We reward bad behaviour

Listening to the UK’s Classic FM today, a dramatic and thundering rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Herbert von Karajan and pianist Yevgeny Kissin gave me goose bumps. It also reminded me of a recent article on Von Karajan in the newspaper. Celebrations of Von Karajan’s 100th birth-year anniversary are about to get under way.

As a kid, I grew up in a classical household. This meant that only classical music was allowed. My mother dictated to the rest of the family what could be considered good music and what was rubbish. And at the pinnacle, the absolute Mount Everest of good music taste, was any recording with Von Karajan as conductor.

Due to this fairly obsessive support of a conductor, never mind the extensive vinyl collection of his work at my home, I ended up taking some note of this musician. It wasn’t difficult as Von Karajan was probably one of the earliest exponents of celebrity culture in modern times and an expert player in the art.

I have to add the disclaimer of modern times. There were many people who really knew how to milk the celebrity way of life well before the Beckhams, Paris Hiltons, Lady Dianas et al graced the covers of the popular print media and now, of course, the pages of the internet as well.

The newspaper article mentions a YouTube video taken of a final rehearsal before a studio recording. It’s totally staged and for the benefit of future purchasers of the music who “need to know in order to buy” what unbelievable care was taken during the rehearsals.

Besides the posturing during this made-for-film rehearsal, I seem to remember a fair number of minor scandals about women, women musicians at the Berlin Philharmonic, autocratic treatment of musicians and such like that regularly popped up in the media.

In fact, one particularly nasty bit of personal history is his membership of the Nazi club, which he acquired in 1933 already, and just in case the powers to be didn’t have a record of that, he joined again in 1935. This was certainly during a period in Germany where this was entirely voluntary and well before the strong-arm tactics by the SS was a huge incentive to take up immediate allegiance.

He also, it seems, managed to sideline other competing conductors to leave the playing field open to himself alone. He wrangled huge performance fees, which meant that he managed to leave a massive tax-sheltered estate of £200-million at the time of his death in 1989, which is an enormous sum for a conductor.

Reading through the more honest and frank articles on Herbert von Karajan in the media, online or otherwise, and adding to what I remember of him, one gets the feeling that this was a fairly obnoxious and selfish character.

The spin-doctors of the music industry are promoting his centenary and with that his recordings in the hope of making money on sales of CDs and box compilations. One would imagine that not that much of Von Karajan is available for illegal download, so this could be a lucrative venture on behalf of the music industry.

But then what is the point, you might think, of all of the above hot air? After all, whether the man was a nasty bit of works or not, he was a great artist. But that is exactly the question I ask. Should one reward nastiness or at the least pretend it doesn’t matter?

Can one divorce the man from the work? Or, in other words, can one still buy that fabulous pair of shoes even if they were made in a sweat shop in China? Is that example too extreme? The question is surely whether unethical behaviour should be rewarded and not to what degree the behaviour is unethical.

Are you a good murderer if you have only killed one person, or do you need to have killed five to be considered a nasty? You still ride to hunt a fox even though you don’t kill it any more. But you certainly scare it half to death — in other words, a kind of animal torture.

We have become so immune to moral issues that we might not even blink any more at the news that Von Karajan was a card-carrying Nazi — twice over. Amy Whitehouse receives five Grammy awards in 2008 even though, according to media reports, she is a drug addict who drinks alcohol and snorts coke during her public performances, never mind what else she gets up to in private (or not so private).

Looking at the kind of bad behaviour that regularly gets rewarded, and often with huge sums of money and acclaim, we shouldn’t be surprised that some of our young people are swearing in public, wielding knives and guns and killing people who have the courage to object to their awful actions.