By Richard Osborne

He just had a passion for music, a deep fit of devotion for every note of it, and why ever not?” After all that has been written about Herbert von Karajan, hostile and adulatory, that sentence by a former Jesuit priest and professor of poetry at Oxford, Peter Levi, comes as close as any to the heart of the matter. As a judgment, it would probably have pleased Karajan. I lost count of the occasions—discussing a singer or instrumentalist or simply watching some of the Berlin Philharmonic players on his CD video films—when Karajan would turn and say: “There is someone I can really admire, someone who is full of music.” It was, I think, the greatest compliment he could pay to a fellow human being. And it certainly applied to him. From childhood onward, Karajan more or less gave up his life to music, drawing all his energies and peripheral activities into its central orbit.

His death, last July at the age of 81, was a loss to music. He leaves behind a huge and distinguished legacy on both record and film. But as London audiences recognized in October 1988 and New York ones last February, even in his eighty-first year Karajan’s orchestral mastery was as compelling as ever, his musical insights, after years of illness, growing still deeper and more humane. Of the performance of Brahms’s First Symphony in London, one critic wrote with sad prescience: “One felt as if he was still perfecting the readings, as if in a workshop. Playing not for the present, but in preparation for some other future time.”

Leonard Bernstein once remarked that every Koussevitzky concert was “a gala event.” So are Bernstein’s, and so were Karajan’s. Whatever this listener’s prejudice or that critic’s judgment about the performances themselves—and for many, Karajan’s live concert and opera performances were among the transforming experiences of a musical lifetime—they were events that made great music a thing of moment in an uncertain and often trivializing world. Karajan recognized this as a great responsibility. He often said to his players: “Do your best, love what you are doing, because you are allowed to follow this thing when most of the rest of the world cannot begin to think about playing or listening to music till six o’clock in the evening. We are privileged and must give pleasure and a sense of fulfillment to those who are not so fortunate.”

André Previn has described Karajan as “the great motivator.” Certainly he was a born teacher, as astute musically and psychologically as he was caring in the pastoral, paternalistic sense of the word. In performance, the commitment of the players working with him was always astonishing to watch. “The playing throughout the evening was truly superb,” wrote Neville Cardus of a Beethoven concert in London in 1961, at a time when Karajan was unveiling his new, young Berlin Philharmonic, “every instrumentalist bowing and blowing and thumping as though for dear life.” And one has often witnessed the spectacle, the collective string band bending into some Brahmsian appassionato like explorers before a force-nine gale. But it was not virtuosity or—pace popular belief—the sound quality that ultimately distinguished a great Karajan performance. There was more to it than that. Charles Dutoit, conductor of the Montreal Symphony, has recalled an account of the Verdi Requiem much as I remember a Mahler Ninth in Salzburg at Easter 1982. “At the end,” Dutoit remembers, “the audience was so moved it could not even applaud; it was the most powerful and strangest concert I ever attended.”

Yet there are those who will continue to ask what this dictator and mega-rich superstar had to do with Verdi’s, or Mahler’s, vision of Last Things. The answer is: quite a lot—although it has to be admitted that the real Herbert von Karajan was generally obscured from the public gaze by a mountain of press comment about his business deals, his wealth (he left an estate estimated at around 500 million DM), his alleged Nazi sympathies, and the so-called “jet set” life of a man who, in reality, hated parties and loved sports—skiing, flying, sailing—that set him apart from human bustle in landscapes of Sibelian remoteness. The real Karajan would have agreed with Thomas Hardy that “mind-chains do not clank when one’s next neighbour is the sky.”

At home he lived with almost Cistercian simplicity. When I made my last visit to his house outside Salzburg in June 1989, great pots of flowers stood around the sitting room on the scrubbed pine floor. With views across the meadow to the looming Untersberg, there was no need for glamour or glitz. Karajan probably had everything, but in his day-to-day life he seemed to demand very little. And this restraint was of a piece with the man who was able to conduct that Verdi Requiem or that Mahler Ninth. Though he was brought up as an Austrian Catholic and was finally laid to rest in the small Catholic church in the village of Anif, he was probably closer in his private beliefs to Buddhist teaching than he was to conventional Catholic faith. And like many people schooled in late-19th-century German philosophy, and those who lived through the First and Second World Wars, he was almost certainly haunted by images of death. In the secular repertory, many of Karajan’s greatest performances confirmed this, whether we think of Mahler’s Ninth, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Brahms’s German Requiem, or Honegger’s Symphonie liturgique.

One of his favorite works was Strauss’s Don Quixote. In Berlin some months before his death, he was busy re-filming some of the tuba solos in the work, trying to ensure that the soloist looked as rubicund as his playing. The session over, Karajan sat hunched in front of the empty video-screens. Suddenly, he hit the table with his hand and, turning, spoke, half to himself: “I would have given anything to be able to conduct that work again tonight!” He once said: “The greatest of the Strauss epilogues comes at the end of Don Quixote, where Quixote says, ‘I have battled, I have made mistakes, but I have lived my life as best I can, according to the world as I saw it, and now . . .’ “ It was a remark that I often recalled, because for all the apparent armor-plating of his public image, there was a good deal of Quixote in Karajan, a proud man but a dreamer and an idealist, whose astonishing successes—record sales in excess of 100 million—were complemented throughout his career by downturns and upsets every bit as extraordinary as Quixote’s dizzy joustings with the windmills and the sheep.

This quixotic quality was nowhere more apparent than in his coping with allegations about his political past. Having made clear years ago the facts of his being required to hold Nazi Party membership when he finally secured the musical in Aachen in 1934-35, Karajan refused to discuss the matter further. This might look like evasion. But his reasoning was exemplary. Embroiling oneself in controversies that are extraneous to one’s all-consuming vocation are only likely to drain one’s energies and perhaps permanently embitter one’s spirit. And if people are determined to believe something about you, they probably will, whatever evidence is adduced to the contrary.

Admirable as this policy was in theory, it did not work. In fact, it did his career and reputation considerable harm, particularly in the United States, where he never worked on a permanent basis and where political activists continued to write him up as a High Nazi even as late as 1989 and his final Vienna Philharmonic tour. The trouble restarted in 1957, when a Berlin-based journalist made the possibly erroneous claim that Karajan had voluntarily joined the Nazi Party once, maybe twice, before his appointment to Aachen.

The Swedish scholar, archivist, and expert on music-making in prewar Germany, Gisela Tamsen, is now in the process of researching material that will, among other things, make clear that such a conclusion is based on ignorance of the methods of allocating and dating official party membership cards.* But the allegations resurfaced in the 1980s and were widely recycled in the press at the time of Karajan’s death—largely drawing on Roger Vaughan’s journalistically vivid but historically fallible biography published in 1986. Though Karajan had done nothing to institute proper archive researches of his own—it was only last June that he took any interest in Tamsen’s researches—the conductor was furious at Vaughan’s maladroitness. But his own solution—to break his Trappist silence on the matter and bluntly restate his case in a so-called “autobiography” dictated to the Austrian critic Franz Endler—was another piece of Karajan quixotism.

Apart from nailing the lie of Karajan’s alleged multiple membership in the Nazi Party, Tamsen’s researches will probably confirm the picture others already have of a talented, ambitious, insecure but largely independent musical workaholic who was sufficiently independent of party, as opposed to musico-political, activity to have sparked frequent official inquiries into the time and validity of his original party membership. It is also interesting to note that Karajan himself hugely exacerbated the problem in the autumn of 1942—at a time when, increasingly, he was a mere bit-part player in the German musical scene—by marrying the quarter-Jewish Anita Gütermann, and following the marriage a month later with a formal request to leave the party.

The 1957 article coincided with the first period of real musical and administrative power in Karajan’s career, and there is little doubt that after that the Nazi issue was used against him strategically—not only by lobbyists but also by disenchanted rivals and by critics. Tenor Jon Vickers, who first worked with Karajan about this time, has observed: “When a man stands as high as Karajan and sets such standards, when his grasp and his ability and his mind are so great, he cannot help but produce enemies. It is one of the sad things about the heart of mankind. The jealousy and envy this man is a victim of absolutely horrifies me, for he is a great, great human being.”

