Eliette von Karajan

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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.

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.

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.

In 1955, they met up again in London, by which time she had become smitten with the maestro.

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.

Eliette would explain that the name "Isabel" was in honor of a favourite hotel in Ischia.

Isabel Karajan has subsequently achieved notability as an actress.

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.

The Karajans' younger daughter Arabella was born at Samaden on 2 January 1964.

Arabella was named as a tribute to Strauss' opera Arabella.

The designated godparents of Isabel and Arabella Karajan were respectively the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras.

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.

Von Karajan served as president of the Karajan Foundation Salzburg Easter Festival until 2020 Since then, she has served as honorary president.

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.

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 both photography and fashion shows in many of Europe's competing fashion capitals.