Herbert von Karajan piloted his own Learjet, raced yachts, drove a Porsche 911 Turbo in Martini racing livery, and hoped to be reincarnated as an eagle soaring over the Alps. He was also arguably the most commercially successful conductor of the 20th century, selling over 200 million records. This episode traces his path from a Salzburg family of Greek-Macedonian origin ennobled by Saxon kings, through piano studies at the Mozarteum from 1916 to 1926, to the teacher Bernhard Paumgartner, who pushed him toward conducting.

The episode examines the documented record that Karajan joined the Nazi Party twice, in Salzburg in 1933 and in Aachen in 1935, his placement on the Gottbegnadeten list, his 1942 marriage to Anita Gütermann, who had Jewish ancestry, his flight to Italy in 1945, and his clearance by a denazification tribunal in Vienna in 194 ...