Where people have gone wrong in their assessment of Karajan’s career is in their strange assumption that because he was to become powerful in his later years, he must have been so from the start. In reality, between his debut in 1929 and the death of Furtwängler in 1954—a period of 26 long years’ apprenticeship and growing achievement—his career was disrupted, diverted, and blocked by events largely beyond his control. These ranged from his dismissal from Ulm in 1934 by a well-meaning administrator, and dismissal again from Aachen in 1941, to Furtwängler’s curious determination to close off to him after the war not only Berlin and Vienna but even Karajan’s native city of Salzburg. It was in Salzburg in the early 1930s that Karajan had been, as he quaintly put it, “maid of all work” to the theater director and Festival founder, Max Reinhardt, and to Karajan’s own mentor in so many cultural and musical matters, Bernhard Paumgartner.

It was a quarter-century that radically changed Karajan’s view of the world; but like many people, he learned hard lessons through deprivation. After the horrors of the Berlin air raids and a dangerous Italian spring in 1945, Karajan, in common with most non-Jewish musicians who had stayed in Germany during the war, was subjected to the long process of denazification. Typically, he treated the time as an opportunity for reading, meditation, study, and mental and physical preparation for the years ahead. Meanwhile, he made music where best he could, with Walter Legge and the Philharmonia in London; in Milan; and with the unfashionable Vienna Symphony Orchestra, which he briefly revived artistically. And it was in some of his immediate postwar concerts and recordings that he gave most compelling and eloquent expression to his feelings about the times, not only with works like Brahms’s German Requiem and the Honegger Symphonie liturgique, already mentioned, but with such pieces as Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, of which he made the memorable first recording in the autumn of 1947.

When Furtwängler died and Karl Böhm was sacked from the reopened Vienna Opera, Karajan, still locked into commitments in London and Milan, became briefly a kind of European Generalmusikdirektor, a title that stuck to him years after it ceased to have any relevance. In reality, the late 1950s and early 1960s were no more than a transition in a long journey between the years of disruption and a future, planned in those years, when Karajan would realize his ultimate goal of music-making in conditions free of interference from politicians, bureaucrats, and professional administrators. The press liked to depict Karajan as a musical megalomaniac. But it was not power that he primarily sought; it was independence.

In large matters, if not always in small ones, he was a man of extraordinary patience, with a long-term vision and an obsession with continuity and loyalty in his immediate associates. His professional heroes were men who had been master builders of great orchestras: Talich and Mengelberg, Mravinsky and Szell. It was inevitable in 1955 that he would ask for a life contract with the Berlin Philharmonic, and he richly justified it, evolving the orchestra’s technique and playing style over more than three decades and leaving a rare heritage of recordings spanning an astonishing, and continuously evolving, repertoire. (The repertoire was huge, despite much rerecording of the central core.)

Why relations with the orchestra came to a final breaking point seven years after the row over Karajan’s desire to appoint clarinetist Sabine Meyer is a matter for cultural historians to sift and assess. The Berliners were the finest, the best-paid, and the best-equipped orchestra of our era, but no one—not even Karajan—could work with a dissenting group within the orchestra; and after a grueling winter of recording, touring, and film editing, he judged it best to quit in April 1989. He admired independence, and often talked warmly of players who had found, as he had, personal satisfaction in establishing their own schools and businesses; and he retained great affection for many of the serving players, from his concertmaster, Leon Speirer, who had so bravely borne personal tragedy two years before, to some of the brilliant young musicians who had only recently joined the orchestra.

On the other hand, he saw nothing but problems in the resurfacing of the kind of corporate ambitions that lead players into musical and financial politicking of their own. And he openly detested the kind of-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality that led to demands for equal rights between orchestra and conductor, right down to the status of hotel rooms on tour. Happily, he was still able to laugh about it. “In Vienna they made this demand and I said, ‘Gladly.’ In fact, I had moved to a hotel that was quiet and could give me the kind of service that I need now with all my many problems. I don’t know whether they realized that the hotel had only 25 rooms. If the whole orchestra had stayed there, the management would have had to fit bunk beds!”

