Herbert von Karajan: The Maestro Behind the Music and the Myths

On 2 July 1914, six-year-old Heribert Karajan and his two-year-old brother Wolfgang watched the Austro-Hungarian battleship Viribus Unitis make its way, escorted by destroyers, through the narrow Fažana Channel, near the small island where they were holidaying with their mother Martha. The funeral convoy carrying the bodies of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, who had been killed four days earlier in Sarajevo, was bound for Trieste. There they were to be transferred to a royal train for their final journey to Vienna.

Karajan later recalled that his uncle, seeing all these ships, muttered, “Now there will be war.” This was a decisive moment for the young Heribert, whose life and career would be closely linked to subsequent political events – the collapse of the imperial Austro-Hungarian Empire, the rise of Nazism, the birth of the cult of the “great conductor”, the Second World War, post-war tensions and the democratisation of Germany, and, in the last years of Karajan’s life, his ongoing preoccupation with the Nazi era.

The famous conductor Herbert von Karajan is regarded as a controversial figure of the 20th century who cannot be fully understood. There are many legendary anecdotes that illustrate his undoubtedly enormous ego. In one of them, Karajan gets into a waiting limousine in Vienna and the driver asks him where he wants to go. “It doesn’t matter,” he replies, “I am wanted everywhere.”

He was often accused of vanity and excessive perfectionism, and his opponents described him with words such as pathetic interpreter, despotic master of his ambitions and even Nazi conductor. These descriptions are in profound contrast to the image still given by his admirers. Karajan is said to have been a shy man, often lonely, a born teacher, deeply loyal to his closest colleagues and often very amusing. He remains an iconic figure for a wider musical audience, who took classical music to all corners of the globe.

The sound he created with the Berlin Philharmonic lives on today. Herbert von Karajan made the orchestra sound like one big instrument, and this incredible and classical “Berlin sound” with von Karajan at the helm makes many people’s breath catch when they listen to his recordings.

Early years

Heribert Ritter von Karajan was born on 5 April 1908 in Salzburg, Mozart’s hometown, in what was then Austria-Hungary. On his mother’s side he was of Slovenian descent, his mother being Marta Kosmač and his father Mihael born in Mojstrana. Heribert had Greek roots on his father’s side, probably also Welsh. His great-great-grandfather Georgios Karagiannis was born in Kozani, Greece, and moved to Vienna in 1767. Later, when he lived in Saxony and became a nobleman, he changed his surname to von Karajan.

Little Heribert was an extremely shy child, which he may have inherited from his mother. Martha von Karajan was also of a reserved nature, although this was probably more a matter of social conditioning than private temperament. She came from a good family, although much less distinguished than the von Karajans, and her role was that of wife and mother, which she performed with untiring efficiency. Heribert’s piano teacher, Franz Ledwinka, described her as ‘loving, good and charming’. Heribert himself later said that she would have been happy to look after the whole world.

Ernst von Karajan, Heribert’s father, was a surgeon with a genuine sense of human need. As a doctor, he specialised in the treatment of galls, a thyroid swelling in the throat that was common at the time, especially in some rural areas. He was a kind but serious man. With gentle firmness, he was both a reprimand to his son’s wild adolescent years and a guide in his more mature years.

The Karajans’ home was steeped in music, as they had two pianos and an accordion in the house. Ernst’s father played the piano and – the real joy of his life – the clarinet. He brought both his sons into the circle of his musical creativity. The young Heribert, who took great pride in playing music together, played Mozart’s piano concertos at musical evenings, while his teacher Franz Ledwinka complemented the wind parts on the harmonium. Unlike her husband and her two sons, Marta had no practical musical knowledge, but there is no doubt that she was “intuitively” musical, with a deep passion for music, especially the works of Wagner.

Karajan told an early biographer that neither he nor his brother Wolfgang had close contact with their parents, but this is hard to believe. Heribert was indeed born at a time when parents had great authority and a certain distance from their children, but with his mother the problem was the other way round. She devoted her whole life to her family, but she counteracted this dedication with emotional demands on those she cared for.

As a boy, Heribert, who loved the mountains, fell on Salzburg’s Kapuzinerberg hill, injuring his back and breaking his leg. His mother was relieved to see her son on a stretcher, relieved that it was not worse, and happy to think that he would be housebound for a few weeks. This possessiveness irritated Heribert and complicated his relationship with his mother.

