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Herbert von Karajan, probably the world's best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music, died yesterday at his home in Anif, in the Austrian Alps. An aide reported that he suffered a heart attack in the early afternoon, and died before a rescue helicopter could fly him to a hospital. He was 81 years old.

An official of the nearby Salzburg Festival, Rene Galle, said Mr. Karajan had been working eight hours a day rehearsing for a production of Verdi's ''Ballo in Maschera.'' He had shown no signs of ill health, other than the aftereffects of his many illnesses in recent years, which included a stroke, three back operations and severe circulatory difficulties.

Tributes to the legendary maestro came from many quarters. ''With him, the music world has lost one of its greats,'' said the Austrian Chancellor, Franz Vranitzky. A 'Magic Carpet' for Singers

The American soprano Jessye Norman, in Paris for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, said: ''Herbert von Karajan always rolled out a magic carpet for us, the singers. With him, our musical work took on another dimension.''

Hans Landesmann, a Salzburg Festival board member, said the festival would open as scheduled on July 27, but with a tribute to Mr. Karajan, who had been its dominant spirit for 25 years.

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Mr. Karajan's life was hardly untouched by controversy. His membership in the Nazi party from 1933, his lack of overt repentance for his thriving career during the Nazi years and his imperious personality made him many enemies. Turmoil in Berlin

While he was always deeply respected as a conductor, some critics found his music-making increasingly slick and overrefined in his last decades. And his final years were clouded by a series of bitter battles with the Berlin Philharmonic, the West Berlin ensemble whose ''conductor for life'' he became in 1955. He abruptly resigned his Berlin post in April of this year, citing ill health.

Still, no one would deny his position in the topmost ranks of 20th-century conductors. Inspired to conduct at the age of 20 when he heard Arturo Toscanini in Vienna, and Wilhelm Furtwangler's great rival from the early 1940's until the older maestro's death in 1954, Mr. Karajan once said that he had attempted to combine ''Toscanini's precision with Furtwangler's fantasy.''

Mr. Karajan could not properly be considered simply the last of a long line of soulful Germanic conductors stretching from Richard Wagner through Hans von Bulow, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Nikisch, Karl Muck, Furtwangler and Hans Knappertsbusch. He had a particular gift for Wagner and above all for Bruckner, whose music he conducted with sovereign command and elevated feeling. His final visit to New York, three concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in February, included Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, which earned him a deeply deserved ovation. Friend of Brisk Tempos

But Mr. Karajan also breathed a contemporary air - not so much in that he championed contemporary music, although he played his share, but in his absorption of the modernist fashion for brisk tempos and linear, intense music-making. In that, he was truly as much the heir of Toscanini as of Furtwangler.

But Mr. Karajan was always more than a mere conductor: he was a man of enormous energy and careerist determination, and he managed at his peak, in the late 1950's and early 60's, to tower over European musical life as no one had done before or is likely to do again. His nickname at the time was ''the general music director of Europe,'' leading the Berlin Philharmonic, La Scala in Milan, London's Philharmonia Orchestra, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.

He resigned the Vienna post in 1964, but founded the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1967 and served as artistic adviser to the Orchestre de Paris in 1969-70.

''The Karajan industry bears about the same relation to postwar European music that Krupp bore to prewar European steel production,'' wrote Martin Mayer in The New York Times Magazine in 1967.

The classic, if perhaps apocryphal, Karajan anecdote had the conductor leaping into a taxi and, when asked his destination, replying: ''No matter. I am in demand everywhere.'' No Aversion to Fame

Aside from his concerts and his increasingly frequent stage direction of his opera productions, Mr. Karajan was eager to use the mass media to further the cause of music and, incidentally, himself.

Although he stood only 5 feet 8 inches tall, his classically sculptured face, his shock of first iron-gray, then white hair and his dreamy, eyes-closed podium manner made him an acknowledged authority figure and a natural for films and television. He also made more than 800 recordings, more than any other conductor. Deutsche Grammophon, the West German record company that shared him with EMI, an English label, said his albums sold ''probably hundreds of millions'' of copies. Der Spiegel, the West German newsweekly, reported that the conductor earned more than $6 million annually from record sales and conducting fees.

In the 1970's, Mr. Karajan perfected what seemed like a totally self-contained circuit of performances and recordings. He would record an opera, then use the recording in rehearsals at the Salzburg Easter Festival, then videotape the performances and, often, the rehearsals. Laboring over the tapes in his home editing studio, he told his American biographer, Roger Vaughan, that ''making this review of my music is like a religion for me.'' A Basic Mastery

Yet for all the tales of arrogance and self-indulgence, Mr. Karajan remained a masterly conductor, with a grasp of the standard orchestral and operatic repertory from Mozart through Schoenberg that was unsurpassed among his peers. Always a champion of Mozart, Beethoven - whose symphony cycle he recorded three times -Wagner and Bruckner, he gradually extended his grasp to include Mahler and even Schoenberg. He was also a lifelong admirer of Italian opera and, contrary to his domineering image, a champion of young talent, from the American soprano Leontyne Price (who called him ''one of the kindest men I ever met'') to the Soviet pianist Yevgeny Kissin, whom he conducted in his last Berlin Philharmonic concert on New Year's Eve.

