Watching Karajan Conduct Richard Strauss

I decided to jump the gun a bit in continuing to address Herbert von Karajan’s career as an opera conductor. With this objective in mind, I was pleased to see that there was a YouTube video of a performance of Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier when it was performed at the 1962 Salzburg Festival with Karajan in the orchestra pit and staging by Rudolf Hartmann. This was a digitization of a film made for television by Paul Czinner, the British film director born in Hungary on May 30, 1890. In the mid-Fifties Czinner began to focus his attention on making film documents of performances of opera and ballet, and his Rosenkavalier film was one of his last efforts.

This film allows one to see the role of the Marschallin sung by soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. There is an interesting “local connection” here, because on September 20, 1955 Schwarzkopf made her United States opera debut, singing this role with the San Francisco Opera. Furthermore, the role of Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau was sung in Salzburg by bass Otto Edelman, who sang the same role during Schwarzkopf’s San Francisco debut. The other major Salzburg roles were taken by mezzo Sena Jurinac as Octavian and Anneliese Rothenberger as Sophie von Faninal.

In spite of these impressive resources, the film leaves much to be desired. Compared to current productions, Hartmann’s staging is frustratingly static, making for more stand-there-and-sing moments than most of today’s audiences would willingly tolerate. Sadly (or consequently), Czinner’s talents as a director leave much to be desired. This may be because Hartmann provided him with inadequate source material, but even the camera angles tend to be awkward more often than not.

Anneliese Rothenberger, Sena Jurinac, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the trio near the end of Act 3 (screen shot from the video being discussed)

As a result, it is up to Karajan to save the day, for Czinner as well as the viewer. The best viewing is to be found during the orchestral introduction to Act 3. Karajan conducts this at a breakneck pace, which could not be more appropriate for the abundance of low comedy that is about to unfold (at least in the scenario text). What impressed me the most was the way in which he managed turn-on-a-dime shifts in dynamic levels from one extreme to the other. This made for edge-of-your-seat listening of the best kind; and, in this case, Czinner definitely deserves praise for not only the views of Karajan himself but also the ways in which the camera-work accounts for the many different centers of activity in the pit.

For those that have been discouraged by my account of the overall production, the time code for the beginning of the third act is 2:07:48.