Ernst von Karajan was particularly impatient with his son’s absent-minded handling of his personal property. Throughout his life, Heribert was prone to losing things and could not clearly explain their loss. He lost sunglasses, watches, shoes, sometimes even trousers. In his childhood, it was umbrellas, which were not the best thing to lose in Salzburg. When Heribert asked for another umbrella, his father smiled, made a cross over the spare umbrella and muttered, “Schon verloren (already lost).”

When he wasn’t operating, making music or buying umbrellas, Ernst and his family spent their time in a villa at the western end of Grundlsee, a remote and still largely unspoilt lake in the mountains sixty kilometres east of Salzburg. There they walked around the lake, sailing, climbing and skiing. The young Heribert, who hated city life, found it idyllic, and even in his later years he often retreated to the mountains for solitude.

The child prodigy on the piano

The first memory Karajan regularly referred to was his hiding behind the curtains, jealously listening to his brother’s piano lessons. Heribert began piano lessons at the age of three and, as a four-year-old, he was already playing four- and eight-hand arrangements of symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven and Mendelssohn with his aunts, his father’s sisters, occasionally complaining about the arthritic fingers of the “old ladies” (both in their fifties) and their careful tempo.

In any case, he was well enough to play in public and in 1912, in a Salzburg restaurant, he impressed a charity audience with a skilful performance of Mozart’s Rondo. The fact that he quickly overtook his brother as a pianist, which led Wolfi, as the elder son was called at home, to take up the violin, was both a blessing and a curse.

For Heribert was not only talented, he was exceptionally talented, with all the stress that such talent entails – the isolation of a child in the family circle resulting from the burdensome pressures of daily practice. Karajan claimed that as a child he practised for four hours a day, even during school hours. This was also confirmed by the boy’s nanny, Anna.

While Wolfgang – cheerful, extroverted and enthusiastic about science – often turned the house upside down with his games and scientific experiments, Heribert was more serious and silent. “He was not a problem in the house,” said Anna. “He played the piano all the time. Outside the house it was different.”

At school, the young Karajan was a good all-round student, although he had to put a lot of effort into his schoolwork because of the extra strain that music brought. He was small in stature, but surprisingly excelled in most sports, even being the goalkeeper of the school football team.

A child prodigy, with virtuoso piano skills from an early age, he was admitted to study music at the Salzburg Mozarteum in 1916. Heribert studied piano with Franz Ledwinke, harmony with Franz Sauer and composition and chamber music with Bernhard Paumgartner. As their rising star, he regularly appeared in a special concert on Mozart’s birthday, which was staged every year around 27 January.

Paumgartner took the young Karajan to orchestral rehearsals with him and let him sit next to him so that the boy could imagine what it was like to conduct. He recognised Heribert’s exceptional talent and encouraged him to devote himself to conducting.

In the meantime, Heribert von Karajan changed his name. First, he dropped the “von”, which had been banned in April 1919 by the purge of imperial titles in the new post-war Austrian constitution, and then, because of his youthful shyness, he began to sign his name as Herbert Karajan and dropped the name Heribert because it seemed outdated to him.

In May 1921, a plebiscite was held in the province of Salzburg. All the main political parties were in favour of the “Anschluss” and the vote was overwhelmingly positive. However, this was only a political gesture and the federal government took the precautionary measure of declaring the plebiscite illegal. What did the teenage Karajan think of all this?

He was a conservative by nature, and as such he too supported the reunification of Austria with Germany. Part of this evidence is to be found in the registration form he filled in each year for the philosophy faculty of the University of Vienna, under whose auspices he studied. In addition to information on age, nationality and place of birth, the form also required a declaration of national origin. Almost without exception, Karajan’s classmates answered the question directly: the Austrians wrote Austrian, the Swiss Swiss Swiss, the Jews Jew.

The Salzburg-born Karajan described himself as an “Aryan German”, which is a rather provocative description, as it is quickly understood that he is an anti-Semite. If Karajan held such views, he kept them to himself. During his stay in Vienna he had Jewish friends, supported Bolshevik theatre groups, played jazz and dabbled in all kinds of “degenerate” art.

