Where were you when you heard that Herbert von Karajan had died? It’s a question that dates any classical music-lover – and of course, if you’re old enough to answer it, you’ll know that it’s the wrong one. The news that really stopped the classical world in its tracks wasn’t Karajan’s death, aged 81, in July 1989, but an event that had occurred barely two months previously, and which had felt, oddly enough, as if it was even more final. In May that year Karajan had resigned from his post as chief conductor (for life) of the Berliner Philharmoniker.
It’s difficult, now, to explain just how much that mattered. My parents still talked about the break-up of the Beatles, but for classical music fans in the 1980s, Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker were every bit as huge. They were a cultural phenomenon: their recordings on Deutsche Grammophon were the only classical discs that you were guaranteed to find on every high street. Full page adverts promoted Karajan’s symphony cycles in the Radio Times.
In the pre-internet age, we were only partially aware of Karajan’s life story – how a conductor born before the First World War had fought his way to a position where he could be described (not wholly ironically) as “General Music Director of Europe”. Rumours circulated of his complicity (willing or otherwise) under the Nazis; we knew of his postwar triumphs with London’s brand-new Philharmonia Orchestra and his subsequent ascent to the top job in Berlin, as well as his near-imperial status in his native Salzburg, where the Easter Festival was his creation and his unchallenged domain.
And then of course there was the “Karajan sound” – the precision, the weight of tone and the silken, lustrous sheen that came as standard when Karajan conducted his Berlin forces. It was ideally suited to the LP era, and even more perfect for the new digital sound-world of the CD (Karajan loved his tech). If you wanted to show off your new stereo you played Karajan’s Zarathustra or Beethoven 5. Other maestros were available, but Karajan / Berlin was the benchmark. This was how classical music was supposed to sound.
So yes, I remember that moment, and I also remember the backlash. The recording boom of the 1980s led to a bust in the 90s, and one generation’s classic recordings came to sound like stodge to ears that had discovered the trim, peppery sounds of period instruments. Karajan wasn’t the only 20th-century artist to fall from fashion; nor was he the only great musician to have worked (and apparently flourished) under an evil regime. Regardless, a few years ago, chatting to some conservatoire students I discovered – to my absolute bewilderment – that not only did they not have any strong opinions about Karajan, but they had never even heard of him.
Tastes change; but they swing back, too, and upon revisiting some of Karajan’s greatest DG and Decca recordings through STAGE+ it’s clear that even if his legacy is no longer as unapproachable as we once imagined, it nonetheless contains some of the most glorious music-making ever committed to disc. Not all of it, of course – there was a grain of truth in the perception of the Karajan / Berlin operation as a slickly-marketed production line. I’ve never got on with his Mozart symphonies (though his 1969 Berlin recording of Haydn’s Creation is a miracle of warmth and wonder).
But if Karajan could be an autocrat, he was never an automaton, and his interpretations evolved. Of his four recorded Beethoven symphony cycles the one that endures is the set that he recorded in Berlin near the start of his tenure, between 1961 and 1963. Forget the image of Karajan as grand old man (or monster): the energy in these performances is tangible. The result is Beethoven that’s authoritative, for sure, but also lean, athletic and exultant. A decade later he filmed the symphonies in heavily stylised studio settings. The results still divide opinions, though Karajan (who actually detested being photographed) was ahead of his time in his determination to translate the thrill of orchestral music for a culture increasingly defined by cinema and TV.
Karajan also returned again and again to Brahms’ symphonies; and his performances of the First took on an almost existential quality during his later years. Katy Hamilton, surveying Brahms’s First for BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library in October 2024, took Karajan’s Berlin reading as her starting point, and found that it speaks with undimmed power and a profound sense of tradition.
As well it might. Karajan’s teacher Bernhard Paumgartner had known Mahler, and Karajan was mentored by the elderly Richard Strauss (who took the young conductor out to lunch after being impressed by his Elektra). Karajan remains, indisputably, one of the greatest Straussians and in later years in Salzburg he even directed (as well as conducted) Der Rosenkavalier – a production captured on film in 1984, with Anna Tomowa-Sintow as an intensely touching Marschallin.
