Herbert von Karajan was the most renowned conductor to emerge from Europe in the post-World War II era -- and through fortuitous timing throughout his career, and in spite of controversy that dogged his early years, he was the most recorded conductor of the 20th century, and is likely to remain one of the most visible (and biggest-selling) conductors well into the 21st century. Born in Salzburg and descended from a family of Greek origin with deep roots in Austria -- including scholars and physicians in Vienna and Salzburg -- he was a music prodigy, playing the piano at three and playing his first recital a year later. He received encouragement in his teens to shift his focus from the piano to the podium, and the experience of hearing Toscanini conduct on a visit to Vienna possessed him to follow that path. Toscanini and -- a great irony -- Wilhelm Furtwangler became his two idols among conductors; Karajan's teachers included the renowned Viennese conductor (and one time Bruckner student) Franz Schalk. He got his first musical post in 1928 -- at age 20 -- at the Ulm City Theater, initially as chorusmaster and later as conductor, and over the next seven years he learned how to lead an orchestra from the ground up, serving as coach and every other capacity common to a small but busy musical berth.

With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany (which Karajan joined in 1933) and the positions that opened up with the purging of Jewish and part-Jewish musicians from all posts, Karajan saw an opportunity to advance rapidly on a bigger stage than any available in Austria -- he moved his career to Germany in 1935, and became the youngest man in the country to hold a music director's position when he was appointed to the job at Aachen. He was not overtly political, however, and gladly accepted an invitation from Bruno Walter -- perhaps the most prominent Jewish conductor to have been forced out of Germany -- to conduct Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera. From 1938 through 1942, he conducted the Berlin State Opera, and that same year he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1941, he accepted the appointment as music director of the Berlin State Opera.

Karajan found himself in an awkward but prominent position in Germany during the Nazi era. His approach to conducting -- his demanding rehearsals and his precision, even in dealing with such august bodies as the string section of the Berlin Philharmonic -- and his intense personality, coupled with bracing, exciting musical results, earned him the admiration of Adolf Hitler. Additionally, his avoidance of any public displays of resistance to Nazi ideology made him a favorite of the Nazi cultural officials as a counterweight to Wilhelm Furtwangler, the most renowned conductor in the German-speaking world but also a fiercely independent voice, who was known to regard the Nazi Party officials around him with disdain and dismissiveness. It soon became clear that the government was intent on playing Karajan off against Furtwangler, using the younger conductor to subtly pressure the older man and prick his understandably outsized ego. And Karajan gained the quietly repeated nickname of "Hitler's favorite." How much he did to encourage or engender this "fandom" -- beyond pursuing excellence at the podium -- is questionable, and it should be pointed out that septuagenarian composer Franz Lehár enjoyed similar admiration from the Nazi dictator, despite his being apolitical and also having a Jewish wife. Ironically, Karajan found himself in a somewhat similar situation when he married a woman of Jewish descent, Anita Guetermann, in 1942; after that, he was out of favor with the party as well.

Karajan made his recording debut in 1938, at age 30, and those early recordings, including his first Beethoven symphony (No. 7) and some Wagner preludes, as well as symphonies by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák, are of significant academic interest, as are his wartime recordings. But Karajan's major career on record didn't really begin until after World War II in Vienna, when he met producer Walter Legge. Although Karajan wasn't able to conduct in public because of his activities in Germany during the war -- he was "denazified" officially until 1947 -- Legge, as representative of a privately owned business (EMI Records), was able to arrange sessions with the Vienna Philharmonic. Those recordings, done during a time when musicians in occupied Vienna needed to work just to raise their food rations to a subsistence level -- which included the Beethoven Eighth and Ninth symphonies, among other works -- had a quality and an urgency that were bracing to listeners at the time, and they were still being reissued, in audiophile remastered editions, four decades later, in 2005 and 2006.