Herbert’s horizons were constantly expanding. Because of his father’s position, the family suffered few of the financial problems that plagued many less fortunate Austrian families in the years immediately following the political collapse of the country at the end of the Great War. In the summer of 1924, the year of Wolfgang’s eighteenth birthday, the two boys were sent to London for three months to learn English.

The Vienna years

After graduating from the Conservatoire, the eighteen-year-old Herbert went to Vienna. A career in music was obviously questionable, so he studied at the Vienna Technical College from 1926 to 1928.

Despite his studies at the technical college, music, his dream, triumphed and he enrolled as a conducting student at the Vienna Academy of Music in the classes of Clemens Krauss and Alexander Wunderer. One of Herbert’s landladies in Vienna recalls that he spent many hours in front of the radiogram, listening to records and conducting. When she once asked him what exactly he was doing, he replied, “I am practising. One day I will be a very famous conductor.”

In later years, Karajan repeatedly explained why he had exchanged the piano for conducting. One of them was that his Viennese piano teachers Josef Hofmann and Bernhard Paumgartner had advised him to take up conducting studies and that he would not be satisfied with piano alone.

In any case, at the age of 16 he was already playing some quite demanding pieces. At a concert at the Mozarteum on 5 March 1925 he gave a fiery performance of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto. The following year he played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 and Panto Vladigerov‘s First Piano Concerto, an extremely demanding work which he reportedly learned in a fortnight.

Although Karajan studied various subjects at the Academy of Music, he immediately enrolled to study conducting. Unfortunately, there was no conductor to teach him; perhaps this was Vienna’s way of saying that conductors are born, not made. Karajan’s teacher in the conducting class was the versatile Alexander Wunderer, the 49-year-old principal oboist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and from 1923 to 1932 the orchestra’s leader.

The young student Karajan did not have much of a social life in Vienna. His classmates recall that he was more or less completely occupied with music and the theatre. He would eat a quick sandwich in the canteen, rarely chat briefly and disappear to rehearsals or the next event in his busy calendar.

The graduation concert with the student orchestra at the end of his conducting studies took place on 17 December 1928, after which Karajan had just enough time to pack his things and return to Salzburg for Christmas, where he had to prepare for his first public solo performance as a conductor. He made his official debut at the Salzburg Festspielhaus on 22 January 1929, conducting Richard Strauss‘s Salome to great acclaim. His father bought him a Harley-Davidson motorbike as a present.

Selected friends from the orchestra had a look at this mechanical marvel, and then Herbert jumped on and roared through the streets of Salzburg “like a hussar leading his cavalry in a charge”.

The Karajans and their circle of friends made sure that the concert was well attended. Regional Governor Rehrl, President of the Salzburg Festival, was given a seat of honour. He was so impressed by the concert that he called the young man and put a laurel wreath around his neck. The young Herbert’s debut performance also attracted the attention of the General Director of the Ulm City Theatre, Erwin Dieterich, which led to Karajan’s appointment as Deputy Orchestra Manager of the theatre. His senior colleague in Ulm was Otto Schulmann.

Around the same time Karajan heard Arturo Toscanini for the first time, an experience that left a lasting mark on the young Herbert’s conducting style. One day, wishing to see the great maestro, he is said to have got on his motorbike and travelled 300 kilometres to Bayreuth, where Toscanini made his debut in a long-awaited new production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser.

The young deputy leader of the Ulm orchestra

For the 1929/30 season Karajan was entrusted with five operas in Ulm, a significant proportion of the opera programme. Nevertheless, his salary in Ulm was modest. The members of the Ulm Theatre Orchestra earned just over RM 240 per month, but Karajan’s salary was a meagre RM 80, which was only enough for food and lodging and fuel for his Harley. He lived frugally, spending almost nothing on clothes. Eventually, he asked for a raise, helped by the generous lobbying of the orchestra. Dieterich was not impressed: “You’ve got to be joking! He’s our apprentice. He should be paying us for everything he learns here.”

The Director General was right. For the first – and certainly not the last – time in his life, Karajan was working under conditions more or less of his own choosing. True, he was paid next to nothing, but he was able to learn the craft of an opera conductor: not only conducting and training the chorus, but also lighting, stage design, stage management, finance, administration and publicity.

