Karajan led the Berlin Philharmonic for thirty-four years
Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989), born Heribert in Salzburg, held the Berlin Philharmonic’s top post for thirty-four years. Greek ancestry, a von from 1792 Saxon ennoblement, and early coaching by Bernhard Paumgartner shaped a career that also touched Nazi-era Salzburg and wartime stages.
The family story starts with Georg Karajánnis, born in Kozani in Ottoman Rumelia, who left for Vienna in 1767 and then Chemnitz, where he and his brother helped build Saxony's cloth trade. Their title lapsed when Austria abolished nobility after the First World War. Herbert, son of a Salzburg surgeon, studied at the Mozarteum from 1916 to 1926, then at the Vienna Academy under Franz Schalk among others. He debuted as a conductor in Salzburg on 22 January 1929, which led to a junior post at the theatre in Ulm.
His Nazi membership was something he kept quiet about after 1945, and accounts conflict. One historian says he joined twice: in Salzburg on 8 April 1933, a membership apparently never formalised, and again in Aachen in March 1935. He routinely opened concerts with the party anthem yet insisted he had joined purely for his career, while critics note that conductors such as Toscanini, Klemperer and Busch chose exile. In 1935 he became Germany's youngest general music director, at Aachen, and in 1938 he debuted with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera. He conducted in Berlin as late as 18 February 1945 before fleeing to Milan.
A Vienna tribunal cleared him in March 1946, but Soviet occupiers banned him from conducting, so that summer he worked at Salzburg anonymously. After the ban lifted he recorded Brahms's German Requiem in 1947 and helped turn London's new Philharmonia into a world-class orchestra. Protests dogged the Berlin Philharmonic's 1955 American tour; Detroit cancelled its concerts and Eugene Ormandy refused to shake his hand.
In 1956 he succeeded Furtwängler as the orchestra's conductor for life, and he ran the Vienna State Opera from 1957 to 1964 and founded Salzburg's Easter Festival. He resigned from Berlin on 24 April 1989 and died of a heart attack at Anif that July, leaving an estate estimated at over half a billion marks.
Source: Herbert von Karajan
