One of the things I enjoy about his renditions is how much you can discover (and re-discover) about a piece. Dvorak's 9th symphony, for example, which lends its

One of the things I enjoy about his renditions is how much you can discover (and re-discover) about a piece. Dvorak's 9th symphony, for example, which lends itself a lot to personal interpretation, has a lot of variety in its renditions, but few are as haunting and expressive as Celibidache's. After I heard it for the first time, all the others seemed a little bland, even Karajan's. He was not the most conventional of conductors, but he certainly enriched the world of music through his activity. As for his personal views and his personal life... one of the first painful lessons I was taught about music is that admiration for one's art is best kept confined to art. It's tempting to think that someone who created beautiful art is a great person. Oftentimes they're not. Back in high school, I was not just really passionate about music (which I still am), but I also had way more free time than I have now, so I did the whole teenage band thing. I got to meet a bunch of musicians from the local scene, some of them of modest international fame, at least within their genre. I quickly learned that many of the people that I genuinely admired were major assholes. And this assholery, I have found, crosses all kinds of borders. It spans every music genre, every kind of music education, every gender.