As the story is told in Georg Wübbolt's sweeping yet strangely lightweight documentary Herbert von Karajan: Maestro for the Screen, it was on tour in Japan that Karajan saw the light. Before, the eminent conductor had looked down his nose at television: neither as sound nor as image could the medium do justice to his live performances. But with a series of twelve live broadcasts beginning in Tokyo, he was reaching 18 to 20 million viewers per concert, instead of just the 3,000 listeners in the hall. From then on, Karajan lavished his energies on creating a cinematic legacy the world could never forget. In time he became his own director, and in the end he cofounded his own production company, Telemondial. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," the Roman poet Horace proclaimed, speaking of his collected odes: I have raised a memorial more lasting than brass -- and such was Karajan's aspiration. No statue in a city square, thanks! Just keep spinning those videos.Wübbolt's narrative weaves together archival footage with commentary from a bewildering cast of talking heads, some worshipful, some savage. One calls Karajan power-mad, another thinks of him more innocently as a control freak. One recalls the threat that always got him his way: "In that case, I'm leaving." His generosity and personal loyalty are remembered, along with his icy tyranny. In one surprising clip he entertains his audio crew with a tale of an actor so deep into his movie role as Beethoven that he starts losing his hearing. At least so Karajan has been told by the actor's boastful dad, none other than his distinguished colleague Karl Böhm, which gives the jest its glint of malice. Norio Ohga -- CEO of Sony, creative partner and nonpareil supplier of gadgets -- is a major presence, not least because he was present at the time of the maestro's fatal heart attack.All this passes the time, but the analysis of Karajan's contribution to and impact on the medium of film is less searching than a historically or critically oriented viewer might like. Much of the terrain is familiar: Karajan's ban on beards and bald heads, his obsession with lighting, his practice of rehearsing camera angles with student orchestras and filming to the accompaniment of recorded audio tracks, a mechanical exercise the players of the Berlin Philharmonic found degrading, though they took the money and ran.A segment on Karajan's "apprenticeship" and subsequent falling out with the high-powered French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) is informative, but not so fascinating as the episode involving Hugo Niebeling, who locked horns with Karajan over a film of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral. An artist in his own right, no pushover, Niebeling experimented with soft focus, backlighting, funhouse mirrors, color-coded floors and overhead shots weirdly reminiscent of Busby Berkeley. Unhappy with Niebeling's edit, Karajan made his own. Wübbolt provides an A-B comparison by running the two versions of the same brief sequence side by side. Karajan's -- surprise! -- is the one with the lingering close-ups of the conductor.One doubting Thomas raises a very pertinent question, which applies generally. "What do the visuals have to do with the music?" he asks, just after Wübbolt has shown a passage characterized by cuts of manic swiftness. Even Karajan's most ardent admirers admit that the moving pictures can be a distraction. Chances are Karajan sensed this, too. Still, he kept building his monument."Many great artists die and are dead," one apologist muses near the end of the movie. "Not Karajan. He's with us. He's here." No wonder, then, that Wübbolt gives the undead maestro the last word. "We have many lives," Karajan announces on camera. "I'll be back. Goethe said, 'If my body fails, Nature owes it to me to produce a new one.'" Holy smoke. --Opera News, Matthew Gurewitsch, February 2010Georg Wübbolt's documentary, originally produced for German television, focuses on the conductor Herbert Von Karajan's near-obsession with capturing his work with the Berlin Philharmonic on video.Karajan initially opposed the small screen medium, claiming the visual and audio quality of the 1950s-era television productions could not properly recreate the impact of a concert hall setting. But the popular response to a broadcast of the philharmonic on Japanese television during a 1957 Tokyo engagement and the commercial success experienced by rival conductor Leonard Bernstein via a series of U.S. television programs convinced him otherwise.Karajan's aggressive pursuit of obtaining the proper mix of visual style (particularly images that presented him as a powerful artistic figure) with the philharmonic's musical output seemed to overfeed his ego, and his strident perfectionism resulted in a skein of fractured relationships with filmmakers, most notably French auteur Henri-Georges Clouzot.If Karajan did not score points for congeniality with his cinematic collaborators, at least he managed to create a series of handsomely produced video productions that captured his energy and artistry. Karajan wisely predicted these videos would preserve his legacy - even noting that his perceived artistic foes would only be remembered by reputation because there was no filmed record of their live performances.Wübbolt's production offers a fascinating insight into the creative process, with an unapologetic view of a brilliant but arrogant maestro who reached for greatness while stepping on toes. --IdentityTheory.com, Phil Hall, December 9, 2009Rating: 5 starsKarajan was totally obsessed with videotaping his own musical performances to preserve them for the ages.  The results are the many now-DVDs in the series subtitled "His Legacy For Home Video." He was convinced he was the greatest conductor on earth, and in making these films (mostly with his own money) he felt he was building a monument for future generations to cherish.  This documentary, recently made for German TV, is the story of how Karajan became his own film director.He was a powerful conductor - many Europeans considered him the Music Director of all Europe - but he had a huge ego, was tyrannical, possessive, and as the essay in the printed booklet suggests in its title, a control freak. Among the interviews with players of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, his later cinematographer, his film editor and his personal secretary, are descriptions of what it was like to work with or under him. One could converse with him about other subjects, and he was very helpful with personal concerns of friends and co-workers, but you couldn't suggest anything contrary to his thinking when having anything to do with music. He had a violent temper, and would just say "Then I'll leave." - the most disastrous words to be heard from him.Karajan was a nut about everything technical. He owned and loved fast cars and airplanes, but when TV producers originally talked to him about telecasting his performances he said neither the image nor sound quality were up to his standards. Then the Berlin Philharmonic toured Japan, where they were telecast and seen by three million viewers - when they only reached three thousand in the concert hall. People on the street stopped them afterwards.  Karajan was smitten.  He began a long relationship with Sony - one of their CEOs became a close friend and he had all their latest equipment installed in his home.The videotapes and broadcasts by Leonard Bernstein were another stimulus to Karajan's fixation on recording his own legacy. He considered Bernstein his adversary. Karajan hired such film directors as George Cluzot for his first efforts, but they had a falling out. Among other directors he used one who pulled out all the stops in flashy shots and editing that attempted to visually emulate the structure of the music being played. They did Beethoven's Sixth, and some excerpts are in the documentary - enough to make me want to see the whole thing, but also enough to realize it was way over the top and a distraction from the music performance. However, the reason Karajan blew his stack over the result (and attempted to re-edit it for broadcast) was primarily because it didn't have nearly enough closeups of himself conducting! He even prerecorded performances and shot closeups of himself miming his conducting to cut into the actual performances (which of course all required the players to silently mime their playing to a prerecorded track). After one director pointed out to him it didn't look good in his closeups to always have his eyes shut, the conductor made a strong effort to keep them open more.  He conceived the idea of filming the whole work with cameras first one one side of the hall, and then on another day on the other side of the hall.  His penchant for dramatic backlighting and silhouettes came from his model for the dramatic presentation of classical music - Disney's Fantasia. Those backlit silhouette shots of Stokowski shaking hands with Mickey Mouse evidently really turned him on.As a result of his work with various film and TV directors, as well as his Sony connections, Karajan eventually learned enough about the presentation of classical music via the media that he became his own perfectionist director and controlled every detail of productions from his own Telemondial studio. He built up a library of video presentations of the classics which will continue to enthrall music lovers for generations, with Maestro Karajan as the very obvious star on the screen. Many of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians began to hate the willful conductor towards the end of his very long tenure with them, but on the other hand they loved the money that rolled in for them from the royalties. His editor reveals that after Karajan's death in 1989 he personally destroyed all the original footage at Karajan's orders, so that no one could later re-edit or use it in another presentation.  