Karajan's career ascent was stymied in the decade after the end of the war by his rivalry with Furtwangler, who would not let him near either the Berlin or the Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. Instead, he took the leadership of the Vienna Symphony, and also became the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. It was with the Philharmonia, for EMI, that Karajan's recorded legacy grew astronomically in the late '40s and the first half of the '50s. Karajan's denazification and his appointment to the Philharmonia coincided with the advent of magnetic tape recording in England (though EMI was slow to adopt the new system) and the LP record; he was also more open to the concept of recording than Furtwangler or any of his older conducting rivals, who tended to regard making records as an unpleasant adjunct to a music career. Where Furtwangler, Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch, etc., kept their recording activities to a minimum, Karajan reveled in the act of recording -- he made dozens of records across those seven years, of repertoire ranging from Bach to Vaughan Williams, including operatic works, from Mozart to Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss that have never been equaled, not even by his own subsequent efforts. He also cut his first complete Beethoven symphonic cycle, which straddled the mono and stereo eras -- the First through Seventh and the Ninth were in mono, but the Eighth was in stereo. The Beethoven cycle was also an illustration of Karajan's mindset -- Karajan had never performed the Fourth Symphony in concert, and it would never have occurred to Furtwangler, Kleiber, et al., to record a work that they'd never had in their concert repertoire, but Karajan simply did the Fourth for the first time for the cycle. That series of recordings was also notable for the vision of Beethoven's symphonies that they presented, resplendent in a lush string tone, bursting tension, and energy that oozed out of every bowing and note. Virtually all of his recordings from the 1950s, whether in mono or stereo, retain exceptional luster and richness, owing to Walter Legge's production and the work of the EMI engineering staff, and continue to sell well in the 21st century.

From the second half of the 1950s onward much of Karajan's activity -- apart from occasional forays to RCA Victor and Decca/London, and a short return to EMI at the outset of the 1970s -- was centered on the Deutsche Grammophon label, where the lion's share of his Berlin Philharmonic recordings would be made and released. From the advent of the stereo era onward, as his recordings gained him an ever-widening audience around the world, he would become among the busiest conductors in the studio in the entire world, and also one of the first to avail himself fully of the newest developments in air travel, jetting around the world to meet commitments and also learning to fly himself. Karajan in the late '50s and 1960s seemed as "new world" in his habits as the men he succeeded had seemed "old world." He re-recorded all of his key repertoire, from Beethoven to Schubert, more than once throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a new cycle of the former's nine symphonies in each of the those decades and once more in the 1980s, and he extended himself more deeply into the classical era, with the symphonies of Haydn, and into the Baroque period with Bach and Handel (and even such crowd-pleasing pieces as the Albinoni Adagio and the Pachelbel Canon in D), and to the post-Romantic and modern eras with the orchestral works of Berg and Webern -- he was superb at the latter two, less so with Haydn, Bach, Handel, et al. It was almost a necessity to find these other areas, however, as Karajan's recording commitments multiplied; by the end of the 1970s, he had passed Leopold Stokowski -- the earliest major conductor to embrace the phonograph record, and practically a one-man recording industry -- as the most recorded conductor in history. Among his few "blind spots" among major Romantic composers was Gustav Mahler, whose music didn't become part of his repertoire until very late in his career -- although when he did embrace Mahler, the results were most impressive.

Karajan's career timing was fortuitous in other areas as well. With the advent of the home video era, there were two major bodies of his video performances waiting to fill that demand. Karajan's appearances on television dated back to the end of the 1950s, and his broadcasts from 1965 into the mid-'70s were distributed by Unitel, which later made them available on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD. From the end of the 1970s, however, all of Karajan's video work was done through his own production company, Telemondial, which later licensed them to Sony for release commercially. Ironically, many of these were among his least-favored and controversial works critically -- too many of the Telemondial performances were more like music videos, with hours spent getting the sections of the orchestra looking right, from the correct angle, and synchronizing that shot up with a recording that was already made. With a few notable exceptions, such as the actual live performances in front of an audience at the Vienna New Year's concerts, most viewers dismiss these "documents" as artificial and totally the opposite of what a concert is supposed to be; they were about visual perfection rather than performance, and that seemed to characterize many of his late-career efforts in music. Additionally, during the final 15 years of his life, Karajan engendered some resentment from critics and fellow musicians for his rapidly escalating fees, which led the way to similar demands from other artists and helped to turn the economics of classical concerts into something resembling major-league baseball.

Karajan also played a key role in the development of the compact disc format, lending his work and his prestige to its rollout in 1981 -- it was also reportedly at his insistence that the original intended running time of the CD, 60 minutes, was pushed to 68 minutes, using the running time of a typical Beethoven Symphony No. 9 as a benchmark. At the time of his death in 1989, he had completed yet another Beethoven cycle and was beginning to redo many key works in the digital format; his last recording was of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Oddly enough, for all of his renown, he was not the most honored conductor of his time, at least in the United States -- Sir Georg Solti earned more Grammy Awards -- but he was, along with American Leonard Bernstein, one of the two most well-known conductors in the world. And even the timing of his death was perfect, in that there was no slowing of the number of releases of his work -- CD conversions of work from the 1940s, 1950s (especially legitimate versions of live opera recordings, and in particular those with Maria Callas), and 1960s have filled release lists and still fill the racks of music stores more than two decades later; both EMI and Deutsche Grammophon have their "Karajan Editions" in various forms. ~ Bruce Eder

Claude Debussy (born Achille-Claude Debussy) was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His mature compositions, distinctive and appealing, combined modernism and sensuality so successfully that their sheer beauty often obscures their technical innovation. Debussy is considered the founder and leading exponent of musical Impressionism (although he resisted the label), and his adoption of non-traditional scales and tonal structures was paradigmatic for many composers who followed.

