Kick the Karajan

January 31, 2008

Music commentator Norman Lebrecht takes aim at conductor Herbert von Karajan as many in the music world gear up to celebrate the centenary of his birth. If you’re a Karajan fan, wear your seatbelt. Lebrecht’s latest assessment of the conductor shows no mercy: Karajan had a tendency to homogenise music, bending it to his line of beauty, suppressing its diversity of character. Hearing an excess of Karajan is like spending a month at McDonalds, a bloating, desensitising experience. Those who listen to Karajan for the first time this year will, I suspect, be stupefied by the sameness of his brand. (Karajan) never made an original note of music, bequeathed a transmissible idea or represented any appreciable human value.” Click here to read the rest of Lebrecht’s article, “The Monster and His Myth”.