Genius.

When I was young I have mentioned before how we were centred around the gramophone much as today families are centred around the TV. The records we played are with me still, religiously kept by a friend, through all the years I was away living overseas. They sit like soldiers side by side waiting to be taken down and played again, custodians of the magic of music, ready to serve to the human ear a mystical series of notes and harmonics which the 'ancients' had identified as a mathematical sequence for the brain to interpret in all kinds of ways and the human psyche to construed as pleasure. 

These old brittle records have the ability to cast a spell. Arturo Toscanini, Herbert von Karajan, Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, Maria Calas, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Rubinstein the list goes on and on. 
We had our favourites, who sang better than who, who played better than who, which was the greatest orchestra who was the best conductor.
It was all very subjective but the Berlin Symphony and Herbert von Karajan were in our modest household the tops.
I have been watching a program this evening in which a film made recently of von Karajan was shown and a warts and all presentation of his long career was made. Von Karajan was a maestro a perfectionist, an egotist, driven, self centred self absorbed, not in any way an easy man.
Yet gifted people who had been members of the Orchestra and who had had to bear the brunt of what today we would call tyrannical behaviour, they adored his genius. His precision and insight into converting, through the orchestra the beauty, the fury, the melancholy and the excitement of the score which identifies that unfathomable world of a great composer.
The interpretation or the music is vital and the detail that is in von Karajan's interpretation marks him out from his peers. The crystal clarity, like a bubbling stream skipping and tantalising the listener.
His discipline, bordering megalomania drew the best out of his sometimes adoring, sometimes fearful orchestral players but as is often the case, mysticism mixed with fear often brings out the best, even when it leaves a scar.
Some people are born with a self belief which allows nothing to get in the way of their talent von Karajan was one of those people. He held himself aloof from everyone, part showman part egotist he defined his talent to be precious and it needed the rarefied air of isolation so as not to become contaminated.
Sitting in our living room we were unaware of the tangled demons that drove him only the music which to this day seemed to have a clarity and a meaning that has not been repeated.