Is Von Karajan a bad habit?

A great portion of my passion for classical music lies on listening to recordings -lots of recordings.

It is true that nothing matches the excitement or intensity of watching a live performance, but going to lots of classical music concerts can get expensive, and I don’t mean only in regards to money.

I started going to classical music concerts since I was a child, but I really started to grasp the complexity of music when I started to analyze what I was listening to.

I started to buy a lot of records, but now I that I think about it, most of them, to not just say almost all of them had the name of Herbert Von Karajan stamped on them.

You can’t go wrong by starting to experiencing classical music with the recordings made by Karajan and his Berlin Philharmonic. The quality of the recordings, both technically and artistically, definitively sets a high standard.

However, if you only listen to Karajan’s records for a long time, like I did, you turn what initially represented an informal education into a bad habit -in other words, you get spoiled. 

When it came to listening to other recordings to widen my references so I could enjoy diversity, which is how you really learn, I found it hard not only to enjoy them, but also to get rid of the Karajan sound that I had inadvertently planted in my head.

It took me years of making a deliberate effort to appreciate the quality of other records to finally leave my Karajan phase behind. I purposely didn’t hear Karajan for a few years and instead focused on recordings made by other greats like Bernstein, Solti or Kleiber and, more recently, to albums made by Salonen, Currentzis and Fisher.

I am not dishing on Karajan, don’t get me wrong. I do feel lots of gratitude for helping me wet my feet in the difficult, at times intimidating, arena of classical music. I am just saying that in order to experience the real power of classical music, diversity is the key. In this fascinating world, you must often kill your darlings and give the benefit of the doubt to those “strangers” -they may ultimately become your new “favorites”.