The International Summer School in Salzburg was a wonderful event for the young Karajan. He was born to play music, but also to teach, as his genius for accompaniment testifies. Already in the summer of 1929, just a few months after his professional debut, he was already giving courses for conductors and solo instrumentalists.

Karajan began conducting without a score – a hallmark of the short-sighted Toscanini – and during a performance of Cavalleria rusticana suffered a complete fiasco, as the tenor singing Turiddu entered forty bars too early. Nevertheless, Dieterich was happy to renew the contract of his young deputy orchestra leader at the end of the 1929/30 season.

In the 1931/32 season Karajan gave his first concert performance in Ulm. Money was tight, schedules were packed and the orchestra was unfamiliar with non-operatic repertoire. Finding a suitable venue was also a problem, so an improvised stage was created. The concert was a success despite the initial difficulties. “One was pleasantly surprised when listening to it”, reported the Schwabischer Volksbote, a respected newspaper from Ulm.

Karajan’s next concert with the opera orchestra took place on 22 February 1933. The orchestra, as Karajan later told his parents, played with ‘incredible intensity. When it was all over, the audience sat as if riveted for ten seconds and then cheered as if at a football match.”

In March 1933, at the end of the winter season, the Ulm City Theatre was in ruins. The opera company was already living hand-to-mouth amidst the political uncertainty and falling subsidies that theatre companies and opera houses had been living on since the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Dieterich had cut seat prices by five percent to keep audiences, who were increasingly financially strained.

Dieterich’s job was threatened after Hitler’s rise to power, as in April 1933 the Third Reich passed a law reinstating the status of civil servant, under which all Jews were dismissed from public service without severance pay. All artists had to register with the Reich Chamber of Culture, set up by Goebbels, and thousands of musicians from orchestras and opera houses and music teachers were thrown out on the street and replaced by second-class amateur musicians. Within weeks, opera directors in Berlin, Breslau, Chemnitz, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Leipzig and Mannheim were sacked.

Negotiations about Dieterich’s future and the future of the orchestra dragged on and Schulmann’s successor as first conductor, who was immediately sidelined, was also unclear. In the first week of April 1933, there was a very good chance that Karajan would soon join the slightly less than 24,000 German musicians who were officially on the unemployment list.

When looking for a new job, Karajan informed his parents that he would not apply for the vacancy at the Vienna Volksoper. “Until now,” he wrote, “it was just a theatre on the periphery and without a reputation.” He added: “Besides, it seems that all of Palestine is gathering there.”

Old worries resurfaced in the Karajan family. Wasn’t the crisis in Ulm exactly what Herbert’s parents had warned him about when he decided to put everything on the line for a career in music?

Joining the Nazi Party

In the years after Hitler came to power in 1933, he managed to deliver on his promise to revive the German economy, and the high level of public support allowed him to obfuscate his broader plans, or at least to provide the conditions (both favourable circumstances and intimidation) in which a large part of the German-speaking population was swept up in a strange, even cult-like sense of national euphoria, and were likely to turn a blind eye to the horrors that most of them knew, or even suspected, were already taking place.

Despite the fact that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was at the forefront of the Nazi programme, few people in this period believed that their country would seriously undertake the mass extermination of an entire race.

It is difficult to guess where exactly Herbert von Karajan (the title “von” was not forbidden in Germany) found himself in this scenario, but who can doubt that Karajan and his contemporaries, at the time he joined the party, had more than a hunch that all was not well in Germany.

In the post-war period, Karajan kept quiet about his membership of the Nazi Party, which has led to many conflicting stories about it. His apparent indifference to the dark clouds of the Third Reich, despite his moral compass, fuelled the anger of some of his harshest critics, and the ghost of his party past haunted him until his death.

One version has it that Herbert von Karajan tried to join the NSDAP on 8 April 1933, the day after the law reintroducing the status of civil servant was passed, because of the changing political climate and the destabilisation of his position, as is also recorded in a surviving report in one of the Nazi Party files. Herbert Klein, the party secretary, received five shillings from Karajan as a membership fee. Klein sent him a duly endorsed registration form, which Karajan did not return and thus did not collect his membership card. His membership was thus declared invalid.

Otto Schulmann was forced to leave Germany in 1933 due to the Nazis coming to power and after a few uncertain weeks Herbert Karajan was promoted to orchestra leader. Opportunities for the young newcomer were plentiful, as well-known conductors such as Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were Jewish and forced into exile. Of the artists who remained, only Wilhelm Furtwängler enjoyed international renown, and he considered every other conductor a threat, and the handsome young virtuoso the greatest threat, and therefore constantly schemed against him.

That same year Herbert von Karajan made his debut at the Salzburg Festival, the most prestigious musical event in Austria, with Max Reinhardt‘s Valpurga’s Night from Faust. The following year, also in Salzburg, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time.

He remained in Ulm until 1934, when he was appointed the youngest orchestra leader at the Aachen Opera House, where he conducted operatic and symphonic concerts between 1934 and 1941. At that time he also conducted occasionally at the Berlin State Opera.

How the young conductor came into contact with the artistic director of the Aachen theatre, Edgar Gross, a member of the SS, in 1934 is a big question, but it is clear that Karajan had considerable support from “above”. He hired as his concert agent the ruthless and self-important SS man Rudolf Vedder, a close friend of Himmler’s, and at the age of 27 he was paid a salary that exceeded that of the Mayor of Aachen himself. Not surprisingly, after the war Herbert carefully destroyed all traces of his involvement in such “interesting” acquaintanceships.

Surviving documents show that Herbert von Karajan rejoined the Nazi Party in Aachen in March 1935. After the war, he explained that he had done so at the request of the Nazi administrative authorities in Aachen. Membership of the NSDAP was a prerequisite for launching his career, and shortly afterwards Karajan became Germany’s youngest Director-General of Music. As a guest conductor he appeared in Bucharest, Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris.

There is no evidence that Herbert von Karajan ever used his membership for anything other than a means of advancing his career and job security. In this case, as a very young career starter, party membership was essential to keep his job at all, although there seems to be no doubt that the impeccably educated von Karajan saw in Hitler’s projection of power something to be admired. Party membership also enabled him to travel unrestrictedly around his homeland.

Although Karajan always claimed later that he had joined the NSDAP purely out of ambitious opportunism rather than ideology, throughout the Nazi period he did not hesitate to open his concerts with the Nazi anthem Horst-Wessel-Lied, even in occupied countries. In Paris, he is bitterly remembered for having opened an evening at the opera with this infamous song of the Nazi party.

Career under Nazism

Although von Karajan never got involved in explicitly political matters, he lent his talent and reputation to the Nazi Party and benefited from it during the reorganisation of the musical world under Hitler. It is well known that Richard Strauss was sacked for defending a Jewish librettist, which gave Peter Raabe a job, and von Karajan was able to take Raabe’s place at the Aachen Opera.

In 1938, the same year that Hitler’s Germany annexed Austria, the 30-year-old conductor from Salzburg led the Berlin State Opera in a production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The performance was spectacular and Herbert von Karajan was hailed as a marvel (“Das Wunder Karajan”). A Berlin critic wrote that Karajan’s “success with Wagner’s demanding work has placed him alongside Wilhelm Furtwängler and Victor de Sabata, the two greatest opera conductors in Germany at the moment”.

On 26 July 1938, Herbert von Karajan married Elmy Holgerloef, a graceful operetta singer with whom he had collaborated on several occasions, but the marital idyll did not last long. The war and Karajan’s attempts to keep his positions in Aachen and Berlin at the same time led to a divorce.

Shortly after his marriage, Karajan signed a lucrative contract with Deutsche Grammophon and made the first of some 100 recordings, conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle in the overture to The Magic Flute. By the end of his life, two hundred million recordings of his performances of classical music had been sold.

Karajan’s name was included in Goebbels’ list of musicians “blessed by God” and he was well on his way to becoming one of the leading musicians of the Third Reich. But even the “miracle” conductor was not immune to Firer’s proverbial fickle affections.

There was no conductor in all of Nazi Germany as promising as Karajan, and only Furtwängler’s prestige stood between Karajan and his complete success. The only laurel missing from his brilliant and meteoric rise was directing the Bayreuth Festival, the most transcendental musical event in Nazi Germany, a festival conceived and encouraged by Wagner himself with the idea of presenting his works, especially Parsifal and the Ring of the Nibelung tetralogy.