The son of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, Debussy began piano studies at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11. While a student there, he encountered the wealthy Nadezhda von Meck (most famous as Tchaikovsky's patroness), who employed him as a music teacher to her children; through travel, concerts and acquaintances, she provided him with a wealth of musical experience. Most importantly, she exposed the young Debussy to the works of Russian composers, such as Borodin and Mussorgsky, who would remain important influences on his music.

Debussy began composition studies in 1880, and in 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. This prize financed two years of further study in Rome -- years that proved to be creatively frustrating. However, the period immediately following was fertile for the young composer; trips to Bayreuth and the Paris World Exhibition (1889) established, respectively, his determination to move away from the influence of Richard Wagner, and his interest in the music of Eastern cultures.

After a relatively bohemian period, during which Debussy formed friendships with many leading Parisian writers and musicians (not least of which were Mallarmé, Satie, and Chausson), the year 1894 saw the enormously successful premiere of his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) -- a truly revolutionary work that brought his mature compositional voice into focus. His seminal opera Pelléas et Mélisande, completed the next year, would become a sensation at its first performance in 1902. The impact of those two works earned Debussy widespread recognition (as well as frequent attacks from critics, who failed to appreciate his forward-looking style), and over the first decade of the 20th century he established himself as the leading figure in French music -- so much so that the term "Debussysme" ("Debussyism"), used both positively and pejoratively, became fashionable in Paris. Debussy spent his remaining healthy years immersed in French musical society, writing as a critic, composing, and performing his own works internationally. He succumbed to colon cancer in 1918, having also suffered a deep depression brought on by the onset of World War I.

Debussy's personal life was punctuated by unfortunate incidents, most famously the attempted suicide of his first wife, Lilly Texier, whom he abandoned for the singer Emma Bardac. However, his subsequent marriage to Bardac, and their daughter Claude-Emma, whom they called "Chouchou" and who became the dedicatee of the composer's Children's Corner piano suite, provided the middle-aged Debussy with great personal joys.

Debussy wrote successfully in most every genre, adapting his distinctive compositional language to the demands of each. His orchestral works, of which Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and La mer (The Sea, 1905) are most familiar, established him as a master of instrumental color and texture. It is this attention to tone color -- his layering of sound upon sound so that they blend to form a greater, evocative whole -- that linked Debussy in the public mind to the Impressionist painters.

His works for solo piano, particularly his collections of Préludes and Etudes, which have remained staples of the repertoire since their composition, bring into relief his assimilation of elements from both Eastern cultures and antiquity -- especially pentatonicism (the use of five-note scales), modality (the use of scales from ancient Greece and the medieval church), parallelism (the parallel movement of chords and lines), and the whole-tone scale (formed by dividing the octave into six equal intervals).

Pelléas et Mélisande and his collections of songs for solo voice establish the strength of his connection to French literature and poetry, especially the symbolist writers, and stand as some of the most understatedly expressive works in the repertory. The writings of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, and his childhood friend Paul Verlaine appear prominently among his chosen texts and joined symbiotically with the composer's own unique moods and forms of expression. ~ Allen Schrott

His musical education was erratic, he toiled as a civil servant and wrote music only part-time, influenced few if any of his contemporaries, died early from alcoholism, and left a small body of work. Yet Modest Mussorgsky was a towering figure in nineteenth century Russian music. His works exhibit a daring, raw individuality, a unique sound that well-meaning associates tried to conventionalize and smooth over. He is best known for Night on Bald Mountain (bowdlerized by Rimsky-Korsakov), Pictures at an Exhibition (a difficult piano suite orchestrated by Ravel), and the dark, declamatory opera Boris Godunov (polished by Rimsky-Korsakov) -- bastardized works all, yet each one full of arresting harmonies, disturbing colors, and grim celebrations of Russian nationalism.

Mussorgsky died in poverty, but he was born to a wealthy landowning family. Under his mother's tutelage, he developed a facility at the piano, but entered a cadet school in preparation for a military career. He joined a choir and discovered Russian church music, which would profoundly influence his later work.

