One of the most famous 20th century conductors who led the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 35 years, Herbert von Karajan died on 16 July, 1989, at the age of 91.

He became a global household name with a prolific career touring and recording with some of Europe’s best orchestras, and was known as the General Music Director of Europe between the 1950s and the 1970s.

But he came in for criticism for his egotism and for sending conductors’ fees soaring and paying guest stars inflated sums of money as well as increasing his own pay during his time at the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival.

He was also a staunch advocate of technological developments to improve the quality of recorded and live music and played a fundamental role in introducing compact discs to the musical world at the start of the 1980s.

Born into an upper-bourgeois family in Salzburg on 5 April, 1908, Heribert Ritter von Karajan began learning the piano at the age of four and studied at the Mozarteum Conservatory in Salzburg until 1926 before moving to the Vienna School of Music until 1929.

His professional conducting career started soon after with a five-year stint as first Kapellmeister at Ulm’s Stadttheatre with his first conducting appearance at the Salzburg festival coming in 1933 and his debut leading the Vienna Philharmonic in 1934.

Mr Karajan’s career began to take off after he joined the Nazi Party and became Germany ’s youngest General Musikdirector along with guest-conducting orchestras around Europe and at the Aachen opera house between 1934 and 1941 before embarking on his long relationship with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1937.

His 1942 marriage to Anita Gütermann, who was a quarter Jewish, led to a run in with the Nazis, sending his conducting career into doubt and prompting him to flee Berlin for Milan in 1945 and putting his career on hold until he got clearance from the Allies to be able to perform again.

By 1948, he was made artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna and also showcased his talents at La Scala in Milan along with recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London .

He then added more strings to his bow with his appointment of Music Director for Life of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1956, also spending several years as Artistic Director of the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival and setting up the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1967.

Mr Karajan was an ardent believer in the possibilities offered by visual media and audio technology, making the first digital recording to Mozart’s The Magic Flute and championing the development of the compact disc as well as helping to introduce stereo sound in television sets.

His intense passion for music saw him continue to perform, record and take the Berlin Philharmonic on numerous global tours with many live concert broadcasts for German television during the 1980s until his death in Salzburg in 1989.

During his career, Karajan shaped one of the world’s great orchestras, raising the bar in terms of musical standards with his best recordings of Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner and Strauss. Yet his egotistical nature vexed some of his critics who claimed that he and fellow conductor Leonard Bernstein were "unequalled in their mastery of podium histrionics".

In addition to the many highs, Mr Karajan’s career had its low points: during a performance of Die Meistersinger in 1939, he stumbled while conducting without a score, bringing the performance to a standstill and leading Adolf Hitler to ban him from the Bayreuth .

He nevertheless enjoyed great critical success throughout his career with two Gramophone awards with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1981, a Médaille de Vermeil in Paris , the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London and the UNESCO International Music Prize.

His recordings have been used by director Stanley Kubrick such as Strauss’ The Blue Danube Waltz in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Béla Bart'k's Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta in The Shining and his 1963 rendition of the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in A Clockwork Orange.