When critics complained that his performances in his later years had grown overrefined, he replied that ''if the details are right, the performance will work.'' And to the very end, he drew playing of the utmost tonal beauty from his orchestras. The Berlin Philharmonic is widely regarded as the world's pre-eminent orchestra, if any one ensemble can stake that claim. And his performances at Carnegie Hall with the Vienna Philharmonic drew almost astonished enthusiasm from veteran observers for their sonic sumptuousness, even if not all the critics praised the musical results.

Herbert von Karajan was born in Salzburg on April 5, 1908, the son of Ernst von Karajan, the city's chief medical officer and an avid musical amateur, and Martha Kosmac von Karajan. The young Karajan played the piano at 3 and gave his first piano recital at 8. He studied music at the Salzburg Mozarteum and at Vienna University, with a brief detour while he devoted himself to engineering. A Debut in Mozart

Following his encounter with Toscanini, he studied conducting with Franz Schalk and made his debut on March 2, 1929, leading Mozart's ''Marriage of Figaro'' in the Austrian city of Ulm, where he remained as a staff conductor for five years.

In 1933, Mr. Karajan joined the Nazi party, which had come to power in Germany but not yet in his native Austria. He insisted later that he had joined in 1935, had done so for strictly careerist reasons and had retained his membership only briefly. But at his post-war ''de-Nazification'' trial by the Allies, it was proven that he had in fact joined in 1933 in Vienna, and had joined again 1934 in Germany, after the party had been banned in Austria. He was also known to include the ''Horst Wessel'' song in his concerts and to perform other Nazi musical doggerel.

In 1934, he was appointed general music director of the German city of Aachen, and a performance of Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' at the Berlin State Opera in 1937 marked a turning point in his career. Thereafter he was active in the German capital, favored by Hermann Goring in a cultural power struggle with Joseph Goebbels, who backed Furtwangler. A Flight to Italy

The fact that the conductor's second wife, Anna Maria Sauest, was a ''Mischling 2. Grades'' in Nazi terminology, meaning that she had a Jewish grandfather, had no apparent impact on Mr. Karajan's career - although his still-mysterious flight to Italy in 1944 has suggested to some that he had fallen afoul of the Nazis.

After the war, Mr. Karajan was forbidden by the Allies to conduct for two years, and his first concerts in the United States in 1955 aroused picketing and protests.

His international career began in conjunction with Walter Legge, the English record producer and husband of the German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Legge had founded the Philharmonia as a recording orchestra in 1945, and Mr. Karajan became its first star conductor.

Inexorably, he expanded his career to nearly every capital of the Western world. He conducted Wagner's ''Ring des Nibelungen'' at the Bayreuth Festival, in Vienna and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, although that cycle was completed without him, following a dispute. Three-Part Contention

The tripod on which his mature career rested remained West Berlin, Vienna and his native Salzburg, even though there was discord in each of those cities. He resigned the Vienna State Opera post in 1964, after a particularly distinguished tenure there, although eventually he repaired his relations with the Vienna Philharmonic, which is the State Opera orchestra in its concert-giving mode.

At Salzburg, he used the Berlin Philharmonic after his break with Vienna, and founded the Easter Festival in part to create his own bailiwick when he was at odds with the Viennese cultural bureaucrats. Even in recent years, he battled with the Salzburg Festival authorities, resigning from the board and threatening a complete break if his veto power - used to reaffirm the festival's essentially conservative direction - was not observed.

But his most widely publicized controversies came in West Berlin. Basically, his disputes with that orchestra derived from divergent interpretations of the term ''conductor for life.'' Mr. Karajan wished to maintain as complete control as possible, perpetuating an authoritarian conductorial tradition that has died out nearly everywhere else. The orchestra, which is self-governing, resisted Mr. Karajan's dictatorial tendencies, while recognizing his gifts, his prestige and his undiminished appeal to concertgoers and record buyers. Fight Over a Clarinetist

The most notorious of his Berlin disputes began in 1982, when Mr. Karajan attempted to hire the 23-year-old Sabine Meyer as deputy first clarinetist. The orchestra resisted the inclusion of a woman in its ranks, offering musical explanations for their decision. Eventually, Miss Meyer withdrew her candidacy and Mr. Karajan - after a few flamboyant humiliations of the Philharmonic, including a last-minute replacement of the German orchestra by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1984 Salzburg Festival - eventually capitulated.

Thereafter, however, he engaged in continual squabbling with the Berlin orchestra and the West Berlin Senate over his rights and obligations. With the ascension of the left-wing Green party in the latest West Berlin elections, Mr. Karajan's position grew even more tenuous, and he resigned in April.

Mr. Karajan complemented his glamorous podium image with a glamorous life style. An avid sportsman, he skied and sailed and piloted his own airplanes. Fascinated by technical innovations, he once contemplated being frozen for 15 years so that he could re-record the standard repertory in the latest video and audio technology. In his later years he had homes in Anif, St. Moritz, Switzerland, and St. Tropez, France, and he and his third wife, the former French model Eliette Mouret, made an attractive target for paparazzi.

Yet the conductor also had a spiritual side, and was a 40-year student of yoga and Zen Buddhism. He believed in reincarnation, and once dreamed of being reborn as an eagle, soaring above his beloved Alps.

He is survived by his wife and their two daughters, Isabelle, 29, and Arabelle, 25. Funeral arrangements were not yet known.

Correction:

Wednesday, Late Edition - Final July 20, 1989, Thursday, Late Edition - Final An obituary in some copies on Monday about the conductor Herbert von Karajan referred incorrectly to the city of Ulm. It is in Bavaria, West Germany, not in Austria.

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