Monday night, PBS's Great Performances series presented a 90-minute documentary on the late great conductor Herbert von Karajan, entitled Karajan: Or Beauty As I See It. It was an illuminating program that featured footage of Karajan I had never seen before, such as family vacation movies and rehearsals for his ambitious production of Wagner's Ring cycle. The program took a sympathetic view of Karajan for the most part. It briefly recounted his membership in the Nazi party during the 30's, as well as the bitterness of his last years with the Berlin Philharmonic. Mainly the doc focused on Karajan's obsession with musical perfection, or performance perfection.
Ever since I was first exposed to Karajan's style via his recordings of Beethoven's symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, I was fascinated by this man - the conductor and the legend around him. If I could use a geeky analogy, I saw Karajan as the High Lord Kevin of his time. During his heyday in the 60's and 70's, he had amassed considerable clout, to the point that he was called the "music director of Europe." Then in the 80's Karajan suffered a stroke, which symbolically signalled his decline. The Berliners came to resent his tyranny over them, so in the last years of his life Karajan spent time instead with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Regarding Karajan's Nazi past, I think it very unfair when detractors dismiss him as just that - a Nazi - as if that was the sum of his existence. He wasn't a soldier, he wasn't bombing cities and killing Jews. He was just a conductor - albeit a damn good one. As I understand him, Karajan joined the party out of musical ambition, the ambition to have an orchestra of his own. Nothing more and nothing less. If he were truly a nefarious Nazi as his detractors would like us to believe, then one would have expected him to become a Holocaust denier or to constantly spew anti-Semitic rants. But the only thing Karajan did after the war - the only thing he had ever constantly, consistently done - was to make beautiful music with an orchestra. Music was his whole life. So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, versus the detractors.
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Ken Burns makes great documentaries!