Herbert Von Karajan

Emerging from Europe as its most celebrated conductor in the aftermath of World War II, Herbert von Karajan benefited from well-timed opportunities across his professional life. Despite early controversies that shadowed his initial steps, he became the twentieth century’s most frequently documented maestro and seems destined to stay among the most prominent and commercially successful figures in the field well into the twenty-first.

Born in Salzburg to a family of Greek ancestry long established in Austria, with relatives who included scholars and physicians in both Vienna and Salzburg, he displayed prodigious talent by taking up the piano at age three and giving his debut recital the following year. During his teenage years he received advice to redirect his energies from the keyboard toward the conductor’s podium, an ambition reinforced when he attended a Toscanini performance during a visit to Vienna. Toscanini and, ironically, Wilhelm Furtwängler became his principal models; among his instructors was the distinguished Viennese conductor Franz Schalk, once a student of Bruckner.

His first professional engagement arrived in 1928, at twenty, when he joined the Ulm City Theater as chorusmaster before advancing to conductor. Over the ensuing seven years he acquired comprehensive orchestral leadership skills by serving in every capacity required of a small, active theater.

The ascent of the Nazi Party in Germany, which Karajan joined in 1933, and the vacancies created by the exclusion of Jewish and part-Jewish musicians allowed him to pursue advancement beyond Austria. He relocated to Germany in 1935 and, upon appointment at Aachen, became the youngest music director in the country. Although never overtly political, he accepted an invitation from Bruno Walter—perhaps the most prominent Jewish conductor expelled from Germany—to lead Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera. Between 1938 and 1942 he conducted at the Berlin State Opera, making his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in the same period; in 1941 he was named music director of the Berlin State Opera.

His demanding rehearsal standards, meticulous precision even with the Berlin Philharmonic strings, intense demeanor, and the exciting results he achieved earned Adolf Hitler’s admiration. At the same time his reluctance to voice public opposition to Nazi ideology positioned him as a preferred alternative, in official eyes, to Wilhelm Furtwängler, the leading conductor in the German-speaking world and a fiercely independent figure openly dismissive of party officials. Government circles deliberately used the younger man to exert subtle pressure on the older one and to challenge his considerable ego, prompting the private nickname “Hitler’s favorite.” The extent to which Karajan actively cultivated this favor, beyond his pursuit of excellence, remains uncertain; comparable admiration from the dictator was extended to the apolitical septuagenarian composer Franz Lehár, who had a Jewish wife.

Karajan’s own situation shifted when he married Anita Gütermann, a woman of Jewish descent, in 1942; thereafter he fell out of favor with the party.

He made his first recordings in 1938 at age thirty. These early efforts—his initial Beethoven symphony (No. 7), several Wagner preludes, and symphonies by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák—along with his wartime documents, retain scholarly value. His substantial recording career truly commenced after the war in Vienna upon meeting producer Walter Legge. Although official denazification prevented public appearances until 1947, Legge, representing privately owned EMI Records, organized sessions with the Vienna Philharmonic. Musicians in occupied Vienna participated partly to supplement meager food rations; the resulting accounts, including the Beethoven Eighth and Ninth symphonies, conveyed an urgency and quality that listeners found striking and that continued to appear in audiophile remasterings as late as 2005 and 2006.

Rivalry with Furtwängler hindered his postwar progress, barring access to both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. He therefore assumed leadership of the Vienna Symphony and became principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. With the Philharmonia, under EMI, his discography expanded dramatically from the late 1940s through the first half of the 1950s. His clearance and Philharmonia appointment coincided with the introduction of magnetic tape in England—though EMI adopted it slowly—and the arrival of the LP. Unlike Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch and other senior colleagues who viewed studio work as an unwelcome necessity, Karajan embraced recording enthusiastically. Across those seven years he produced dozens of discs spanning Bach to Vaughan Williams and operatic repertoire from Mozart through Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss, performances never surpassed, even by his own later versions. He also completed his first integral Beethoven symphony cycle, which bridged the mono and stereo eras: Symphonies Nos. 1–7 and 9 in mono, No. 8 in stereo. The cycle illustrated his approach; he had never conducted the Fourth Symphony in concert, yet recorded it for the set—an option earlier generations would not have considered. The performances projected a lush string sonority, coiled tension, and propulsive energy. Most of his 1950s recordings, whether mono or stereo, preserve exceptional richness thanks to Walter Legge’s production and EMI engineering, and they continue to sell well today.

From the mid-1950s onward, aside from occasional projects for RCA Victor and Decca/London and a brief return to EMI in the early 1970s, his principal activity centered on Deutsche Grammophon, where the majority of his Berlin Philharmonic recordings appeared. With the stereo era he became one of the world’s most active studio conductors and an early adopter of jet travel, flying himself to fulfill engagements worldwide. In the late 1950s and 1960s his habits seemed markedly modern compared with the older generation he had succeeded. He re-recorded core repertoire—from Beethoven to Schubert—multiple times during the 1960s and 1970s, issuing fresh Beethoven cycles in each of those decades and again in the 1980s. He explored the Classical period more deeply with Haydn symphonies, entered the Baroque with Bach and Handel, and included popular pieces such as the Albinoni Adagio and Pachelbel Canon in D, while also addressing post-Romantic and modern works by Berg and Webern; he excelled with the last two composers yet proved less persuasive with Haydn, Bach, and Handel. Growing commitments necessitated these expansions. By the close of the 1970s he had overtaken Leopold Stokowski as the most recorded conductor in history. Among major Romantic composers, Gustav Mahler remained a relative blind spot until late in his career, though the eventual performances proved highly impressive.

His timing proved equally advantageous with the rise of home video. Television appearances dating from the late 1950s and broadcasts from 1965 through the mid-1970s were handled by Unitel and later issued on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD. From the late 1970s onward he worked exclusively through his own production company, Telemondial, which subsequently licensed the material to Sony. Many of these films rank among his most debated: extensive rehearsal time was devoted to visual framing and synchronization with preexisting audio tracks, producing results that critics likened to music videos. Notable exceptions include the live Vienna New Year’s concerts; most viewers nevertheless regard the majority as artificial constructs that prioritize visual perfection over spontaneous performance and that reflect broader tendencies in his final years. During the last fifteen years of his life he also drew criticism for sharply increased fees that set precedents for others and reshaped the financial landscape of classical concerts in ways reminiscent of major-league baseball salaries.

He played an influential part in the launch of the compact disc in 1981, and reportedly insisted that the format’s initial sixty-minute capacity be extended to sixty-eight minutes, citing the duration of a typical performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. At his death in 1989 he had finished yet another Beethoven cycle and begun re-recording major works in digital sound; his final recording was Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Although he did not receive the greatest number of Grammy Awards—Sir Georg Solti surpassed him in that regard—he remained, alongside American Leonard Bernstein, one of the two most widely recognized conductors internationally. The timing of his passing proved fortunate: releases drawn from the 1940s, 1950s (including authorized live opera documents, notably those featuring Maria Callas), and 1960s have continued without interruption, still occupying retail shelves more than two decades later, while both EMI and Deutsche Grammophon maintain dedicated Karajan editions in various formats.