There are two different approaches these days to writing about the most celebrated living musicians. The first is hagiographical, with the musical sainthood in question arising less from beauty of soul than from efficiency of press agent. Prime examples of such cultist efforts are the sentimental books about opera singers now seemingly a necessary accompaniment to an over- and misused voice. The second is spiteful; it takes its raison d’être from nothing more profound than the natural human desire to cut the famous down to size. A prime recent example of this way of writing biography was Glenn Plaskin’s life of Vladimir Horowitz, in which the artist, and those around him, were blamed for his not emerging publicly as a full-fledged, lifelong homosexual.[1] This year music lovers have been presented with another example of the spiteful approach in Roger Vaughan’s recent biography of Herbert von Karajan, the legendary German conductor now nearing eighty.[2]

Biographical spite doesn’t exist save when it is projected onto success, and Karajan is quite simply the most successful conductor to have emerged on the international music scene since World War II. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he was perhaps the leading conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London; in 1955 he became the director for life of the Berlin Philharmonic; in 1957 he became the director as well of the Vienna Opera, a post he held until 1964; in 1967 he founded the Salzburg Easter Festival, and he remains