Upon graduation in 1856, Mussorgsky entered the Russian Imperial Guard. That year he started to socialize with the composers Dargomizhsky and Cui, and through them Balakirev, with whom he began composition lessons. During this period he wrote small piano pieces and songs, and after an emotional crisis in 1858 resigned his commission with the intention of composing full-time. He began to go his own way as a composer in 1861, but was preoccupied helping to manage his family's estate. The decline in his family's fortunes led him to accept low-level civil service positions. He joined a commune with other intellectuals and became a proponent of musical Realism, applying the style to his songs. He had difficulty finishing works in larger formats, but his music circulated widely enough that by the late 1860s he was cast with Balakirev, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin as part of Russia's "Mighty Handful."

Mussorgsky toiled many years at his masterpiece, Boris Godunov, which reflected in music the inflections of Russian speech and met with great success in 1874. That year he also produced his innovative piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Yet his heavy drinking led to his dismissal from government service in 1880. Friends offered some financial help and Mussorgsky occasionally accompanied singers at the piano, but his finances and mental state quickly deteriorated. He died in 1881, leaving it to posterity to sort through and complete his unfinished works of unruly genius.

Maurice Ravel was among the most significant and influential composers of the early 20th century. Although he is frequently linked with Claude Debussy as an exemplar of musical impressionism, and some of their works have a surface resemblance, Ravel possessed an independent voice that grew out of his love of a broad variety of styles, including the French Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Spanish folk traditions, and American jazz and blues. His elegant and lyrically generous body of work was not large in comparison with that of some of his contemporaries, but his compositions are notable for being meticulously and exquisitely crafted. He was especially gifted as an orchestrator, an area in which he remains unsurpassed.

Ravel's mother was of Basque heritage, a fact that accounted for his lifelong fascination with Spanish music, and his father was a Swiss inventor and engineer, most likely the source of his commitment to precision and craftsmanship. At the age of 14, he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he was a student from 1889 to 1895 and from 1897 to 1903. His primary composition teacher was Gabriel Fauré. A major disappointment of his life was his failure to win the Prix de Rome in spite of numerous attempts. The difficulty was transparently the conflict between the conservative administration of the Conservatory and Ravel's independent thinking, meaning his association with the French avant-garde (Debussy), and his interest in non-French traditions (Wagner, the Russian nationalists, Balinese gamelan). He had already established himself as a composer of prominence with works such as his String Quartet, and the piano pieces Pavane pour une infante défunte, Jeux d'eau, and the Sonatine, and his loss of the Prix de Rome in 1905 was considered such a scandal that the director of the Conservatory was forced to resign.

Ravel continued to express admiration for Debussy's music throughout his life, but as his own reputation grew stronger during the first decade of the century, a mutual professional jealousy cooled their personal relationship. Around the same time, he developed a friendship with Igor Stravinsky. The two became familiar with each other's work during Stravinsky's time in Paris and worked collaboratively on arrangements for Sergey Diaghilev.

Between 1909 and 1912, Ravel composed Daphnis et Chloé for Diaghilev and Les Ballets Russes. It was the composer's largest and most ambitious work and is widely considered his masterpiece. He wrote a second ballet for Diaghilev, La Valse, which the impresario rejected, but which went on to become one of his most popular orchestral works. Following his service in the First World War as an ambulance driver and the death of his mother in 1917, his output was temporarily diminished. In 1925, the Monte Carlo Opera presented the premiere of another large work, the "lyric fantasy" L'enfant et les sortilèges, a collaboration with writer Colette.

American jazz and blues became increasingly intriguing to the composer. In 1928 he made a hugely successful tour of North America, where he met George Gershwin and had the opportunity to broaden his exposure to jazz. Several of his most important late works, such as the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 and the Piano Concerto in G show the influence of that interest.

Ironically, Ravel, who in his youth was rejected by some elements of the French musical establishment for being a modernist, in his later years was scorned by Satie and the members of Les Six as being old-fashioned, a symbol of the establishment. In 1932, an injury he sustained in an automobile accident started a physical decline that resulted in memory loss and an inability to communicate. He died in 1937, following brain surgery.

In spite of leaving one of the richest and most important bodies of work of any early 20th century composer, one that included virtually every genre except for symphony and liturgical music, Ravel is most often remembered for an arrangement of another composer's work, and for a piece he considered among his least significant. His orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition has been wildly popular with concertgoers (and the royalties from it made Ravel a rich man). Boléro, a 15-minute Spanish dance in which a single theme is repeated in a variety of instrumental guises, has been ridiculed for its insistent repetitiveness, but it is also a popular favorite and one of the most familiar and frequently performed orchestral works of the 20th century. ~ Stephen Eddins