In fact, as the marvelous new recording of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony confirms, Karajan had already reestablished a well-nigh symbiotic relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra he had conducted way back in 1934 and with which he had made his first truly memorable recordings in 1946 and 1947. He was of the opinion that the orchestra had gone into decline in the late 1960s, but lately they have challenged even the Berliners in almost every department, and it is doubtful, had he lived, whether Karajan would have missed his old orchestra.

In September 1965, Walter Legge noted: “The American public will have no idea of von Karajan’s full stature until it has heard how this Klingsor of operatic conductors conjures up his magic garden.” The recordings tell us something; but Karajan was by instinct and training a man of the theater, and it is another of those paradoxes surrounding his career that this central aspect of his art has to some extent been obscured from the general public gaze. True, the famous Lucia di Lammermoor with Callas visited Berlin, and parts of the Salzburg Ring found their way to New York, but for largely practical reasons his work in the opera house since the 1950s was largely confined to Vienna, Milan, and, finally, Salzburg. To hear Karajan in the opera house, the mountain had to go to Mahomet.

Most people who made the pilgrimage found it worth their while, not only for the quality of the music-making but also for the quality of the staging and design that pointedly bypassed the often musically ruinous fads of postwar “directors’ opera” in order to reestablish contact with an older and still valid tradition. It is a tradition that goes back, with a passing glance at the work of Wieland Wagner, through Gründgens and Reinhardt, to Roller, Mahler, and even Wagner himself.

Beginning in the early 1940s, Karajan frequently both conducted and directed. Again, this was no act of vanity or calculated lust for power. Rather, it reenacted the German ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. As Peter Conrad has put it, “Karajan doubles as director so that he can reproduce musical motifs on stage.” Franco Zeffirelli said of the Milan/Berlin Lucia: “Callas did the Mad Scene with a follow-spot like a ballerina against black. Nothing else. He let her be music, absolute music.” Karrajan’s concern, to use the nice distinction made by Rutgers Professor Peter Kivy, was with “drama-made-music” rather than “music-drama”; and this yearning for wholeness, for oneness, is consistent with some of the tenets of Buddhism and of the 19th-century German Romantic philosophy to which Karajan was so closely drawn. In the opera house it informed much of his most significant work from the prewar Berlin Zauberflöte with Gründgens through so many of his own greatest productions, such as the 1962 Vienna Pelléas et Mélisandee and on through the great Salzburg Wagner cycles to the most recent Don Giovanni.

—Karajan’s last opera project, unhappily not realized onstage by him, was Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, a work whose formal perfection and mordant humor were tailor-made for him but which he hadn’t conducted since his days in Ulm. Typically, the team he assembled mixed sure-footed expertise—Plácido Domingo as Riccardo—with a roster of artists new for Karajan: Leo Nucci, Florence Quivar, the greatly gifted British soprano Josephine Barstow, and the young Korean Sumi Jo. Both Barstow and Jo told me of his endless kindness and care, and of an ability that bordered on the uncanny to knit the cast into a team in a few days. With Karajan, there were no schedules. No questions with him of singers’ coming and going or mugging up scenes on airplanes as they flew in to a prearranged slot. As Barstow observed, this meant you had to have your role absolutely under control. Sometimes Karajan would switch scenes at a moment’s notice, something that would be impossible to tolerate were it not for his ability, with a single downbeat, to establish a mood, a color, an atmosphere. As Barstow puts it, with wide-eyed astonishment: “This happened immediately!” And this, I suppose, is one of the ultimate mysteries of the art of the great conductor.

Critics will go on disputing Karajan’s place in the pantheon of great conductors, though few, I fear, know at first hand the work in its entirety, and many have long since lapsed into hearing what they expect to hear, whether it be a remorselessly “beautiful sound” or the jingle of spurs and crash of jackboots in the coda of Brahms’s First Symphony. And no doubt it will continue to be suggested—perhaps more in Europe than in America—that an interest in technology and test-pilot status on jets is somehow incompatible with a musician’s calling.

