For many it is the stuff of pure nightmare. The old enemy back from the dead – on posters, on websites, even on coins. For it’s the centenary of Herbert von Karajan, and, 19 years after his death, the maestro with most recordings to his name, the man who led the Berlin Philharmonic for an astonishing 34 years, is being fêted again.

Forget Liverpool ’08 – in Germany and Austria it is definitely Karajan 2008, with a celebratory website (www.karajan.org), a commemorative €5 coin, a sprawl of tribute concerts and a tonne of repackagings of some of his crucial cuts on Deutsche Grammophon. Next Saturday Radio 3 joins the party, with a Karajan Week devoted to picking through the conductor’s discography, and including a detailed documentary on his life and times.

No other conductor could possibly inspire all that – and no other conductor could possibly have prompted such a backlash in response. The party year dawned with a flurry of antiKarajan polemics. He was, we were told, a bully. A barely repentant fascist. A self-publicist. And, worst of all, his music-making was facile: seductive, perhaps, and certainly disciplined, but empty of meaning.

It’s a tempting narrative – indeed, it’s a story that’s been given so much airtime that it is practically canonical. Growing up without any direct experience of the man, my first impressions were only the slurs: it was his great rival, Leonard Bernstein, who seized the imagination, even to the point of claiming Karajan’s home ground for his epochal performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the recently fallen Berlin Wall.

Perhaps the most interesting release this year from Karajan’s record label is Robert Dornhelm’s biopic, Herbert von Karajan – or Beauty as I See it, a revealing clutch of interviews with those who knew the man. Fast forward through the toadying montages and you hit some fascinating observations.

The soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf recalls his instructions to one hapless cast: “And if any of you are unwilling I’ll twist the screws so tight that every one of you comes crawling to me on your stomachs.” That’s a story that sounds dramatic until you hear that at Karajan’s very first orchestra his sacked concert-master turned up to rehearsals with a loaded pistol in his pocket – such was his hatred of the jumped-up twentysomething who had the arrogance to dismiss him.

That this maestro took no prisoners isn’t up for debate: no, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have a pint with him. But what emerges most strongly from the film is his artistic credo, indivisible from his personality: the pursuit of total perfection. He had an unflinching desire to control every aspect of music production, even including directing Wagner on stage at the Salzburg Festival (badly) to masterminding the bizarrely dated tableaux of his filmed concerts.

The error is to mistake this musical authoritarianism for the political kind. It’s a terrible and dangerous diversion to align Karajan’s moral cowardice (like many of the artistic community in 1930s Germany, he never considered exile and joined the Nazi party to further his ambition) with that artistic vision. To crave total power on the podium is not some warped adaptation of Nazi doctrine: he simply accepted no other authority. Or as the soprano Gundula Janowitz puts it on film: “he was the locomotive, we were the carriages.”

What were Karajan’s real crimes? He deliberately cultivated an image of cool self-control during performances. He shaped the craggiest of the Romantic repertoire into cogent, seamless wholes. And he believed that everything was subservient to music. One astute observer in the film points out that: “Politics came to art rather than vice versa.” No, Karajan didn’t do outreach.

All that clashes with our image of the perfect 21st-century maestro. We want him sweating like Valery Gergiev, or warmly beatific like Simon Rattle: we want to feel what they feel. The period movement has wiped out our image of rhapsodic Beethoven or Brahms, who now sound fitter, leaner, and meaner. And no maestro would ever dare to demand that politics serve art. Music rests uneasily within culture’s service industry: we hope this will do you some good – please don’t be intimidated.

Much of that may be for the better. But the biggest tragedy of Karajan year would be dismissing his masterworks: that never so-silky Rosenkavalier, the riveting Tchaikovsky symphonies, a Mahler Ninth brimming with tears and anguish. To call any of those empty, fascist or facile is simply giving in to the dogmas of today rather than fairly judging the dogmas of yesteryear. So, roll on Karajan Week: hold your nose, perhaps, but don’t shut your ears.

Karajan Week begins on July 5 on BBC Radio 3

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