Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music. (Book Reviews).

Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music. By Richard Osborne. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. [x, 851 p. ISBN 1-55553-425-2. $37.50.]

Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music is the most comprehensive biography yet published of the Austrian conductor, one of the most significant, yet controversial, musical figures of the twentieth century. Richard Osborne, a highly respected British broadcaster and writer, previously authored Conversations with von Karajan (New York: Harper & Row, 1989) and has contributed erudite notes for numerous compact-disc releases of Karajan's recordings for the EMI Classics and Deutsche Grammophon labels.

Osborne's broad knowledge and background allow him to bring perspective to the events surrounding Karajan's life and career. At the outset, he places the conductor s childhood in the context of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination--Karajan was six at the time, and unusually perceptive--and the subsequent events leading to the First World War. Widespread speculation that Russia would enter the conflict instilled in Karajan a fear of the Russians that was to haunt [him] until well after the Second World War" (p. 5).

The Karajan personality emerges as one of extraordinary complexity. Extremely shy except among the inner circle of friends and colleagues who had earned his trust, Karajan had determination and a sense of purpose, inherited from his father, that emerged at a very early age. Externally, he seemed an enigma, an image some close to him believed he actually cultivated. His teacher Bernhard Paumgartner commented that "[h]e combines his gifts with a certain intensity and depth, which however he does not like to reveal" (p. 9). Karajan was known to exaggerate or distort the facts surrounding his life in order to cultivate an image of himself as a self-made phenomenon. He married three times, and each time his reasons for doing so seemed to relate directly to his professional as well as his personal needs. In October 1958, after divorcing his second wife, Anita Gutermann, Karajan married Eliette Mouret, with whom he had two children. According to Osborne, "Karajan had wanted nothing to do with family and children wh en he married [his second wife] in 1942. But the desires of a rising young star of thirty-four can be very different from the needs of a man of fifty whose career is substantially made" (p. 4136).

Osborne explores in depth Karajan's relationships with colleagues--including performers, recording producers, and stage directors--and with various orchestras. After a performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera in 1938, the thirty-year-old maestro was hailed as "das Wunder Karajan" in a local review. The young conductor's exceptional talents, combined with his ambition, earned him the resentment of a number of his older colleagues, notably Hans Knappertsbusch and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Karajan shared the conducting of the first postwar Bayreuth Ring cycle with Knappertsbusch, and after a rehearsal in which Karajan anti Max Kojetinsky played piano four-hands for the older conductor, he told Karajan, "If there's a coach's job going begging somewhere, I'll put in a word for you" (p. 303; Wolfgang Wagner's recollection of this incident is nearly identical in Acts: The Autobiography of Wolfgang Wagner [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994], 117). Where Knappertsbusch may have made such stat ements with a touch of humor, there was no room for levity in Karajan's relationship with Furtwangler. Upon arriving in Bayreuch to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the reopening of the festival, Furtwangler promptly had Karajan thrown out of his rehearsal.

Karajan's relationship with Wagner's grandsons during his two-year tenure at Bayreuth was a stormy one, and Osborne's accounts are again consistent with those of Wolfgang Wagner. (Osborne cites Wagner's autobiography several times.) Karajan ...