![]() If this seems surprising, it is typical of the paradoxes surrounding a man and a musician whose image - assiduously cultivated in different ways by Karajan himself, his admirers, a.ifd his detractors - was often profoundly at odds with the realities both of his private life and of his music making. f The composer to whom Karajan felt closest was Shostakovich. It was a defining moment for a young boy whose life and career would be intimately bound up with subsequent political events - the collapse of imperial Austro-, Hungary, the rise of Nazism, the birth of the cult of “the great conductor,” the Second World War, postwar tensions over Berlin, the democratization of Germany and its regeneration as Europe’s most successful consumer economy, and the continuing preoccupation in the latter years of the century with the Nazi period and the problems of guilt and expiation it involves. “Now there’ll be a war,” muttered his uncle. Herbert von Karajan, vacationing with his family on an island off the Adriatic coast, watched the funeral convoy pass. ■ The story begins with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. Periods in Karajan’s life hitherto ignored or believed to have been in some way “covered up” - his childhood in Austria during and after the First World War and his early career as a conductor in Nazi Germany - are frankly and revealingly explored. This biography explores Karajan’s life and music making against the background of European music and politics in the years 1908-1989. ![]() Thes( i', starting point that for a biography were only the draws on interviews with those who worked with Karajan during his sixty-year career, and on a vast array of primary archival material that has never previously been examined. Richard Osborne knew h d many con¬ versations with him. BELVEDERE TIBURON LIBRARY 01840 7880 ■ m VON L I PE IN MUSIC RICHARD OSBOHNE Herbert von Karajan wa the twentieth century’s.
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