In 1939, Karajan experienced great embarrassment during a performance of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, which he conducted without a score, in an attempt to demonstrate his great professional skill. A slip of memory caused him to lose his way, which led to confusion among the singers. The performance stopped and the curtain came down. Adolf Hitler, who was in the audience, took this as a personal insult and greeted the young, famous conductor and director with contempt. Furious, he ordered that Karajan should not conduct at the annual festival of Wagner’s works in Bayreuth as long as he, the führer, lived.

A favourite of Hermann Göring, Karajan continued as conductor of the Staatskapelle until 1945, conducting some 150 operas.

In 1942, his contract in Aachen was terminated because the opera house needed more than a part-time music director.

For a conductor of exceptional talent, there was a lull of several months. His second marriage to Anita Gütermann, heiress to a textile fortune, who was burdened with a Jewish grandfather, and the prosecution of his agent Rudolf Vedder, who was accused of fraud and had his agent’s licence revoked, contributed to his temporary professional decline, and Karajan had few commitments as a result.

In 1944, Herbert von Karajan lost most of the goodwill of the Nazi leadership, according to his own words, but in February 1945 he was still giving concerts in wartime Berlin. Shortly afterwards, in the final stages of the war, he and his wife fled Germany for Italy, where they hid in anguish, first in a friend’s apartment in Milan and then on the shores of Lake Como.

The post-war years

In 1946, Herbert von Karajan gave his first post-war concert in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic, but shortly afterwards the Soviet occupation authorities banned him from public performance because of his association with the Nazi Party.

But what threatened his career as a conductor in the Third Reich, he saved in the post-war years. Being out of favour with Hitler worked in his favour, as did his marriage to Anita Gutermann, who had Jewish roots. By 1947 all the bans had been lifted and he was free to perform and conduct as he wished, although the stigma of being a Nazi sympathiser remained part of his musical life.

Shortly afterwards, the English music producer Walter Legge listened to Karajan during rehearsals of the Vienna Philharmonic and immediately signed him to an exclusive contract with EMI.

The hugely influential Legge, who also led London’s newest Philharmonia Orchestra, was looking for a young, vital conductor who could polish this as-yet-untapped ensemble. Unlike many of his colleagues, Legge was also indifferent to Karajan’s Nazi past, and a series of recordings emerged that made the Austrian conductor an international star, while giving him the negotiating advantages he needed to take the reins of his professional life.

In 1949 Karajan became artistic director of the Friends of Music in Vienna.

He also conducted at La Scala Opera in Milan, but his most important work during this period was as conductor of the newly founded Philharmonia Orchestra in London, which he helped to make one of the world’s finest orchestras.

Although his egotism and ambition were no secret, his political convictions were sufficiently obscure for the post-war music world to look away. Karajan took part in many renowned musical events, such as the festivals in Lucerne, Salzburg and Bayreuth.

After the death of Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1954, he was appointed lifetime director of the Berlin Philharmonic, which was one of his conditions. The “Sun King of international musical life”, as the music director was derisively called by many critics, was finally at the helm of this orchestra, whose leadership had always been one of his greatest ambitions.

In 1955, Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic embarked on the first post-war American concert tour. Before they arrived in New York, however, a storm of protests broke out. Hundreds of musicians signed a petition to ban the Carnegie Hall performance, and Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of America’s most famous orchestras, refused to shake the hand of his European counterpart.

Karajan toured all over the world, but despite his worldwide fame and the affection of a “forgetful” public, some prominent Jewish musicians, such as Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman, refused to forget his past and permanently refused to give concerts with the Austrian maestro because of his association with the Nazis.

Between 1957 and 1964 he took over the artistic direction of the Vienna State Opera.

In order to expand the programme of the Salzburg Summer Festival, Karajan founded the Easter Festival in 1967 in Mozart’s city, which still offers both opera performances and classical music concerts.

West Berlin, Vienna and his native Salzburg remained the foundations on which his mature career rested, although in all three cities he was opposed for his authoritarianism and excessive demands. He was often virtually alone in deciding on ensembles and other personnel issues in many of the major music houses in Europe, so it is not surprising that the music public half-jokingly referred to him as the “General Musical Director of Europe”.

Despite his collaboration with a wide variety of musical institutions, the Berlin Philharmonic has always been at the centre of his musical activity, although after 1982 he became estranged from the members of its orchestra due to disputes.