Meanwhile those who heard Karajan’s live performances of Metamorphosen spoke with awe of the pure emotional intensity, and few conductors felt a more personal (or complex) connection to Strauss’ late music. His 1974 recording of the Four Last Songs with Gundula Janowitz is simply rapturous. Karajan never had any trouble attracting the greatest singers of the age, and the casts of his opera recordings are A-list – Mirella Freni and the young Pavarotti in Puccini’s La bohème, Domingo and Barbara Hendricks in a monumental Turandot, and an astonishing Jon Vickers in Wagner’s Die Walküre.
In fact, it’s tempting to conclude that Karajan was at his best when he was working with fellow-musicians whose personalities and talents challenged and played off his own – like the cellists Pierre Fournier (in Strauss’ Don Quixote) and Mstislav Rostropovich, whose performance of the Dvořák concerto sends shivers down the spine. Slava plays as if his life depended upon it, while Karajan and the entire orchestra strain every fibre of heart and being to meet him on the same transcendent level.
But then, Karajan always relished playing against type, and lavishing the Berliners’ collective virtuosity (and his own musical intellect) on music from outside the Austro-German tradition. Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony for example, or Sibelius’ symphonies – music whose inner logic found a powerful complement in Karajan’s deep love of nature (any native of Salzburg grows up with one eye on the mountains). Has there ever been a more purely beautiful recording of the orchestral music of Alban Berg (admittedly, a composer rather closer to the milieu of Karajan’s youth)? Certainly, Honegger’s Third Symphony has never sounded more electrifying.
Perhaps the greatest instance of Karajan meeting his musical match – and thriving on it – was his passionate lifelong affair with that most independent of orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic. By the 1980s the ailing Karajan was revisiting his repertoire with a new freedom and insight: he believed that the performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony that he recorded live in Berlin in 1982 attained a level of expressive truth that he could never hope to surpass. Many listeners will agree. Karajan’s (by now) failing marriage to the Berlin Philharmonic never regained those heights.
In Vienna, though, matters were different. Here, just months before his death, Karajan bade farewell to another lifelong artistic love with a visionary – you might say otherworldly – performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (also captured on film). Karajan always felt a special kinship with Bruckner, but this is tremendous, and all the more remarkable given that he was in near-continual pain. He had taken a three-week sabbatical before conducting the Vienna Phil’s January 1987 New Year’s Day concert of music by the Strauss family. “I have difficulty walking” he told his biographer Richard Osborne. “But people say that when you are on the rostrum and start making music…” ventured the writer. “Yes, I know,” replied Karajan. “And it makes me completely happy”.
If there’s one Karajan recording that everyone should experience, it’s the disc (and film) of that New Year’s morning in Vienna: supreme artists meeting as equals and charging this joyous, deceptively profound music with a beauty, a meaning, and a life-affirming warmth that disarms all doubts – at least, while the music is playing. Talking of the other Strauss (Richard), Karajan expressed a special affinity for the final pages of Don Quixote: “I have battled, I have made mistakes, but I have lived my life as best I can, according to the world as I see it, and now…”
And now? It’s a dull conductor who has an unblemished record, either in art or life. If nothing else, listen to the Vienna performance of Josef Strauss’ Sphärenklänge waltz. You might – or might not – hear why Herbert von Karajan mattered to so many people for so long. Either way, as the critic Tim Page observed after Karajan’s final concert in the US in February 1989, “Never forget that an orchestra can play with such unity, such subtlety, such luxuriance of tone. You may never again hear such playing but now you know that it can be done”.
The Herbert von Karajan A-Z of recordings, opera performances and an exclusive archive of Telemondial concert films is available now on STAGE+, the streaming service for classical music by Deutsche Grammophon.
This article was sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon.