Herbert von Karajan was born in 1908 and died in July 1989, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918 and died in October 1990, and in one of his last major concerts he conducted the Berlin Symphony Orchestra with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, in a concert celebrating the fall of the Wall. It’s the same orchestra that had been conducted for decades by von Karajan, but had never invited Bernstein to conduct it throughout that period. It was one of the episodes of the complex relationship between the two great conductors who dominated classical music in the second half of the 20th century. Many things separated them, they respected each other immensely from a musical point of view, their personal connection was complicated. They were rivals, but their rivalry led to the creation of sublime music. This is the subject of the documentary film made in 2015 by Emmanuelle Franc for a French television station, in a series dedicated to the great rivalries of history.
The documentary follows the main events of the artistic lives and careers of the two giants of music. Born ten years apart, they almost belonged to the same generation, but they were separated by the great historical schism of the 20th century represented by World War II. Leonard Bernstein belonged to the first generation of Americans in a Jewish family who arrived in America at the beginning of the 20th century. The war caught him during the ascension period in which he was growing from a passionate jazz pianist into the first great conductor born in the United States. Herbert von Karajan, a little older, compromised joining the Nazi party to pursue a career in which he conducted orchestras purged by Jewish musicians in Austria and Germany, singing for and being appreciated by Nazi dignitaries. Immediately after the war, while Bernstein continued his artistic ascension, von Karajan went through a period of ‘denazification’, considered too short by many, to resume his musical career after a two-year break. From the mid-1950s until the end of their lives, the two became celebrities of the musical and mundane worlds, led large orchestras, were musical rivals and media stars loved and appreciated by the public. Both loved the lights of the ramp, understood the role of television in making information and culture accessible to many people and put their charismatic personalities in the service of music and education of the public and especially of the younger generations. Each of them had his shadows and torments. The rivalry between them was one of the complex dimensions of these huge personalities.
The format imposed on the filmmaker allows for a comfortable viewing that undoubtedly captures the essentials, but also has its limitations. The 55-minute duration of the show makes some of the most interesting episodes look superficial, although the authors have struggled to filter and present the essence. To what extent was von Karajan’s compromise during the Nazi period a pact with the devil? Has he ever thought of alternatives, to choosing the path of exile chosen by many German intellectuals and artists, even non-Jewish? Why has Bernstein never been invited to conduct in Berlin in the nearly three decades that von Karajan conducted the orchestra? I would love to see a more detailed version of the movie, with material that must have been omitted from editing of the final version. But even so, this documentary is captivating and gets emotional at many moments. Follow the sequences in which they conduct the same musical works. The two are so different in many details of style and approaches to working with the orchestra. Paradoxically, Bernstein appears more conservative, more orthodox musically, while von Karajan is more radical, more revolutionary. But when they conduct, both are huge, charismatic, passionate – they live the music and create it through gestures and expressions. Now, when three decades have passed since they are gone, the rivalry of the two has also become a high intensity meeting in the realm of the sublime.