As the centenary of conductor Herbert von Karajan hove into view, so there was another certainly - that Norman Lebrecht would excoriate "Das Wunder".
Reminding the world that Karajan was a deeply unpleasant, greedy, vain, musically conservative Nazi, who has destroyed classical music is at least a part-time occupation for Norman Lebrecht, as he struggles to push against the pendulum of adulation.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for critical engagement with reputations, and where necessary violent re-evaluations, but it has to be done with a larger aim in mind.
Lebrecht’s argument is that Karajan being an awful person and a Nazi, led inevitably to musical inferiority: that and his vanity led to him being over-rated: that and his greed damaged classical music for everyone else. This can be shown quite simply as:
(QM/(PA+N)+V=R)+G=KQM is the Musical Quality
PA is Personal Awfulness
N is Naziness
V is Vanity
R is Rating of musical performance in the public’s mind
G is Greed
K is Karajan
Note that a common howler is to see the outcome of the equation as
QMActually, a lot of what Lebrecht says is fair enough.
Karajan’s recordings of baroque music are, depending on your taste, repellent or hilariously misconceived: the gloopy
Adagio, commonly ascribed to Albinoni but at least half-written by Giazotto brings forth a queasiness unmatched by any other piece of music I can imagine.
The explorations of what was once called ‘authentic performance’ before its aspirations were reined in as ‘historically-informed’, left no impact on his chromium shell. His Mozart and Haydn can seem laughably bloated, but his Beethoven, Brahms and other bits of the core German repertoire (for Lebrecht, Karajan’s concentration on this is itself a dubious choice) still worked (at least in his early days).
It’s true also that Karajan was no storm-trooper for the avant-garde – he didn’t care to help anyone ‘throw a lance into the future’. A few pieces by Carl Orff hardly count – especially as he fights his own posthumous rear-guard action against accusations of Nazidom. Though why a Nazi would want to conduct the degenerate works of Schönberg, Berg and Webern, the unacceptably nationalist Bartók, the shamefully Slavic Stravinsky, and Hindemith’s clearly anti-Nazi M
athis der Maler Symphony isn’t immediately clear.
Would Schönberg have approved of the dubious sonic experiment of reseating the orchestra through each of the
Variations? Who cares?; he was dead. Stravinsky, one of the few living composers Karajan essayed, memorably and tartly remarked that his
Rite of Spring was in a ‘tempo di hoochie-koochie’.
But attacking Karajan raises the same problem as attacking Wagner and Eliot for their anti-Semitism. We begin to focus on that individual as a lightning-rod of hatefulness, forgetting that there were others whose views were just as nightmarish, and so, those people get off.
The truth is that anyone who wanted to continue their careers when the Nazis rose to power had to choose from three options;
1) Enthusiastically embrace the philosophy
2) Decide to what degree they were willing to see their careers suffer rather than help the Nazis
3) Leave
Once we start to look at anyone who stuck around, we find the inevitable and necessary compromises that come with living in a dictatorship. Once the dictatorship is gone, it’s a different matter, but the genial uncle still has a dark past.
Lebrecht’s Cassandra act has been going on for over a decade: one of his most successful publications was
The Maestro Myth: a sustained attack on… well, it does what it says on the tin. Stupidity, pettiness, arrogance, vanity, unfaithfulness, greed, cruelty, deviousness, blackmail, profiteering, racism, sexual perversion and above all tyranny and egomania, this catalogue of conductors’ unseemly behaviour spared few (except those who, living, might sue).
But for some reason Karajan has become Lebrecht’s lightning-rod. It’s just a shame that while focusing on the
éminence-not-so-
grise, and his Fafnerish wealth, he was unaware of the fact that conductor Robert King was abusing his choristers.
Sonic Illuminations is a day exploring sound and moving image at BFI Southbank. More info here
Every epic widescreen shot of this highly choreographed film has an Antonioni-like formal beauty, which keeps the intense emotions (just) in check until the awful final scenes. There’s an almost balletic quality to the movement of the actors and the camera, and Jancsó's then-trademark long-takes rack up the tension and, paradoxically, the beauty. Some see him as more of a formalist than a psychological film-maker but we can't miss how, forced into mutual betrayals, characters struggle to avoid facing each other.
There is nowhere to hide, just as the interrogation implacably bypasses the prisoners’ prevarications. There’s a Fordian fascination with doorways, ironically pointing to the hopelessness of escape, as in Ethan's final departure into his own lonely world in The Searchers.
Three pensioners – two men a woman – float in a swimming pool, taking refuge from the sun’s heat. After a while, one of the men lazily swims over to the woman. While they make love, the other man takes no notice. They part and the initial tableau returns. Then a young man swims by oblivious to these goings-on, forcing us to question society’s youth-ophilia. 
A wintry tree stands next to a cairn-like pile of rocks. Two BMX-ers appear and bounce their way over it (after all, why simply ride around it?) then disappear down the hill. The scene is again empty. In the tree a crow’s nest mysteriously catches fire.
