[3][4][5][6][7] Herbert's great-great-grandfather, Georg Karajan (Geórgios Karajánnis, Greek: Γεώργιος Καραγιάννης), was born in Kozani, in the Ottoman province of Rumelia (now in Greece), leaving for Vienna in 1767, and eventually Chemnitz, Electorate of Saxony.

[8] Georg and his brother participated in the establishment of Saxony's cloth industry, and both were ennobled for their services by Frederick Augustus III on 1 June 1792, thus adding the prefix "von" to the family name.

[9] Although traditional biographers ascribed a Slovak and Serbian or simply a Slavic origin to his mother,[10] Karajan's family from the maternal side, through his grandfather who was born in the village of Mojstrana, Duchy of Carniola (today in Slovenia), was Slovene.

In the postwar era, Karajan maintained silence about his Nazi Party membership, which gave rise to a number of conflicting stories about it.

After the annexation of Austria, the responsible Reich Treasurer of the Nazi Party discovered Karajan's double membership in Munich and declared the first accession invalid.

In Salzburg in 1934, Karajan led the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time, and from 1934 to 1941, he was engaged to conduct operatic and orchestra concerts at the Theater Aachen.

Karajan's career received a significant boost in 1935 when he became Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor, at Aachen, and performed as a guest conductor in Bucharest, Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris.

The critic wrote that Karajan's "success with Wagner's demanding work Tristan und Isolde sets himself alongside Wilhelm Furtwängler and Victor de Sabata, the greatest opera conductors in Germany at the present time".

[17] Receiving a contract with Deutsche Grammophon that same year, Karajan made the first of numerous recordings, conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in the overture to The Magic Flute.

His marriage to Anita Gütermann (with one Jewish grandparent) and the prosecution of his agent Rudolf Vedder also contributed to his temporary professional decline, leaving him few engagements beyond a limited season of concerts with the Staatskapelle.

[citation needed] By 1944, Karajan was, by his account, losing favour with the Nazi leadership, but he conducted concerts in Berlin as late as 18 February 1945.

A short time later, in the closing stages of the war, he and his wife fled Germany for Milan, relocating with the assistance of Victor de Sabata.

Critics such as Jim Svejda[24] have pointed out that other prominent conductors, such as Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, and Fritz Busch, fled Germany or Italy at the time.

On 22 October 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Karajan married his second wife, Anna Maria "Anita" Sauest, born Gütermann [de], the daughter of a well-known manufacturer of yarn for sewing machines.

His biographer Roger Vaughan observed this phenomenon while listening to the Berlin Philharmonic play in 1986, after nearly 30 years under Karajan's direction, noting that "what rivets one's attention is the beauty and perfection of the sounds.

The eminent Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon considered Karajan's recordings of the 12 London Symphonies as some of the finest he knew, and his multiple Beethoven cycles are still staples.

In a 1981 interview with Gramophone's Robert Layton, Karajan remarked that he felt "a much deeper influence, affinity, kinship—call it what you like—[in Sibelius's music] with Bruckner.

"[50] When pressed about this connection toward the end of his life by his biographer Osborne, Karajan echoed some of these sentiments, saying: There is in both [Bruckner and Sibelius] a sense of the elemental.

In his conversations with Osborne, Karajan recalled that, in the 1930s, when Italian opera was still something of a rarity in Austria and Germany: [M]y training in Verdi's Falstaff came from Toscanini.

[53]Karajan went on to make two recordings of Falstaff—one for EMI/HMV in 1956 and another for Philips in 1980—and his colleague Otto Klemperer hailed the Vienna State Opera production as "really excellent".

[57] Karajan's 1981 Deutsche Grammophon recording of An Alpine Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic became the first work ever to be pressed on the compact disc format.

Two reviews from the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs illustrate this point: The New York Times writer John Rockwell wrote in 1989: "He had a particular gift for Wagner and above all for Bruckner, whose music he conducted with sovereign command and elevated feeling.

In a 1982 tour of the United States, musical stars from Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa to Frank Sinatra attended his Carnegie Hall concerts.

[This quote needs a citation] The West German news weekly Der Spiegel reported that he earned more than $6 million annually from record sales and conducting fees in 1989.

Karajan amassed a fortune valued at 250 million euros as of 2008, remaining one of top-selling classical music artists two decades after his death.

[67] He received the Médaille de Vermeil from the Académie française in Paris,[68] the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London,[69] the Olympia Award of the Onassis Foundation[70] and the UNESCO International Music Prize.

In Salzburg, for instance, the Karajan Foundation of Vienna commissioned the Czech artist Anna Chromý to create a life-sized statue of him, which now stands outside his birthplace.

Most famously, the version of Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube heard during the film's early outer space scenes is that of Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic.

[82] Other Karajan recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic include Also sprach Zarathustra, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Mahler's Symphony No.

Karajan premiered Carl Orff's De temporum fine comoedia in 1973 with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon.