Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music by Richard Osborne Chatto & Windus 851pp, £30 in UK
In 1990, reviewing Robert Bachman's biography of Karajan for this paper, I suggested that the reader ended up sympathising with the conductor precisely because Bachman's polemic against him was so pitiless: the superstar becomes an underdog. Parenthetically, I noted that I agreed in substance with Bach man's case; thanks to Richard Osborne's colossal new biography, I no longer do so.
Osborne doesn't shirk the vexed question of Karajan's purported Nazism: he unquestionably joined the Nazi party in Aachen in 1935 under instruction from the local municipal authority; undoubtedly he profited opportunistically from his membership ("the right chessmove" - Yehudi Menuhin), but then in the Third Reich "Music fared best, if only because it was the least political of the arts" (William L. Shirer). Around the same time as Karajan, some eight million Germans and Austrians joined the party, and the Nuremberg Tribunal refrained from branding party membership as a criminal offence in itself. According to Goebbels, Hitler had "a low opinion" of Karajan, whom he railed at as a pretentious Kerl (bumptious fellow). In turn, Karajan labelled the Nazis "Hottentots". In 1942 he married Anita Gutermann, who was quarter Jewish, something hardly calculated to endear him further to the authorities. Here, however, ambiguities set in: Osborne calls the "Anita factor" a "grey area" and refers to her "enthusiasm for the Nazis" without giving us any details, consigning to the footnotes Charles Munch's sister's claim that "Anita . . . cavort with high-ranking Nazis" in wartime Paris (this relegation of potentially important material to asides and footnotes is one of the most irritating features of the book). Karajan himself conducted in occupied Paris, playing the Horst Wessel Lied as a curtain-raiser to Tristan.
So undoubtedly the Maestro's hands were far from unsullied, yet the denazification process essentially exonerated him. The campaign of vilification that was reignited in the 1980s claimed to have unearthed new facts, yet Osborne makes it clear that this was not the case. He convincingly argues that the gutter press and the tabloidised "quality" press of the Thatcher/Murdoch era found Karajan a large enough target for the kind of attack that concealed right-wing scurrilousness behind a facade of pseudo-liberal moralising. Karajan himself, for better or for worse, refused to comment.
Karajan married three times, and a weak point of this book is its failure to give us more than a sketchy and faintly malicious account of these women. Eliette Mouret, a French fashion model much Karajan's junior, was with him for the last thirty-something years of his life, thirty-one of these as his wife and the mother of his two much-loved daughters. Osborne, however, gives us an insubstantial portrayal of her as a human being in her own right, something that would surely have given us a reciprocal insight into Karajan's mentality.
Indeed it's an indictment of Osborne's method, or lack of it, that even after so much obviously painstaking research his subject's larger-than-life personality emerges only in fleeting glimpses, many of them contradictory. Was he a bully (Elizabeth Schwarzkopf said he "had a bully's instinct for picking on small fry")? Was he a saint (there are many instances of his kindness towards musicians who had fallen on hard times or into bad health, to say nothing of his chivalry towards the almost deformed pianist Clara Haskil)? Was he bisexual (Anita, who may herself have had an affair with the distinctly ambidextrous Leonard Bernstein, claimed Karajan was homosexual; Christopher Raeburn said that his predilections embraced "A little bit of everything")? Who or what was he? Osborne doesn't leave us much the wiser; my own cumulative impression is that he was a curiously endearing figure with many monstrous attributes; beyond that, I admit to a healthy indifference.
"Why should so prodigiously gifted an Englishman appear to be bothered by a dead Austrian maestro?" The question, asked concerning John Eliot Gardiner (who discerned "something evil" in Karajan) and characteristically left unanswered, might equally be asked of Osborne himself. "To what extent is the life of a recreative artist a suitable subject for a full-dress biography?" This question, postponed until page 751, also receives no answer, and this book does not in itself provide one. Anyone contemplating the purchase of such a weighty and expensive biography would indeed be unwise not to ask themselves: why bother?