Karajan performed much of the standard operatic repertoire and most of the 19th century classics, as well as music by Bach, Mozart and Haydn. He also regularly conducted selected works by 20th century composers including Bartok, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Sibelius, and performed the more popular works of Debussy and Ravel. Over time, he learned to perform these non-German works so convincingly and in the original spirit of the composers that he received much praise from professional music circles and achieved legendary fame for this stylistic achievement, which was unmatched by any other Austro-German conductor of his generation.

Although he was able to deliver first-class performances for the rest of his life, Karajan became very volatile in his last years, as chronic ill-health followed him virtually without interruption. In his last years, he suffered from heart problems and worsening back pain, the result of a childhood injury. He was increasingly in conflict with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the West Berliner Board over his rights and obligations, and was also accused of an old-fashioned dictatorial style of management. A few months before his death, he finally resigned as director of the institution.

One of the richest and most famous conductors in the world, he died of a heart attack on 16 July 1989 at the age of 81.

On the road to fame and fortune

Karajan complemented his glamorous image on the conducting podium with a lavish lifestyle, and he undoubtedly enjoyed his media image as well. What the public saw was sincere, as the star maestro truly participated in and even excelled at all the activities he so openly shared with the camera.

He broke the mould of the ossified Germanic music conductors – he wore high-collared jumpers from renowned fashion designers, his hair was elegantly styled. In the little spare time he had, he indulged himself in the life of a plebe, applying the same high standards he demanded in the concert hall. After the concert he drove off in his elegant Porsche, and when he steered his yacht, he did so with skill as a soloist in his own concert, responding with delicate precision to the waves of the sea.

His lifelong commitment to the principles of Zen helped him to reach higher planes of existence, whether he was scuba diving, mountain climbing, racing fast cars or piloting a jet plane. He was seeking the same kind of perfection as when he held the baton. His hobbies and passions were as genuine as his exceptional musical talent. Like a true sportsman, he took them on with ease and achieved remarkable skill in all of them.

Karajan, who had been sailing from a young age, bought his first sailing boat, Karajanides, shortly after his marriage to Elmy in 1938. In 1967, the first Helisara was launched and the name of the boat was an abbreviation of (H)erbert, (El)iette, (Is)abel and (Ara)bel. Five more boats bore this name, and eventually he owned the racing boat Helisara VI. With this boat, which was 79 metres long, 17 metres wide and had a mast 98 metres high, the Austrian star maestro won several regattas.

The outstanding Austrian conductor had already taken part in private car races before the war, where, according to his first wife Elmy, he raced like the famous German racing driver Caracciola. His garage was home to cars from prestigious marques such as Mercedes, Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Audi and, of course, Porsche. In general, Herbert favoured sports cars capable of high speeds, so it is not surprising that he signed a special contract with the German manufacturer Porsche to test new models.

Not all his friends and colleagues shared his great passion for speed. Mstislav Rostropovich in particular, for example, was very afraid of his driving style. Once, sitting with Karajan in the same car, hurtling down winding mountain slopes as if he were driving on a straight highway, the famous cellist remarked in horror, with his hands raised: “Herbert, I don’t mind dying. But please leave the slightest chance for the undertakers to separate our bones.”

Even as the world was recovering from the Second World War, Karajan was following his passion for aviation and pursuing his dream in Switzerland. In post-war Germany, the Allies ordered a ban on private aviation, so he moved to Ascona for a while to take private flying lessons at a small abandoned airport and to obtain his private pilot’s licence.

From 1952 he piloted his own aircraft – first a Cessna. Later he owned six aircraft, including a twin-turboprop Beechcraft and two jets, a Lear jet and a Falcon, which he developed speeds of up to 900 kilometres per hour. In 1982, at the age of 74, when he was approaching the upper age limit for jet flying, he took up the challenge of learning to fly a helicopter. He scored 93 points on the test, four points less than his personal professional pilot.

Since in his most active years he had chosen to live in Anif, just outside his native Salzburg, he had to commute regularly to Berlin to fulfil his Philharmonic duties, so he travelled between the two cities in his own twin-engine aircraft.

In his later years, he also lived in St. Moritz in Switzerland and St. Tropez in France, and he and his third wife, the former French mannequin Eliette Mouret, whom he married in 1958, a few months after his divorce from his second wife Anita, were an attractive target for the paparazzi. Their first daughter, Isabel, was born in 1960 and their second daughter, Arabel, in 1964.

