Opera: Carry On, Karajan

"I cannot attain a really deep expression of a work," says European Conductor Herbert von Karajan, 58, "when someone stages it who does not see with my eyes, hear with my ears, and have my own heart." Which leaves only one man who can meet Karajan's standards for a director of any opera that he conducts: Karajan himself. And so, for the production of Wagner's Die Walküre last week at Salzburg's new Easter Festival, Karajan had no trouble getting both assignments. After all, the creator, financial wizard and guiding spirit of the entire festival was Karajan.

The sellout opening-night crowd of 2,000 agreed that Karajan's confidence in Karajan was justified. Director Karajan swept away the clumping athletics and far-out allegory of most recent Walküres. If what was left was often static staging, it was well coordinated with the music, which Conductor Karajan molded superbly. He toned down the singers' usual tendency to bellow and brought out a fresh quality of refinement through subtly shaded dynamics and sensitively modeled phrases. "Chamber music of the soul," rhapsodized one critic, while others looked ahead to the addition of Das Rheingold next year, Siegfried in 1969 and Götterdämmerung in 1970.

Not a Groschen. The festival is the fruition of a decades-old urge of Karajan's to present Wagner's great cycle with absolute control over all the elements—a Ring that he could wrap around his little finger. His home town of Salzburg was the obvious setting, with its magnificent Festspielhaus. But Karajan was unwilling to ask the Austrian government for a single groschen of the customary state financial support; his official relations have been strained since 1964, when he quit as director of the Vienna State Opera because of "bureaucratic interference."

Instead, Karajan, who knows his way around a balance sheet as well as a musical score, plugged his festival into the free-spending electronic media. He recorded and released his version of Walküre before the festival performance, brought in a TV production firm—in which he is a major stockholder—to film the festival for worldwide distribution, and lined up more than 20 radio networks. These tie-ins enabled him to sign such top singers as Jon Vickers and Régine Crespin, and he even persuaded the Berlin senate to let the city's famed Philharmonic make its first appearance in an opera pit.

Like any canny producer, Karajan will also take his success on the road. Next fall, the festival production of Walküre, with Karajan on the podium, will play before American audiences at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera.