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Wilhelm Furtwängler

Wilhelm Furtwängler (January 25, 1886 – November 30, 1954) was a German conductor and composer.

 

Biography

Furtwängler was born in Berlin into a prominent family. His father Adolf was an archaeologist, his mother a painter, and his brother Philipp a mathematician. Most of his childhood was spent in Munich, where his father taught at the university. He was given a musical education from an early age, and developed an early love of Beethoven, a composer he remained closely associated with throughout his life. Though his chief posthumous fame rests on his work as a conductor, he was also a composer and regarded himself first and foremost as such, having in fact first taken up the baton in order to perform his own works.

By the time of Furtwängler's conducting debut at the age of twenty, he had written several pieces of music. However, they were not well received, and that combined with the financial insecurity a career as a composer would provide led him to concentrate on conducting. At his first concert, he led the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra) in Anton Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. He subsequently held posts at Munich, Lübeck, Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Vienna, before securing a job at the Berlin Staatskapelle in 1920, and in 1922 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra where he succeeded Arthur Nikisch, and concurrently at the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Later he became music director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Salzburg Festival and the Bayreuth Festival, which was regarded as the greatest post a conductor could hold in Germany at the time.

Towards the end of the war, under extreme pressure from the Nazi Party, Furtwängler fled to Switzerland. It was during this troubled period that he composed what is largely considered his most significant work, the Symphony No.2 in E minor. Work on the symphony was begun in 1944, and carried on into 1945. It was given its premiere in 1948 by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Furtwängler's direction.

He resumed performing and recording following the war and remained a popular conductor in Europe, although he was always under somewhat of a shadow. He died in 1954 in Ebersteinburg close to Baden-Baden. He is buried in Heidelberg's Bergfriedhof.

Furtwängler is most famous for his performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner. However, he was also a champion of modern music, and was known to give performances of thoroughly modern works, such as Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

 

Nazi Party ties

Furtwängler's relationship with and attitude towards Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was a matter of much controversy. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Furtwängler was highly critical of them. In 1934, he was banned from conducting the premiere of Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, and Furtwängler resigned from his post at the Berlin Opera in protest. In 1936, with Furtwängler becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the regime, there were signs that he might follow Erich Kleiber's footsteps into exile, when he was offered the principal conductor's post at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, where he would have succeeded Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini's biographer Harvey Sachs wrote that Toscanini recommended Furtwängler for the position, one of the few times Toscanini expressed admiration for a fellow conductor. There is every possibility that Furtwängler would have accepted the post, but a report from the Berlin branch of the Associated Press, possibly ordered by Hermann Göring, said that he was willing to take up his post at the Berlin Opera once more. This caused the mood in New York to turn against him; from their point of view, it seemed that Furtwängler was now a full supporter of the Nazi Party.

However, Furtwängler never joined the Nazi Party nor did he really approve of them, much like the composer Richard Strauss, who made no secret of his dislike of the Nazis. Furtwängler always refused to give the Nazi salute, for instance, and there is even film footage of Furtwängler shaking Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels' hand, then turning away and wiping his hand with a handkerchief.

Furtwängler was treated relatively well by the Nazis; he had a high profile, and was an important cultural figure. His concerts were often broadcast to German troops to raise morale, though he was limited in what he was allowed to perform by the authorities. He later said he tried to protect German culture from the Nazis; it is now known that he used his influence to help Jewish musicians escape the Third Reich.

Albert Speer claimed that in December 1944 Furtwängler asked whether Germany had any chance of winning the war. Speer replied in the negative, and advised the conductor to flee to Switzerland from possible Nazi retribution. Furtwängler did in fact escape to Switzerland shortly after a concert in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic on 28 January 1945. At that concert he conducted an account of Brahms's Second Symphony that was caught on tape and is considered one of his greatest recordings.

At his denazification trial, Furtwängler was charged with supporting Nazism by remaining in Germany, performing at Nazi party functions and with making an anti-Semitic remark against the part-Jewish conductor Victor de Sabata. However, he was eventually cleared on all these counts.

As part of his closing remarks at his denazification trial, Furtwängler said,

"I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like.

"Does Thomas Mann [who was critical of Furtwängler’s actions] really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize, that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them."

(quoted from John Ardoin's The Furtwängler Record)

Violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin was among the few people in the Jewish music community and the United States to have a positive view of Furtwängler. In 1933 he had refused to play with him, but in the late 1940s after a personal investigation about Furtwängler, he became supportive of him, and performed and recorded alongside him.

British playwright Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides (1995), set in 1946 in the American zone of occupied Berlin, is about U.S. accusations against Furtwängler of having served the Nazi regime. In 2001 the play was made into a motion picture starring Harvey Keitel and featuring Stellan Skarsgård in the role of Furtwängler.

 

Career

Conducting style

Furtwängler had a unique conducting technique. He saw symphonic music as creations of nature that could only be realised subjectively into sound. This is why composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner were so central to Furtwängler's repertoire, because he identified them as great forces of nature. He disliked Toscanini's approach to the German repertoire. He walked out of a Toscanini concert once, calling him "a mere time-beater!". Furtwängler did not have a strong beat, as you can see in video recordings that show him making awkward, gawky movements like a medium in a trance. He wished that the sense of time be established by the players in themselves, as in chamber music. Furtwängler would then show the orchestra when he wished to use rubato. His gestures bear seemingly little relationship to the rhythms of the music, while his physical motions were described as "like a puppet on a string" by one orchestra member. Furtwängler would generally hold his baton hand closer to his body and his left would be outstretched giving the expression of the phrase to the orchestra. On occasion he would violently shake his baton hand when he would get into conducting fits onstage. In the video referred to above you can see Furtwängler conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on 19.4.42 in celebration of Hitler's birthday. In the symphony's coda, Furtwängler can be seen having tremendous fits as he leads the orchestra through the chorus' final cries of "Götterfunken, Götterfunken!". Despite, or perhaps because of, this unorthodox style, musicians were mesmerized by his leadership. His best performances are characterized by deep, bass-driven sonorities, soaring lyricism and wrenching extremes of emotion co-existing with logical cogency. Neville Cardus wrote in the Manchester Guardian in 1954 of Furtwängler's conducting style as follows:

"He did not regard the printed notes of the score as a final statement, but rather as so many symbols of an imaginative conception, ever changing and always to be felt and realised subjectively...Not since Nikisch, of whom he was a disciple, has a greater personal interpreter of orchestral and opera music than Furtwängler been heard."

Many commentators and critics regard him as the one of the greatest conductors in history.

Furtwängler was famous for his exceptional inarticulacy. His pupil Sergiu Celibidache remembered that the best he could say was "Well, just listen" (to the music). Carl Brinitzer from the German BBC service tried to interview him, and thought he had an imbecile before him. A live recording of a rehearsal with a Stockholm orchestra documents hardly anything intelligible, only hums and mumbling. Still, Furtwängler remained highly respected amongst musicians. Even Arturo Toscanini, usually regarded as Furtwängler's complete antithesis (and sharply critical of Furtwängler on political grounds), once said – when asked to name the world's greatest conductor apart from himself – "Furtwängler!"

 

Influences

One of Furtwängler's protegés was pianist Karlrobert Kreiten. He was also an important influence on the pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, of whom Furtwängler's widow, Elisabeth Furtwängler, said, "Er furtwänglert." ("He furtwänglers.") Barenboim recently recorded Furtwängler's 2nd Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Furtwängler's performances of Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner remain important reference-points today.