As a former Nazi Party member, Karajan is personally unbeloved—hence, the lack of dedicated festivals—but his politics haven’t kept record sales low. Rebecca Davis, director of publicity for Universal Music Classical, which owns Deutsche Grammophon, says D.G. has sold between 40 million and 50 million Karajan albums to date, recorded between 1938 and 1943 and from 1959 until his death. One top-selling 1987 compilation album, Adagio, moved about 2 million units, and Karajan still sells 300,000 albums annually for Universal Classics. Karajan has also sold more than 20 million units on EMI Classics of performances recorded between 1946 and 1984, says Graham Southern, catalog director for EMI Classics.

Anja Rittmöller, D.G.’s vice president of production and catalog, reports that Bernstein has sold about 10 million albums for the company, for which he remains even today a top 10 royalty artist. Although there are no new Bernstein recordings, his catalog “continues to be actively and successfully exploited on audio and video, in both physical and digital formats,” Rittmöller says. The company saw a sales spike last year, the 50th anniversary of West Side Story, which bodes well for this year.

Before signing with D.G., in 1976, Bernstein recorded for RCA and Columbia (more than 500 works for the latter company alone). Both now belong to Sony/BMG, which declines to reveal sales figures.

Bernstein, who was also a successful composer, teacher, and writer, may trump Karajan in potential earnings. Stage works like On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Candide, as well as ballets like Fancy Free, are regularly revived and recorded on CD and DVD. His exuberant public explanations of music in televised young people’s concerts and his 1976 Harvard lectures have recently been reprinted on multi-DVD sets from Kultur.

Craig Urquhart, vice president of public relations for Amberson, a New York-based company founded in 1958 to handle Bernstein’s business life, confirms that Bernstein’s “compositions are performed more” today than during his lifetime. Interest in Bernstein’s work keeps the Amberson office staff of seven, various consultants, and Bernstein’s three children busy. The children, Urquhart adds, “derive a comfortable living” from the income of the Bernstein estate, although they all pursue separate careers as well.

Selling dead white male conductors has never been more essential to the bottom line than in today’s imperiled classical recording industry. No conductors are famous to the degree that their names alone sell albums; in fact, this is also true of all classical music performers. EMI Classics still counts Maria Callas, who died in 1977, among its current top-selling artists, just as SONY/BMG still has various reprints of albums by Glenn Gould, who died in 1982, atop its charts.

“The big stars in classical music who become stars to a broader public like Bernstein, Karajan, or [conductor and violinist Yehudi] Menuhin are extremely interesting, colorful people,” Costa Pilavachi, president of EMI Classics, told the Toronto Star in 2007. “It takes a giant of a person who lifts you up and makes you feel fulfilled.”