Until his death, he continued to record extremely prolifically, making more than 900 films.

Karajan was a technology fanatic and also played an important role in the development of the original compact disc (CD) format around 1980. He supported this new recording technology when hardly anyone believed in it and was one of the most instrumental in Sony’s rise. Some argue that the reason for extending the 60-minute prototype CD format to the final 74 minutes was Karajan’s insistence that the format had to have enough capacity for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on one CD.

Enduring fame and critical response

We often place famous people on moral pedestals from which we would quickly topple ourselves. Karajan’s biggest critics focus on three things in particular that influence all judgements about his musical contributions: his autocratic style, his former membership of the Nazi Party and the glamorous personality he openly displayed.

The first two criticisms could be attributed to his means of achieving the goals he had set himself as a child. His autocratic approach to music-making and the management of the institutions of which he was director were precisely the approaches needed to achieve his lofty artistic goals. He was allowed – even encouraged – to behave like a monarch, with teams of collaborators who catered to his every whim.

Karajan was considered tyrannical and cruel for his high standards and his impatience with mediocrity, but many believe that he could not have stood out and excelled as he did if he had approached his art differently, i.e. democratically.

But if we cannot justify his membership of the NSDAP on the assumption that Karajan joined the Nazi party out of ambitious opportunism rather than ideology, it is perhaps reasonable to ask how many of the conductor’s critics would have acted differently in his place.

His celebrity lifestyle certainly provided ammunition for offended individuals, especially given Karajan’s staggering wealth, which was comparable to that of the biggest movie stars. It is strange that the public readily accepts, even approves, of such wealth and glamour for celebrities in the entertainment world, but not for great ‘classical’ artists.

But both Karajan’s critics and his admirers are unanimous in recognising that the star maestro possessed a special gift for coaxing the most beautiful sounds out of the orchestra.

James Jolly, former editor of Gramophone, the world’s most respected classical music magazine, summed it up in 2014: “Herbert von Karajan was ambitious and undoubtedly imaginative, but few musicians in the post-war years have helped classical music reach the masses and bring them so much enjoyment.”

Karajan’s vanity is also evidenced by the controversial use of the title “von”. Despite the fact that the use of noble titles had been forbidden in Austria since 1919, Herbert von Karajan insisted on it, threatening that if he was not allowed to use the title “von”, he would not conduct in Austria. The Austrian authorities complied, justifying their decision on the pretext that it was an artistic title and not a noble one.

In his later years, Karajan often gave the impression of harbouring a grudge against the past. He was relentlessly ambitious and deeply convinced of his own worth and abilities, and resented the fact that the road to the top had proved so rocky and long.

There was always something a little unearthly about Herbert von Karajan, who was small in stature but extremely striking with his penetrating metallic blue eyes. He was a musician, an artistic director, a producer, a conductor, a building designer and a marketing visionary. A Renaissance man, a master of all life who knew no boundaries, and a genius who was both admired and feared.

A practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Von Karajan was a strong believer in reincarnation. He dreamt of being reborn as an eagle so that he could soar over his beloved Alps. He once said, “If there is another life, I will come back, because I have not done everything yet.”

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The magician of sound and his musical sensibility

In the last period of the mother’s pregnancy, when the darkness is all-encompassing, the child is only aware of the sound and pulse of the mother’s heartbeat, the major rhythms of her breathing and movement, and the sound of her voice. When a child is born, the power of sight usually overrides all other senses. But this is not true for every child.

Karajan was more concerned with sound and rhythm than most. He became famous for conducting with his eyes closed, which he did partly to avoid visual distractions. He once explained, “When I learn a score, I end up trying to forget what I saw, because seeing and hearing are two such different things.”

Herbert von Karajan’s visual sense was not deficient, as he was almost obsessed with set design and stage lighting. His astonishingly acute aural sensitivity was complemented by a deep and abiding fascination not only with the rhythms of the music, but also with the connection between the vital pulse of the music and the beating of his heart. Listening in St. Moritz to the roughly edited recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies made in Berlin, he was horrified by the sense that the tempo was wrong. He was only reassured by the knowledge that he was in the mountains, where his heart beat faster.