A goal pursued and scored
Michael Tanner
HERBERT VON KARAJAN: A LIFE IN MUSIC by Richard Osborne Chatto, £30, pp. 851 This is a most impressive achievement, if not exactly the one its author intended. It must be very hard to retain a fair perspec- tive on an artist with whom one is closely involved on several levels. Besides being a lifelong admirer of Karajan as conductor, Richard Osborne also knew him for the last 12 years of his life, and has worked on this huge biography over a number of years. Other biographers of Karajan have found themselves becoming increasingly unsympathetic to him as they got to know him, or more about him. Osborne is aware of the complexity of the phenomenon he is dealing with, both as a conductor and as a man. Clearly animated by admiration for Karajan's distinctive contribution to music, and feeling affection towards him personal- ly, he still is prepared to be an astringent critic of some of the recordings and perfor- mances, and doesn't conceal the vanity, the caprice, the coldness and general difficulty of the character.
The book begins with a brief description of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdi- nand at Sarajevo, and the five-year-old Heribert's (as he then was) reaction to his uncle's prediction of war. Osborne makes Karajan's dread at that moment into a kind of leitmotif of his life, and I don't find that plausible. His vague idea of emigrating from Europe to South America as the Cold War got under way, his conducting of Hoist's The Planets, his little speech at the end of the New Year's concert in Vienna in 1987, when he expressed a hope for 'peace, peace and again peace', his voice (accord- ing to Osborne: I can't hear it) breaking on the third 'peace' — these all show his obsession with harmony and music as a means to it. This is Osborne's characteristic tone:
Karajan's response to The Planets was not driven by sonority alone. Having brilliantly exploited the orchestra, Hoist ends by renouncing it altogether as female voices, soughing like an Arctic wind, waft us into oblivion. Like many works that particularly engaged Karajan's imagination, this is music that concerns itself with war, dissolution, and last things; it is another of the great repre- sentative works — a musical metaphor, in fact — of the century he had grown up in and come grimly to know.
Well, yes, but nothing concrete that Osborne can advance shows that Karajan was keener on peace than any other sane person by that stage in history, or that his repertoire and the way he performed it were especially devoted to furthering the cause.
What this book certainly does show, and in at least as much detail as anyone could wish, is Karajan's single-minded pursuit of his goal, of having the power to conduct what he liked, where he liked, with what- ever orchestras and performers he wanted. Osborne shows, conclusively I think, thanks to the researches, handsomely acknowl- edged, of Gisela Tamsen, that Karajan's membership of the Nazi party was purely a career move, that he was never a convinced Nazi, and that he regretted having joined. But the claim that Osborne makes that at the Party rally in Aachen in 1935 Karajan `had contemplated conducting Mahler's Eighth Symphony' seems extravagant and quite unsupported. If Roger Vaughan is right in his book Herbert von Karajan: A Biographical Portrait, which Osborne quotes from fairly often, the conductor did admire Hitler and felt, in the 1980s, that there should be a monument to him at Berchtesgarten. Whatever the truth, Kara- jan's political affiliations are a subject which I hope can now be laid to rest.
What does still need more discussion Osborne tells us that a friend claimed the book was too short — is the change in Karajan's conducting style which began, more or less, with his leaving the Philhar- monic, and the development of his close ties with Michel Glotz, his recording pro- ducer at DG and his close friend. The change seems to me so striking that it should be high on the agenda of any seri- ous study of Karajan's life in music, but it gets no sustained consideration from Osborne. Nor does the constitution of the court, which insulated him from any dis- agreeable opinion in his later years — one has a graphic, fascinatingly repulsive glimpse of it in the video Karajan in Salzburg, which Osborne states shows Kara- jan 'as he was'. Repeating the same stories endlessly, laughing in that frighteningly unamused way (there is a good photo in the book of his doing that), throwing his weight around, using macabre images for his relationship to the Berlin Philharmonic without the slightest realisation of what he is betraying — this makes disturbing view- ing. Osborne frequently refers to Karajan's combination of shyness and arrogance, remarks in passing that
elements of this particular Salome — the intelligent spoilt child, the ruthless aesthete — lurked within his own psyche,
gives many illustrations of his chilling capacity to treat people as if they were non-existent, yet fails to draw these ele- ments together with other, more appealing ones into a full, convincing portrait.
By the end of a book that, for most of its length, I had found absorbing, I began to wonder about a life that seems so much a matter of plotting how to sign the most lucrative contracts with the record compa- nies, that was so technologically obsessed, and that strikes one as so free of a general humane culture. In those ways Karajan was undeniably modern — 'just the conductor for 1969' as Klemperer famously remarked. And invoking that name leads me to invoke, too, Peter Heyworth's great biogra- phy of him. That must remain the standard by which all such books are judged. Osborne had far less promising material to deal with, but it would have been a relief if he had indicated what an ultimately unattractive person Karajan was, or had at any rate given us some conclusion other than the one that is common to everyone.
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