The documentary doesn't touch on Karajan's past relationships with the National Socialists, but there's plenty of both negative and positive revelations here. There have been other DVD profiles of Karajan, but they didn't concentrate on this important area of his being a pioneer in the visual presentation of classical music on the home screen. --Audiophile Audition, John Sunier, October 22, 2009Rating: 5 stars Karajan was totally obsessed with videotaping his own musical performances to preserve them for the ages.  The results are the many now-DVDs in the series subtitled "His Legacy For Home Video." He was convinced he was the greatest conductor on earth, and in making these films (mostly with his own money) he felt he was building a monument for future generations to cherish.  This documentary, recently made for German TV, is the story of how Karajan became his own film director. He was a powerful conductor - many Europeans considered him the Music Director of all Europe - but he had a huge ego, was tyrannical, possessive, and as the essay in the printed booklet suggests in its title, a control freak. Among the interviews with players of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, his later cinematographer, his film editor and his personal secretary, are descriptions of what it was like to work with or under him. One could converse with him about other subjects, and he was very helpful with personal concerns of friends and co-workers, but you couldn't suggest anything contrary to his thinking when having anything to do with music. He had a violent temper, and would just say "Then I'll leave." - the most disastrous words to be heard from him. Karajan was a nut about everything technical. He owned and loved fast cars and airplanes, but when TV producers originally talked to him about telecasting his performances he said neither the image nor sound quality were up to his standards. Then the Berlin Philharmonic toured Japan, where they were telecast and seen by three million viewers - when they only reached three thousand in the concert hall. People on the street stopped them afterwards.  Karajan was smitten.  He began a long relationship with Sony - one of their CEOs became a close friend and he had all their latest equipment installed in his home.  The videotapes and broadcasts by Leonard Bernstein were another stimulus to Karajan's fixation on recording his own legacy. He considered Bernstein his adversary. Karajan hired such film directors as George Cluzot for his first efforts, but they had a falling out. Among other directors he used one who pulled out all the stops in flashy shots and editing that attempted to visually emulate the structure of the music being played. They did Beethoven's Sixth, and some excerpts are in the documentary - enough to make me want to see the whole thing, but also enough to realize it was way over the top and a distraction from the music performance. However, the reason Karajan blew his stack over the result (and attempted to re-edit it for broadcast) was primarily because it didn't have nearly enough closeups of himself conducting! He even prerecorded performances and shot closeups of himself miming his conducting to cut into the actual performances (which of course all required the players to silently mime their playing to a prerecorded track). After one director pointed out to him it didn't look good in his closeups to always have his eyes shut, the conductor made a strong effort to keep them open more.  He conceived the idea of filming the whole work with cameras first one one side of the hall, and then on another day on the other side of the hall.  His penchant for dramatic backlighting and silhouettes came from his model for the dramatic presentation of classical music - Disney's Fantasia. Those backlit silhouette shots of Stokowski shaking hands with Mickey Mouse evidently really turned him on. As a result of his work with various film and TV directors, as well as his Sony connections, Karajan eventually learned enough about the presentation of classical music via the media that he became his own perfectionist director and controlled every detail of productions from his own Telemondial studio. He built up a library of video presentations of the classics which will continue to enthrall music lovers for generations, with Maestro Karajan as the very obvious star on the screen. Many of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians began to hate the willful conductor towards the end of his very long tenure with them, but on the other hand they loved the money that rolled in for them from the royalties. His editor reveals that after Karajan's death in 1989 he personally destroyed all the original footage at Karajan's orders, so that no one could later re-edit or use it in another presentation.  The documentary doesn't touch on Karajan's past relationships with the National Socialists, but there's plenty of both negative and positive revelations here. There have been other DVD profiles of Karajan, but they didn't concentrate on this important area of his being a pioneer in the visual presentation of classical music on the home screen. --Audiophile Audition, John Sunier, October 22, 2009There is no question that Karajan was a pioneer in filming opera and concert performances, and it is time for a serious assessment of what he accomplished. Unfortunately, this new DVD comes nowhere close to doing what is needed. We get bits of interviews with musicians, filmmakers, critics and executives--much of it at the level of gossip and trivia--but little or no detailed discussion of Karajan's films, and what these films achieved that was important and memorable.The most interesting part of the DVD is an interview with Hugo Niebeling, the director invited by Karajan to film Beethoven's Sixth Symphony in 1968. The film was wildly experimental, and in the end, too much so for Karajan. That experience convinced him that he needed to direct his own films in order to preserve the integrity of the music. But in Wübbolt's DVD this episode is turned around to show how Niebeling's work was trashed by Karajan.There is no doubt that Karajan was an egomaniac passionately committed to building his own legacy. But egomaniacs can be visionaries and great artists.Wübbolt's DVD loses sight of what Karajan's films were all about: great performances of great music, presented in a visual medium using the latest technology--up to 1989--from a conductor's perspective. --La Scena Musicale, Paul E. Robinson, March 2010This is a gossipy kind of film by George Wubbolt that does not get close to Karajan the man or the musician, but does use available footage to examine the weakest, most controversial aspect of his career: his love of the camera. Referring to Karajan, one interviewee in the film remarks, "The first commandment was, every camera on me." Though the kind of exaggeration the conductor stirred regularly, that observation has much more than a grain of truth to it. Actually we Karajan watchers did see some instrumentalists--the double basses, for example--lined up in spot-lit profile like a hand of gin rummy; or in the early days, the entire orchestra arranged in rising triple phalanxes all pointing down to the man on the podium.It was a bit much, as Karajan eventually realized after going through, and picking the brains of, a series of first-rate European film directors like Henri Clouzot and Hugo Niebeling. In fairness to George Wubbolt, the writer and director of this film for European television, Karajan did have a growing belief in the importance of film and television--and he thought of what he was going to leave behind for posterity. Given the current vogue for DVD, which arose after he died in 1989, the conductor certainly has to be given some credit for foresight."All in all, he was an egomaniac", says another interviewee. And that, alas, is essentially the portrait of Karajan that emerges here. His interest in film began, we are told, with concerts in Japan in the 1960s by him and the Berlin Philharmonic. The day after the first concert, he and his players were recognized in the streets. Recalls the maestro: "In Berlin we were playing for 3,000 people. In Japan, we were being seen by 18 to 20 million." Bingo. That did it for Karajan, and he was soon beginning to learn a new art form, just as in the days at the end of World War II and thereafter (this is not mentioned by Wubbolt) he went to work learning half a dozen new languages because he wanted to be prepared for the international career he knew lay ahead.That does not sound like an egomaniac, just someone who was ready to work hard all his life. A control freak, perhaps. At one point in his film days, contends Concertmaster Thomas Brandis, "Karajan was given a toy control panel to fiddle with." That sounds thoroughly apocryphal. Karajan was no fool. Besides, the same story used to be told about Leopold Stokowski back in the 1930s. At the end of his film Wubbolt does lighten his portrait by establishing Karajan's essential kindness to people who worked for him or whom he could trust, including paying for some of their operations. But, like all perfectionists, Karajan did have his lapses. With the cameras rolling, says Brandis, "Beards were absolutely forbidden. Colleagues who were more or less bald had to wear wigs."For a more fully rounded film portrait one should turn to Robert Dornhelm's DVD Karajan, or Beauty as I See It on DG 0734392 (S/O 2008). In his review Stephen Chakwin observed that Dornhelm had created "a fine look into Karajan the musician and the man", and added: "Karajan, more than any classical performer I know of, has become a kind of screen where people project all sorts of things." Well said. Karajan, for example, was thought tyrannical and cruel because of his high standards and impatience with mediocrity. But he'd had his fill of the compromising, back-biting, and politics he had encountered at Europe's great opera houses, like La Scala and Vienna. And so he built his own opera company at Salzburg, to run at Easter time. There was politics there, to be sure, but very little compromising with Karajan the impresario. --American Record Guide, William Bender, March/April 2010