A Conductor’s Impossible Legacy

[lennygoran]

A Conductor’s Impossible Legacy

The sublime artistry of Wilhelm Furtwängler collided with his role as de facto chief conductor of the Nazi regime.


By David Allen
Oct. 14, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

We live in a time of intense scrutiny of the moral failings of artists — even, or perhaps especially, those whose creations we admire. And in few classical musicians is the gap between sublime work and shameful actions greater than the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Consumed by an exalted belief in the power of music, and preternaturally able to convince listeners of that power, Furtwängler conducted Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner, with proprietary authority, as if he alone could reveal their deepest psychological, even spiritual, secrets.

Sometimes it sounds like he could. With his expressive, flexible approach to tempo and dynamics, Furtwängler breathed the structure of a whole piece into each of its measures, while making each measure sound as if improvised. Ask me to show you what the point of a conductor is — what a conductor can achieve — and I would point you to a Furtwängler recording.

The problem is that Adolf Hitler would point to him, too. For Hitler, Furtwängler was the supreme exponent of holy German art; it was to the Nazis’ satisfaction that he served — in effect if not in title — as the chief conductor of the Third Reich.

The complications are many. Furtwängler never joined the Nazi party, and after his initial protests over the expulsions of Jewish musicians and the erosion of his artistic control were resolved in the Nazis’ favor in 1935, he found ways to distance himself from the regime, not least over its racial policies. His performances with the Berlin Philharmonic and at the Bayreuth Festival at once served the Reich and gave succor to those who sought to survive it, even oppose it.

“At Furtwängler’s concerts, we all become one family of resistance fighters,” one opponent of the Nazis said.

Joseph Goebbels nevertheless had little doubt that Furtwängler was, as he put it, “worth the trouble.” Furtwängler avoided conducting in occupied countries, but, for example, led the Berlin Philharmonic in Oslo one week before the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. He declined to conduct during the Nuremberg rallies, but was satisfied to appear just before them — including, in 1938, with the forces of the Vienna State Opera, immediately after the Anschluss.

Whatever considerable aid Furtwängler may have offered to some in need, he was stained. Given the cover he had offered the “regime of the devil,” the émigré conductor Bruno Walter asked him after the Second World War, “of what significance is your assistance in the isolated cases of a few Jews?”


Acrimonious enough in Furtwängler’s lifetime — when protests forced him to withdraw from posts he had been offered at the New York Philharmonic, in 1936, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1949 — the debate raged on after his death, in 1954.

Time brought distance, reconciliation and research. Musicians took up Furtwängler’s cause, with Daniel Barenboim in the lead. Books rehabilitated the erstwhile collaborator. One, by Fred Prieberg, declared Furtwängler a “double agent”; another, by Sam Shirakawa, described him, absurdly, as doing more to thwart the Nazis than anyone else, as if he were Dietrich Bonhoeffer with a baton.

Recording after recording emerged — mostly archived radio broadcasts, some of extraordinary quality. Distressingly, Furtwängler turned out to have been at his most intensely visionary during the war, performing for an Aryanized audience at the helm of a purged Berlin Philharmonic.

Those wartime tapes only added to the Furtwängler riddle, though. Was the frenzied Beethoven Ninth he gave in Berlin in March 1942 an act of resistance, scorched in sound? Or was it more proof that “the fate of the Germans” was to “unify things that appear impossible to unify,” as he put it in 1937?

“German music proves,” he had continued then, “that the Germans have achieved such victories before.” Hitler evidently thought so. Furtwängler was filmed shaking Goebbels’s hand after having been maneuvered into reprising the symphony for the Führer’s birthday, one month later.

Despite our current climate, the temptation remains to move past these difficulties, rather than confront them yet again. That seems to be the thinking behind a new set from Warner Classics, 55 CDs that announce themselves as the “The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record.”

Compiled with the aid of Stéphane Topakian, a former vice president of the Société Wilhelm Furtwängler, a French organization founded in 1969, the box represents a rare sharing of the back catalogs of Warner and Universal. It takes listeners from Furtwängler’s first, timid recordings of Weber and Beethoven, in 1926, through classic accounts like his Tchaikovsky Sixth from 1938 and his Beethoven Ninth from 1951, to the towering “Die Walküre” he taped a month before his death.

Listen to the box, and if you’re left wondering whether microphones ever truly captured Furtwängler’s carefully calibrated dynamics and his as-if-from-the-depths sound, you still find ample, glorious evidence of his famous long line, his ability to make scores cohere. You also find that he was not at all the invariably slow, monumental conductor he is often remembered as. There is touching warmth in his “Siegfried Idyll,” delicacy and charm in his Haydn, dignity in his vivacious Mozart.

