The Nazi Party Member Who Became the God of the Podium

 

A Viennese taxi driver once picked up Herbert von Karajan.
"Where to, sir?"
Karajan replied: "It doesn't matter. They want me everywhere."

Whether this reflects breathtaking arrogance or simply the truth, there is no better introduction to the man.

Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) was the most powerful figure in 20th-century classical music.

But power, in his case, came wrapped in contradiction.
Any honest account of his life must begin with the Nazi Party.

Karajan joined in 1933 in Salzburg — before the Nazis had even seized power in Austria.
He joined again in 1935 in Aachen.

Throughout the Nazi era he opened concerts with the Horst-Wessel-Lied without hesitation, always insisting it was purely a matter of career survival.
His enemies called him "SS-Oberführer von Karajan."

Then comes the irony: in 1939, a disastrous performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger left Hitler furious, and he reportedly never forgave Karajan.
The man who had courted the regime ended up despised by its leader.

In October 1942, Karajan married Anita Gütermann — classified under Nazi law as one-quarter Jewish.
The marriage endangered his career during the war.
After it, the marriage saved him.

He presented it during denazification proceedings as proof of resistance — a claim some historians view skeptically.
He had begged his father-in-law for help through the process. Gütermann complied.

By the early 1950s, Karajan had met a young French model named Eliette Mouret and divorced Anita without apparent difficulty.

His April 1938 Berlin Philharmonic debut caused a sensation.
It also made an immediate enemy of its principal conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, who from that point on referred to Karajan only as "K" — refusing to speak his name.

The Nazi leadership exploited the friction deliberately, using Karajan as a counterweight to Furtwängler's influence.
The historical irony that followed is striking.

Furtwängler had refused the Nazi salute and sheltered Jewish musicians. Yet for simply remaining in Germany, he faced years of denazification proceedings and lost a major American appointment to protests led by Toscanini.

Karajan, who had joined the party twice, was cleared almost immediately.
Helped, in the end, by his Jewish wife.
After the war, Karajan's dominance over classical music was total.

As lifetime principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, he simultaneously ran the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.

At his peak, his recordings made up roughly ten percent of the global classical music market.

For much of the world, "classical music" simply meant what Karajan had recorded on Deutsche Grammophon.

The man himself defied easy characterization.
He practiced yoga and Zen Buddhism. He conducted from memory with his eyes closed — not as theater, but as discipline.

"It has to do with closing the gap between the sound I want and the sound I actually hear," he once explained.

He discovered a thirteen-year-old Anne-Sophie Mutter at an audition and placed her directly onto the Berlin Philharmonic stage.

He was also capable of spectacular pettiness.
He required musicians to wear wigs during filming, then never showed their faces on camera.

When he disliked flutist James Galway's beard, he recorded the audio with Galway — then replaced him on screen with a beardless substitute.

He retired in April 1989 following a dispute with the Berlin Philharmonic and died three months later.

Plácido Domingo recalled their final performances together:

"There was a religious feeling, a sense of awe — and at the same time a kind of nostalgia. It felt like the end of an era."

Karajan's life comes down to a question no one has cleanly answered:
Does moral compromise diminish great art?

Every reader will decide differently.
That unresolved tension is precisely what makes him, decades later, still worth arguing about.