A lifetime without Furtwängler
OrchestrasThis weekend will mark 70 years since the death of Wilhelm Furtwängler, on November 30, 1954.
While his political decisions remain contentious, his importance as a conductor has only increased. No musician in his time, or since, matched his mastery, vision and spontaneity in live performance.
The attached essay by Wolfgang Schreiber – written for the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society – puts his position rather well:
He believed that the ideal sphere of art had no connection with the pragmatism of politics. Furtwängler lived, so to speak, in two separate worlds – and he did not want to resolve the contradiction.
Read th Schreiber essay here (in German).
Over the next couple of days we will remind ourselves in a few posts of the highs and lows of this epic musical figure.
Note in this video how he doe not wait for the audience to settle down before starting the overture. No doubt who’s in charge.
Great post. For those who are interested in the life and works of this great musician why don’t you take a look on the Web page of the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society here: https://furtwaengler.org/
I hope that this will not be an occasion to re-exhume the stale canards about Furtwangler being a Nazi, a supporter of the Nazis, a collaborator, a bystander or a sympathiser.
Furtwangler was none of the above. He courageously refused to become a Nazis’ lapdog and resisted their blandishments, so much so that towards the end of the war, he had to flee to Switzerland in order to evade arrest by the Gestapo. There is not enough space here to list all his courageous, and sometimes dangerously provocative, gestures of defiance. Before wading into this debate, I suggest reading ‘The Devil’s Music Maker’ by Sam H. Shirakawa – an exhaustive and extensively researched exploration of his career during the Nazi era. Read also ‘The Baton and the Jackboot’, an account of the same subject by his Jewish secretary, Berta Geissmar.
If the matter of musicians’ collaboration with the Nazis is of any interest, there are many more worthy subjects of investigation, for example Karajan, Schwarzkopf, Kabasta, Boehm, Abendroth, Pfitzner and, of course, Richard Strauss. It’s time we let Furtwangler off the hook.
This comment is not really directed to his conducting or the value of his recordings.
The views held by Furtwängler seriously damaged, and continue to some extent to damage, classical music. Although it is true that Furtwängler never joined the Nazi party, and that he did help some Jewish musicians, particularly early when it was still relatively easy to get out of Germany, the fact is that he clearly had many völkisch views. According to these views, there was a clear distinction between culture and civilization; culture was rural, organic and rooted in the soil and in the native population, while civilization was urban, cosmopolitan, and somewhat artificial. In this view, Austro-German classical music (i.e., Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, et al., but not, of course, Mendelssohn or Mahler) was actually part of culture, not civilization, and was intrinsically tied to the deep structure of the Germanic people; Jews and Slavs could not properly interpret it, no matter how technically skilled they were. This led to tropes such as “empty virtuosity,” which, in Furtwängler’s day, were frequently used to attack Jewish musicians, and today, are still being used to attack musicians of Asian origin or other origins as well. In a period in which diversity is being sought in classical music and in which the music needs to reach out to a younger audience, use of these tropes is very damaging and offensive.
Best post I’ve read on here for a very long time. Watching WF conduct its a miracle the orchestra came in almost together, that’s some downbeat!
This is a difference between European and US orchestras. In the US, there are “hard attacks” with everyone very precise on the downbeat, will European orchestras have softer attacks. This is a cultural difference, rather than a sign that he can’t conduct.
Funny, since all major American orchestras were under the direction of European conductors who trained them.
That “empty virtuosity” tag has older origins in German thinking/writing about music and musicians than Furtwängler or the Nazis. Even older than the similar phrases found in Wagner’s infamous essay, where it was aimed at Jews. You can even find elements of the Germanic “empty virtuosity” dislike in the letters Mozart and his father exchanged. I’m not saying it didn’t create a convenient hook on which to hang much anti-Jewish feeling in the time of the Nazis, but it grew from roots that far pre-dated an era of Jewish virtuosos.
Classical music is open to everyone and does not need that kind of forced kind of ’diversity’ which some want to shove down the people’s throats.
The younger audience comes to classical music for Beethoven et al. not to hear Cardi B or something like that with ’classical strings’.
Many virtuose Asian musicians are really good technique is not all, but most of them still have to learn to play properly those wonderful Alpine hillbilly tunes, fiery Tarantelle, joyful ’gammeldans’, and passionate circumstances of human relations that make sense only in a European mental milieu.
“According to these views, there was a clear distinction between culture and civilization; culture was rural, organic and rooted in the soil and in the native population, while civilization was urban, cosmopolitan, and somewhat artificial..”
Now, where have I heard that recently?? Agree with the ‘artificial’ and it seems many millions of Americans now do also.
Furtwangler proved that you don’t have to be technically adept to be a great conductor.
Giulini said in an interview that Furtwangler obtained a great orchestral sound despite the fact that his movements were “all wrong”.
The best academic analysis of Furtwaengler in the World War II era is Fred K. Preiberg’s excellent 1986 tome, “Trial of Strength, Wilhelm Furtwaengler and the Third Reich. Well documented and cited, it was the first time that many rumors and innuendos that still remain today were dispelled. That said, Furtwaengler was offered the New York Philharmonic Music Director position in 1936 where he could have avoided what later transpired. True there were protest in NYC, but he could have negotiated that. He chose to return.