Throughout, there is a sense of hearing a world lost, of a conducting style dating back to Richard Wagner that, with its deliberate imprecisions and its privileging of the perceived spirit behind the music over its textual details, aims at something quite different than maestros do today.


What Warner’s box is not, however, is the complete Furtwängler on record. His discography has always been the subject of debate, as has his conflicted attitude to the medium, but Warner has limited itself to his studio efforts and the live recordings he made with an express view to commercial sale.

Strangely, those criteria have led to the inclusion of recordings that Furtwängler decided not to release, like the “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung” from a “Ring” he led in London in 1937. And myriad live recordings are left out, even those that have previously appeared on Warner and Universal labels, including his rampage through Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” in 1947; his astounding “Ring” for Italian radio in 1953; his destructive, distraught accounts of Brahms’s Third and Fourth; and almost all of his mystical Bruckner.

Perhaps that decision isn’t so baffling when you consider that omitting all but a few live tapes means dedicating fewer than two discs to the war, the defining period of Furtwängler’s life. The timeline provided in the notes coyly states, in the present tense, that he “limits his activities” during the war years, though finds himself “obliged to participate in certain official events.” Topakian, the box’s curator, writes that a postwar Beethoven Seventh in Vienna represents Furtwängler “at his purest,” while the intensity of his Berlin account from 1942 was “nothing to do with the work.” Some amnesia is at play here.

But however often Furtwängler declared himself an apolitical artist, his conservative, nationalistic worldview was never separable from his conducting, as the musicologist Roger Allen has shown — not even after 1945, when most of the recordings in the Warner box were made.

Born to an archaeology professor and a painter in 1886, Furtwängler grew up thinking of himself as a Beethoven in waiting. But the reviews of his early compositions were savage; he did not return to composing in earnest, the historian Chris Walton has found, until the mid-1930s, when Nazi cultural policy savaged modernism and made room for his interminable, quasi-Brucknerian wanderings.

Furtwängler met no such resistance as a conductor. After a series of minor posts, notably in Mannheim, he became chief conductor of both the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1922, later dropping the Leipzig position for one with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Through this period, Furtwängler set out an aesthetic that has uncomfortable resonances today. His promotion of the indomitable supremacy of German art was a major part of this — even if he conducted Schoenberg despite his hatred of modernism. But his methods of analyzing scores and even his theory of conducting were expressed in chauvinistic language. He wrote that music should not be banned — that is, “unless it is a clear case either of rubbish or kitsch or of anti-state cultural Bolshevism.”

The rise of conducting styles that challenged his — above all the textual literalism of his rival, Arturo Toscanini — confirmed for him that the Weimar Republic was a Germany in crisis. Despite his differences with the Nazis, it seems likely that he, like most conservatives, welcomed their takeover as a return to an authoritarian, Wilhelmine past — a process through which the art he perceived as lesser would be excised.


Even after Furtwängler fled Germany early in 1945, following a warning from Albert Speer of threats to his safety, and after he was cleared in a denazification trial in 1946, this worldview lingered. As late as 1947, he was still hailing the “organic superiority” of the German symphonists; two years later, he decried the “biological insufficiency” of atonality.

Nor did Furtwängler step back from grandiose claims about the power of music, and his role as its savior. Astonishingly, he thought it wise to write to colleagues in 1947 that “a single performance of a truly great German musical composition was by its nature a more powerful, more essential negation of the spirit of Buchenwald and Auschwitz than all words could be.”

Warner’s box makes clear that he made marvels in the postwar years, including the pained formalism of his Gluck overtures; the utter revelation of his Schumann Fourth; a heaven-storming “Fidelio”; and a “Tristan und Isolde” that remains unsurpassed since its recording in 1953.

But just as Furtwängler was naïve to claim toward the end of the war that he was proof that a “completely unbroken nation” was still alive and well, that he had carried Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner through the conflict unscathed, so it would be naïve to think of those later interpretations as somehow separate from what had come before.

And dangers from Furtwängler’s legacy still linger in classical music today: the myth he perpetuated of the singular genius; the idea that Beethoven or Brahms are frictionlessly “universal” in their art and impact; the false ideal that music floats, perpetually unsullied, above politics. As for the man himself, it speaks to the lasting power of Furtwängler’s artistry that we still demand so much of him morally — more, for example, than of Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi party, or Karl Böhm, who hailed Hitler from the podium.

Chris Walton, the historian, has suggested that, given all of his intellectual and aesthetic affinities with the Nazis, perhaps the question to ask is not, as it used to be, why he stayed in Germany. Rather, it might be why this man who was “all but ‘predestined’ to become a model Nazi,” as Walton writes, did not — not quite. In that, there remains a glimmer of light, for him and for us.



https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/arts ... music.html

[maestrob]

That's an excellent review, Len. Thanks for posting.