This is rubbish, of course. Karajan was a phenomenally intelligent man and, like Glenn Gould, he was uninhibited in his desire to use technical expertise to the full in all aspects of his musical life. When Karajan was in the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna in 1928, Schoenberg told Erwin Stein at the time, “In radio broadcasting a small number of sonic entities suffice for the expression of all artistic thoughts; the gramophone and the various mechanical instruments are evolving such clear sonorities that one will be able to write much less heavily instrumented pieces for them.” That same year, Schoenberg completed his Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 , which Karajan (at his own expense) would one day remove from the concert hall to the recording studio to make one of the artistically most successful and technologically most radical of all 20th-century recordings.

Karajan leaves almost a thousand recordings, ranging from the prewar Berlin Tchaikovsky Pathetique to the recent valedictory Vienna Bruckner Eighth Symphony. He has made the occasional disappointing recording, and some instantly and obviously great ones, but the consistency is what most astonishes, based on a mixture of discipline and, at best, imaginative freedom in the orchestral playing. As the Berlin Philharmonic’s ex-flutist, James Galway, explains it: “If a player had a good fantasy, Karajan would give that fantasist all the freedom he needed, but he would never accept the standard noise . . . . “Even the skeptics look fondly back on some of the 1950s recordings—the Così fan tutte, the Fledermaus with Schwarzkopf, the Butterfly, and Il trovatore with Callas, the Ariadne, and, a little later, the Falstaff and the Rosenkavalier scores Karajan had learned, respectively, at the feet of Toscanini and Clemens Krauss.

The fashionable theory that things became less interesting thereafter hardly holds water when one considers that the 1960s brought fresh revelations from the new, young, Berlin Philharmonic in Brahms, Debussy, Bruckner, Honegger, and Wagner, alongside a good deal of searing verismo on record—most memorably, perhaps, the 1965 La Scala recording of Cav and Pag. In the 1970s, and in particular in the middle years after Karajan’s first serious and almost fatal spinal operation, he intensified old readings (as Schoenberg said of Mahler, most conductors have nothing to say after the third rehearsal but Mahler knew in the ninth that there was still more to do in the tenth). He also added new ones, taking in works he had first encountered as a student in the 1920s: the music of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and, of course, Mahler himself. As an interpreter of Bruckner, Strauss, and Sibelius, he had occasional co-equals but no one to match so consistently his insight, conviction, command of form, and sense of much of the music’s remoteness, its extraordinary spiritual distance.

The films—Karajan’s great video legacy—remain, to be seen and evaluated. As films, they bear little relation to what he was doing 20 years ago. They are more specific, more humane in many ways, with wonderfully intelligent and specific detailing of the musical argument through close instrumental observation. They represent his own monument, whatever musical or educational value they may have. They also, as he noted, put on record as clearly and imaginatively as possible the work of the Berlin and Vienna orchestras of which he was justly proud. In terms of corporate orchestral expertise and commitment they will serve as a model, and perhaps an inspiration, to future generations. They show what is possible. As the critic Tim Page said to a young music student after Karajan’s final New York concert: “You may never hear such playing again, but now you know it can be done.”

And will we look on Herbert von Karajan’s like again? Inevitably not, for the circumstances of this extraordinary career can never be remotely reproduced. As chance would have it, he died within days of another of the century’s great artist-interpreters, Laurence Olivier. The London Spectator noted: “Both men were perfectionists. Willful and sometimes dictatorial, they were great impresarios as well as artists and always knew what would play well. They had an almost hypnotic stage presence that made them seem larger than life, yet what they possessed of greatness was more than just charisma. It was something which we really may have seen the last of an ability to make grand gesture without seeming either self-conscious and pretentious or self-parodying and ironic.” Not that we have necessarily seen the last of Karajan. The final irony of his career is that more people may be able to see Karajan conducting on video in the 1990s than ever managed to catch him on television or in the concert hall while he was alive. For his successors, he remains a challenge and an inspiration.

*Editor’s note: The conclusion is based on official U.S. government records documenting the dates and serial numbers of Karajan’s two Party membership cards. New investigation may show that the Nazis had altered these dates for purposes of their own. But final answers to such questions remain open until the publication of fresh research.

Richard Osborne is a contributor to Gramophone and is a BBC Music Programme Presenter. His Rossini, a study of the composer’s life and works, was published in the U.K in 1986 and has appeared in several European translations. His Conversations with Von Karajan will be published this April by Michael and Cornelia Bessie Books, Harper & Row.