius on the podium.” He was a dedicated devotee of yoga and Zen Buddhism, and characteristically conducted scores completely from memory with his eyes tightly closed. For Karajan, this was not a pose of affection, but “it has to do with the gap between what you want and what you hear and how it becomes narrower.” Karajan explained, “when I was very young and started conducting, I had to train myself to listen to music as it came out because the orchestra of a provincial town was simply noncompetitive with what I had in my ear. This is the point where you begin, and then you take one step and then another, and the gap begins to narrow.” 

Heribert Ritter von Karajan, born on 5 April 1908 in Salzburg, has always been tight-lipped about his formative years. As a biographer wrote, “his public is curious to know about his family. But he is not in the least inclined to satisfy such curiosity. In all the conversations that he recorded as part of the present biography, what he had to say about his family would fit on a single piece of paper.”

Herbert and Wolfgang Karajan

In fact, Karajan has never given a detailed account of his childhood. This has led to various speculations and theories, with one researcher claiming, “He was not the sort of man to guard sentimental memories or to harbor feelings of resentment.” Karajan clearly had a great number of ghosts in his closet, foremost among them his maintaining silence about his Nazi Party membership. In fact, Karajan joined the Nazi Party twice, first in Salzburg in 1933, and two years later he rejoined the party in Aachen. He subsequently insisted that his interest was “career advancement and survival rather than political conviction,” with Adolf Hitler personally appointing Karajan “state conductor” in Berlin. His enemies called him “SS Colonel von Karajan,” but the de-Nazification board immediately cleared him of any illegal activities, merely banning him from the concert halls for two years. 

The Karajans were of Greek ancestry, with his great-great-grandfather Geórgios Karajánnis leaving for Vienna in 1768 and eventually settling in Saxony. He established a clothing business with his brother, and both “were ennobled for their services by Frederick Augustus III. The conductor’s father Ernst von Karajan was a chief medical officer and senior consultant, and his mother Marta née Martha Kosmač, came from a Slovene background. Apparently, Heribert inherited from his father “a seriousness of purpose,” and he once suggested that his mother wanted him to go into banking. That, however, was never going to happen.

Herbert von Karajan, 1941

Karajan’s earliest memory was “hiding behind the curtains, jealously auditioning his brother’s piano lessons.” Wolfgang Karajan was a gifted pianist, but Heribert was extraordinarily talented. It was quickly discovered that he was a child prodigy at the piano. As he later recalled, “I was naturally under a lot of stress from my piano studies alongside my school work. I wasn’t just plonking away. I played in public every year. On the one hand, it isolated you; on the other hand, it gives you a satisfaction it would be very difficult to get from any other source.” 

Karajan practiced the piano for four hours every day, and he started attending classes at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1914. Within a couple of years, he was working with three eminent teachers, Franz Ledwinka (piano), Berhard Paumgartner (composition and chamber music), and Franz Sauer (harmony). And as the rising star of the Mozarteum, young Heribert made regular appearances in the yearly special Mozart Birthday Concerts. According to contemporary critics, Karajan played with great assurance both of manner and touch, “and a preoccupation with the beauty of sound born of an evidently precocious musical sensibility.”

Statue of Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg

Young Karajan also sang in various local church choirs in Salzburg, and he remembers “that choral singing has in fact accompanied me throughout my life.” Karajan claimed that Bernhard Paumgartner encouraged him to take up conduction, as he “detected his exceptional promise in that regard.” However, Karajan’s’ fascination with orchestral sound had already been identified by Ledwinka. In the event, Paumgartner took Heribert “along again and again to orchestral rehearsals and let him sit alongside him—‘So that you get an idea what conducting is like.’ And he also did his utmost to make sure that I eventually put it all to the test.” On the advice of Paumgartner, and on account of an inflamed tendon in one of his hands, Karajan turned to conducting, taking lessons with Alexander Wunderer and Franz Schalk at the Vienna Academy.