I've made my views known about Furtwangler elsewhere, though, so there's not much to add here. He didn't do much opera besides Wagner, which was, of course, very good to excellent, while the only Verdi I know of was an Otello, which worked quite well. The Schumann IV referenced in the review (DGG) suffers from a bizarre re-thinking of its tempi: I can't listen to it without getting very angry. The same goes for Furtwangler's Bruckner IX, for example, or his Tchaikovsky VI, which Mravinsky & Gergiev both copied.

As for the so-called "superiority" of German music, well, nuts to that. It's great music in many ways, but then the Viennese school also pioneered atonality (which Furtwangler despised), the next step after Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" & Wagner's "Tristan & Isolde."

Need I say more?

[lennygoran]

I've made my views known about Furtwangler elsewhere,

Brian thanks-this reminded me that John F made his views known too! Regards, Len

[maestrob]

I've made my views known about Furtwangler elsewhere,

Brian thanks-this reminded me that John F made his views known too! Regards, Len

Indeed!

Sadly, John is no longer with us, so that debate has ended.

[barney]

Need I say more?

Actually, yes. You've spoken of Furtwangler the muscian, but not the man - or not recently. Do you agree with the late lamented JohnF that his personal life and (contested) Nazi sympathies have little relevance?

An old discussion, true, but maybe its time has come around again.

[Modernistfan]

Unfortunately, his sympathies, which were not really Nazi but völkisch, are still very much relevant, as they continue to persist in some quarters in classical music (see the previous discussion about Asian musicians on this site). Tropes such as "empty virtuosity," frequently employed by Furtwängler and others of his ilk, are still used to calumniate and impugn the musicality of Asian musicians and sometimes others of the "wrong" ethnicity.

[lennygoran]

völkisch, are still very much relevant,

Brian I had to look that up for sure. Wiki has alot to say on it. Regards, Len
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkisch_movement

[Wallingford]

As for myself, I've always kept a safe distance from Furtwangler. Why? First and foremost, his repertoire is stodgy--boring prospect, having to hear yet another work by the second and third Bs, or Wagner, and Bruckner. I wouldn't show interest till he puts in a few Italian masters, or Russian, or Scandinavian. I'm not naive enough to think he'd touch Gershwin.

I read--in a Harold Schonberg book, I believe--that Furtwangler publicly stated that he'd withdraw from any position with an American orchestra, "until Americans cease mixing politics with music." To say the least, he had a helluva lotta business making that statement.

I've heard he was 'the greatest conductor of the 20th century,' but I'll happily bypass anything in the way of spiritual nourishment--it's the risk I confidently take. They can wait till the next lifetime. In the afterlife, though, I expect to come back as a sloth.

[maestrob]

Need I say more?

Actually, yes. You've spoken of Furtwangler the musician, but not the man - or not recently. Do you agree with the late lamented JohnF that his personal life and (contested) Nazi sympathies have little relevance?

An old discussion, true, but maybe its time has come around again.

Hello, Barney. Just saw your post.

What I was referring to was Furtwangler's interpretive ideas, not him as a man.

Can't say that I'm very fond of anyone who became Germany's preferred conductor during the Nazi regime, though. The comment Wallingford mentioned about politics & music, well, politics and the arts are quite inextricable, IMHO. Verdi was quite successful at navigating that minefield, much more so than WF, it looks like, since we all admire him today but WF seems to have a rather limited audience for his legacy, and barely any for his compositions (I have the Barenboim recording of his Second Symphony....a rather turgid and pointless affair.).



WF had an ego the size of life, and he thought much of his interpretive abilities, but the magic he thought that he possessed rarely works for me, and only when he respects the tempo markings in the score, like in his recordings of Wagner, or his reading of Verdi's Otello, which I do admire. Unfortunately, much of his output is in poor sound, so that's discouraging, as is the fuzzy-edged approach he took to orchestral discipline, which simply sounds to me like he didn't want to bother with rehearsing clean attacks or cut-offs.

Furtwangler never seemed to understand that perception in politics is far more important than actual deeds, and he thus resented our rejection when he came, however briefly, to New York. Sviatoslav Richter and Valery Gergiev have also suffered from perception problems, justly or not, so that's just the way the cookie crumbles. We just don't care for oppressive regimes, as it should be.

Personally, I've been a Toscanini admirer since I first heard his Beethoven as a five-year-old. His fire, energy and discipline really resonated with me even then in the Eroica & 7th Symphony. At age 11 I vowed I would find a way to make music that like that, but had no clue how that would happen, yet when I had the chance to move to NYC as a young college graduate, I jumped at the chance just to be close to the center of the musical universe here. My folks had raised me with Toscanini, including a neighbor who was also a distant cousin (the sister of the doctor who delivered me and my brother) who lent me a complete set of Beethoven Symphonies which really clicked with me.

