His music will live for the ages. Pete Seeger is little more than an old crackpot with a banjo. Jane Fonda is a washed out bimbo starlet with a history of dabbling in treason and politics. Von Karajan is the more difficult of the three, because he created quality, brilliant music, and in his youth idolized the likes of Hitler and Goebels and wanted his country, Austria to be absorbed in “greater Germany”. He’s that telegraph boy from the Sound of Music, only he went on to greatness. This disturbs the hell out of me. I’ve read Eliot and Pound, and although they were well worth the reading, I can take them or leave them. Their poetry requires study and is not for everyone. But the biggest idiot that was ever born can listen to Von Karajan’s rendition Beethoven and be utterly awed by it. And he was a goose-stepping fascist pig. Doesn’t that bother you? It does me.
For what it’s worth HVK seemed to have shed any Nazi beliefs he had held. He worked with Jewish musicians all the time.
Well said. It bothers me as well. It’s very difficult for me to separate an artist from his politics, particularly when his politics involve genocide.