Eliette von Karajan

Biography

Eliette von Karajan (née Mouret; born 13 August 1932) is a former French fashion model, first discovered by Christian Dior when she was 18. She is also known as the wife of conductor Herbert von Karajan. As a widow, she is a prominent patron of the arts and a promoter of her deceased husband's artistic legacy. She has established several artistic foundations and institutes. Von Karajan served as president of the Karajan Foundation Salzburg Easter Festival until 2020. Since then, she has served as honorary president.

== Life ==

=== Provence and early years === Eliette Mouret was born in Mollans-sur-Ouvèze, where her parents, both teachers, owned a holiday home. She had one sibling, a sister who was twenty years her senior. While Mouret was quite young, her father died. In a later interview she stated that her mother "was a teacher with a passion for playing the piano, but no time for me. I ended up with a 'foster mother'". Mouret attended a boarding school run by nuns and grew up in Nice.

=== Karajan === Mouret was discovered by Christian Dior when she was eighteen years old. Then, she became known for her long legs, modeling Dior's haute couture creations in photography and fashion shows in many of Europe's competing fashion capitals. In the early 1950s, she first met Herbert von Karajan on a friend's yacht at Saint-Tropez. She was reportedly seventeen at the time, though according to one biographer, "like many very beautiful women ... [she] was seventeen for an awfully long time". On this occasion, the smell of frying fish triggered her recurrent seasickness, and she had to be escorted ashore; Herbert von Karajan volunteered for the task. In 1955, they met up again in London, by which time she had become obsessed with the maestro. During the early 1950s, she began to accompany him on visits to Ischia, where they would meet up with friends and fellow musicians including William Walton and his wife. Lady Walton's later recalled from those visits to the Bay of Naples, Karajan and Mouret sharing a Vespa, with Mouret sitting side-saddle on the back as they scootered back and forth across the island. Herbert, still married to Anita von Karajan at the time, divorced her in 1958; he and Eliette Mouret then married at Megève on 6 October 1958. This marked the end of her career as a fashion model and the beginning of her life as a "jet-set wife" and, a few years later, mother. She was the third of Karajan's three wives, and they would remain married for thirty-one years, until his death. The couple's elder daughter, Isabel, was born on 25 June 1960 in Vienna. Isabel Karajan has subsequently achieved notability as an actress. The Karajans' younger daughter Arabella was born at Samaden on 2 January 1964. The designated godparents of Isabel and Arabella Karajan were, respectively, the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras.

=== Working marriage ===

Over the next three decades Eliette von Karajan constantly accompanied her husband, matching his program of travel and performances and attempting to shield him, as far as possible, from some of the more oppressive aspects of celebrity. Karajan valued his wife's musical judgment because she was neither a trained musician nor a professional musicologist; as a "mere music lover" he knew that she was more representative of concertgoers and record buyers than pundits or professional rivals. She alone sat with him through waits behind the curtain, as he studied a score and arranged for her to have a foot massage, before he headed out towards the podium, and she rushed to take her place in the audience. A pattern was quickly established, and, as their marriage reached a third decade, some commentators suggested that there was an element of careful choreography in the way the Karajans presented a public face of their intense partnership. Between concerts, Karajan attended her husband's orchestral rehearsals. The Karajans were part of a network of cerebral artist-celebrities, and their friends included Jean Cocteau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Helmut Schmidt, Marc Chagall, and the actress Romy Schneider, with whom Eliette supposedly liked to flirt. However, relations cooled after Schneider, while staying as a house guest, used lipstick to scrawl graffiti all over the large mirror in the bathroom. It was "very awkward for my staff", Eliette later recalled. Much of the couple's married life was spent traveling in connection with Herbert von Karajan's work. From around 1961, when they did come home, it was to St. Moritz (in Winter), Saint-Tropez (in Summer) or Karajan's small estate at Anif, on the southern edge of Salzburg. In each of these municipalities they lived in some style, supported by staffs of domestic servants. Since she was widowed in 1989, Eliette von Karajan has reduced her travelling and for the most part simply alternated between living at the homes the couple had shared at Saint-Tropez and Anif.

=== Painting ===

While still working as a professional fashion model, Eliette Mouret enrolled briefly at an art academy in London. Professional pressures, followed by a full-time marriage accompanied by motherhood, led to her never finishing the course. However, after a visit to the "Visuals Academy" (Internationale Sommer Akademie für Bildenden Künste) set up in Switzerland by Oskar Kokoschka, she returned to her art. She was supported by several famous of the time who were also friends. These included late surrealists such as Ernst Fuchs, Jörg Immendorff and Marc Chagall whom she visited frequently at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Her teacher, the painter Herbert Breiter, was also a very important artistic influence. Her husband was particularly enthusiastic about Eliette's emergence as an artist. Till 1982, Eliette's art remained an entirely private passion. Then, a series of her paintings were featured on record sleeves (with more in a separate accompanying supplement) for a special anniversary collection of Karajan recordings issued to celebrate the centenary of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestras (of which Herbert von Karajan had been principal conductor since 1956). The entire set, which had originally comprised 50 LP discs, was re-issued on 5 April 1988 as a set of 25 CDs to mark Herbert's eightieth birthday.