Thus, when exposed to WF, I found him, on record, to be quite inferior and sometime bizarre in his erratic tempo ideas (Bruckner IX or Schumann IV, for example). Also his Beethoven IX from 1954 is slower than molasses in the dead of Winter. Decidedly NOT what Beethoven wrote or even envisioned.

The Brahms Symphony set I have on EMI also doesn't stand up to comparisons with Toscanini (Philharmonia) or Solti/Chicago in much better sound, not to mention Haitink or Herbert Bolmstedt's recent cycle in progress with the Leipzig Gewandhaus.

The comment above about Furtwangler's lack of variety in his repertoire is also quite valid.

I don't mind that a box of his commercial recordings has been issued: his legacy should be accessible to the younger generation, but only so that they can make their own judgement as to WF's limitations and eccentricities.

Furtwangler is, in my mind, the true embodiment of the Peter Principle: That there are those who advance to the highest level of their incompetence. Works for conductors as well as in business.

The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pe ... nciple.asp

[THEHORN]

Wallingford, Furtwangler conducted a much wider variety of repertoire than you give him credit for , but only a limited amount has been issued on recordings .
He conducted Schoenberg, Stravinsky , Hindemith and many other 20th century composers,many of whom are forgotten today, particularly German ones .
I've always had enormous admiration for Furtwangler's conducting . True, he could be erratic at times , but at his best, he was a transcendent interpreter of Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner to name only some composers .

[Modernistfan]

It is true that he did conduct the premieres of Schoenberg's Orchestral Variations, Op. 31 and Bartók's First Piano Concerto (with the composer as soloist), at the 1927 ISCM concerts, The Schoenberg is a strict 12-tone piece, while the Bartók, while not formally atonal, is an extremely harsh, dissonant, and percussive piece, which is hard going for many listeners even today. (If you would like to try it, try Bronfman with Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sony; there are a number of other good recordings.) I was not aware that he ever conducted Stravinsky. I did know that he did conduct Hindemith, including the "Mathis der Mahler" symphony, which did get him into serious trouble with the regime.

[jserraglio]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWyB9i-oUgs

[lennygoran]

What I was referring to was Furtwangler's interpretive ideas, not him as a man.

Brian yesterday I met with a friend for lunch and we were discussing this-he said he had once read this book on the matter but some how it had gotten lost. I googled and found this:
https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... e+Nazi+Era

Regards, Len

[maestrob]

What I was referring to was Furtwangler's interpretive ideas, not him as a man.

Brian yesterday I met with a friend for lunch and we were discussing this-he said he had once read this book on the matter but some how it had gotten lost. I googled and found this:
https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... e+Nazi+Era

Regards, Len

Thanks, Len. I picked up a "very good" used copy on Amazon for $6, as a new one was over $100. Should be a fascinating read.

[lennygoran]

Thanks, Len. I picked up a "very good" used copy on Amazon for $6, as a new one was over $100. Should be a fascinating read.

Brian a great buy-I took a look on Amazon and there was no used copy for under $30-your timing was great! Regards, Len

[Lance]

I've got five of Michael H. Kater's books all dealing with Nazi matters. He researches his subjects supremely well.

[barney]

I found one for $10.50 US, but $17 US shipping. That's $40 Australian. Think I'll try the libraries.

[Lance]

The below is from Presto's web site from the UK. To hear the actual podcast you need to visit the Presto site.

Rob Cowan & David Hurwitz
By Paul Thomas

"German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) was one of the towering musical giants of the 20th century, a man whose near-mythical reputation is arguably better known than his actual recordings. This year has seen a number of Furtwängler reissues, the most significant of which is Warner Classics's 55-disc boxset featuring many previously unpublished recordings. For this special episode of the podcast we invited critics Rob Cowan and David Hurwitz to discuss the relative merits of Furtwängler's art, and how these legendary recordings hold up in the cold light of 2021.

Rob Cowan is one of the UK's best-loved authorities on classical music, having written for Gramophone magazine for many years, and also hosted long-running radio shows on Classic FM and BBC Radio 3. Based in New York, David Hurwitz is the co-founder and executive editor of ClassicsToday.com, and in 2020 launched his very popular YouTube channel on which he regularly posts video reviews and discographical surveys.

You can listen to the podcast right here on this page, or click on the links in the player (via the symbol of the box with the arrow coming out of the top) to find it in Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and other popular podcast apps, where you will be able to subscribe and receive notifications when new episodes become available in the future.

If you are enjoying the Presto Music Podcast please like and subscribe to it on your preferred platform, and maybe even give us a short review. And we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future topics, and also guests who you would like us to talk to. Please email us at info@prestomusic.com."