Furtwängler Rising!

[Ghost Sonata]

I think he was a better composer than he was a conductor, but not nearly as good a composer as his contemporary Felix Weingartner for example.

What do you not like him about his conducting, PW?  His creativity with scores?

[PerfectWagnerite]

What do you not like him about his conducting, PW?  His creativity with scores?

A few things:

1) Tempos way too wayward for my taste, slow parts are very slow and fast parts very fast, but then fast parts could become slow all of a sudden, just too much freedom for my taste
2) Orchestral balances are not detailed. You just hear a mass of sound without much wind, string or any other instrumental differentiation. Probably not helped by bad sound in most of his recordings or the rather large un-HIP ensembles he used to record Beethoven or Schubert but I put the blame on him
3) Orchestral execution tend to be sub-par. Nowhere do you hear the ensemble clarity and finess you find in a Szell performance or a unity, purpose, and correctness you find in a Klemperer performance
4) Performances that leave me cold, just no humanity or humor whatsoever to the music, just walls and walls of sound and chords...as opposed to a Bruno Walter for example.

[Ghost Sonata]

A few things:

1) Tempos way too wayward for my taste, slow parts are very slow and fast parts very fast, but then fast parts could become slow all of a sudden, just too much freedom for my taste
2) Orchestral balances are not detailed. You just hear a mass of sound without much wind, string or any other instrumental differentiation. Probably not helped by bad sound in most of his recordings or the rather large un-HIP ensembles he used to record Beethoven or Schubert but I put the blame on him
3) Orchestral execution tend to be sub-par. Nowhere do you hear the ensemble clarity and finess you find in a Szell performance or a unity, purpose, and correctness you find in a Klemperer performance
4) Performances that leave me cold, just no humanity or humor whatsoever to the music, just walls and walls of sound and chords...as opposed to a Bruno Walter for example.

Thank you, PW! So it's Furtwängler descending, eh?  I have several hours this aft to listen for your excellent points in my EMI set.  Even if you don't buy his approach, you have to admire (I think) the notion that every Furtwängler performance is unique and spontaneous, a creative act rather than a duplicative one (the inspiration/desperation of a wanna-be composer?...one might wonder).  Also, FYI, I had some Weingartner hearabouts and now dunno where he's hiding...

[PerfectWagnerite]

Thank you, PW! So it's Furtwängler descending, eh?  I have several hours this aft to listen for your excellent points in my EMI set.  Even if you don't buy his approach, you have to admire (I think) the notion that every Furtwängler performance is unique and spontaneous, a creative act rather than a duplicative one (the inspiration/desperation of a wanna-be composer?...one might wonder). 

I think Furt's rather eccentric and neurotic approach works for the famous EMI Tristan as most of the music has a rather hallucinatory and wild nature anyway and his extremes don't really get in the way of the music. Same goes for his Bruckner which more or less works well. But taken as a whole he is not my kind of conductor. I have a CD of him conducting Haydn's Sym #88 and Schubert's 9th and they are effortful and ponderous interpretations. And I had A LOT of his CDs over the years (including the big 107cd box that I got about 20 through)...

[Ghost Sonata]

...But taken as a whole he is not my kind of conductor...

I might have thought that myself, actually...everything you've written about him is accurate in my book.  Often found myself wondering if he really had as much control of his orchestras as legend has it.  And I thought I was one of those listeners that more or less prefers sticking to the score and respecting the composer's wishes (when I rail against Rattle, that's one of my main points, guess what? - he's a big fan of Furtwängler) but I found myself enjoying Furtwängler's eccentricities half the time, half the time not.  Key for me was when I thought I understood what he was up to, I could say, "hmmm, interesting" or "valid" or even "that's great!" but when I couldn't even come close to discerning the point, speeding-up here, slowing-down there, I'm ready to send him back to music school.  Love what he does with Brahms' 3rd (I could just hug him); but the opening movement of Mozart's #40 clocks in at a neck-whiplashing 6.54, turning what to me is a fairly ruminative, churning allegro into a romp.  Well, I did learn it's marked molto allegro...! :laugh  But then his andante is a beauty, precise, measured and charming.  And so, even if you dislike him, and I do half the time (so far) I think you have to give him credit for making it all the more interesting (reportedly, he despised routine, and he makes me wonder if his path might be part of the answer to bringing more audiences into concert halls).  I think I've got to listen to him some more - after some physical therapy for the neck whiplash - and read one of his biographies! And you've got to listen to the rest of the CD's in that set - might have been luck o' the draw? 

[Cato]

I was not sure where to place this: a review by Joseph Horowitz of a book by Roger Allen highly critical of Furtwaengler's relationship with the Nazis.

The review is not positive.  Since the Wall Street Journal sometimes blocks those who do not subscribe, I will place the entire review here.

 

Apostle of Inwardness

One of the most thrilling documents of symphonic music in performance—readily accessible on YouTube—is a clip of Wilhelm Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the closing five minutes of Brahms's Symphony No. 4. Furtwängler is not commanding a performing army. Rather he is channeling a trembling state of heightened emotional awareness so irresistible as to obliterate, in the moment, all previous encounters with the music at hand. This experience is both empowering and—upon reflection—a little scary. And it occurred some three years after the implosion of Hitler's Third Reich—a regime for which Furtwängler, though not exactly an advocate, was a potent cultural symbol.

In 20th-century classical music, the iconic embodiment of the fight for democratic freedoms was the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who fled Europe and galvanized opposition to Hitler and Mussolini. Furtwängler (1886-1954), who remained behind, was Toscanini's iconic antipode, eschewing the objective clarity of Toscanini's literalism in favor of Teutonic ideals of lofty subjective spirituality.

Furtwängler was inaccurately denounced in America as a Nazi. His de-Nazification proceedings were misreported in the New York Times. Afterward, he was prevented by a blacklist from conducting the Chicago Symphony or the Metropolitan Opera, both of which wanted him.

Furtwängler was no Nazi. Behind the scenes, he helped Jewish musicians. Before the war ended, he fled Germany for Switzerland. Even so, his insistence on being "nonpolitical" was naive and self-deluded. As a tool of Hitler and Goebbels, he potently abetted the German war effort. In effect, he lent his prestige to the Third Reich whenever he performed, whether in Berlin or abroad. He was also famously photographed shaking hands with Goebbels from the stage.

In "Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical," Roger Allen, a fellow at St. Peter's College, Oxford, doesn't dwell on any of this. Rather he undertakes a deeper inquiry and asks: Did Furtwängler espouse a characteristically German cultural-philosophical mind-set that in effect embedded Hitler? He answers yes. But the answer is glib.

Mr. Allen's method is to cull a mountain of Furtwängler writings. That Furtwängler at all times embodied what Thomas Mann in 1945 called "the German-Romantic counter-revolution in intellectual history" is documented beyond question. He was an apostle of Germanic inwardness. He endorsed the philosophical precepts of Hegel and the musical analyses of Heinrich Schenker, for whom German composers mattered most. All this, Mr. Allen shows, propagated notions of "organic" authenticity recapitulated by Nazi ideologues.

Furtwängler's writings as sampled here (others are better) are repetitious—and so, alas, is Mr. Allen's commentary. The tensions and paradoxes complicating Furtwängler's devil's pact, his surrender to communal ecstasies ennobling or perilous, are reduced to simplistic presumption. Furtwängler's murky Germanic thinking remains murky and uncontextualized. One would never know, from Mr. Allen's exegesis, that Hegel formulated a sophisticated "holistic" alternative to the Enlightenment philosophies undergirding Anglo-American understandings of free will. One would never suspect that Schenkerian analysis, extrapolating the fundamental harmonic subcurrents upon which Furtwängler's art feasted, is today alive and well.

Here's an example. Furtwängler writes: "Bruckner is one of the few geniuses . . . whose appointed task was to express the transcendental in human terms, to weave the power of God into the fabric of human life. Be it in struggles against demonic forces, or in music of blissful transfiguration, his whole mind and spirit were infused with thoughts of the divine." Mr. Allen comments: "It is this idea, with its anti-intellectual subtext, which associates Furtwängler so strongly with aspects of Nazi ideology. . . . That Bruckner's music represents the power of God at work in the fabric of human existence, can be seen as an extension of the Nazi . . . belief in God as a mystical creative power." But many who revere Brucknerian "divine bliss" are neither anti-intellectual nor religiously inclined.

A much more compelling section of Mr. Allen's narrative comes at the end, when he observes that Furtwängler blithely maintained his musical ideology after World War II, with no evident pause for reflection. One can agree that this says something unpleasant about the Furtwängler persona, suggesting a nearly atavistic truculence. But it is reductionist to analogize Furtwängler's unrelenting postwar hostility to nontonal music to "the non-rational censure of 'degenerate' art by the Nazis." Far more interesting is Furtwängler's own argument that the nontonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers lacks an "overview." A calibrated long-range trajectory of musical thought was an essential ingredient of Furtwängler's interpretive art. Absent the tension-and-release dynamic of tonal harmony, he had little to work with.

The political dangers inherent in German Romantic music are a familiar concern, beginning with Nietzsche's skewerings of Wagner. The best writer on this topic remains Thomas Mann, who lived it. Here he is in "Reflections of a Non-Political Man" (1918): "Art will never be moral or virtuous in any political sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental tendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the 'barbarism' that begets beauty [is] indestructible; and although some may call this predilection . . . immoral to the point of endangering the world, yet it is an imperishable fact of life, and if one wanted to eradicate this aspect of art . . . then one might well have freed the world from a serious danger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself."

With the coming of Hitler, Mann changed his tune and moved to California. The most impressive pages of Mr. Allen's book come in an appendix: Mann's lecture "Germany and the Germans," delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945. Mann here becomes a proud American: "Everything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence. As an American I am a citizen of the world."

It is pertinent to remember that seven years later, having witnessed the Cold War and the Red Scare, Mann deserted the U.S. for Switzerland; as early as 1951 he wrote to a friend: "I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil to which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me."

Wilhelm Furtwängler's refusal to emigrate, however else construed, is not irrelevant here. He processed much differently the stresses that drove Thomas Mann into permanent exile.

—Mr. Horowitz is the author of "Understanding Toscanini," among many other books.

 

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wilhelm-furtwangler-review-apostle-of-inwardness-1533331650

[vandermolen]

Am enjoying this epic work (1944/5) which conveys a strong sense of looming catastrophe:
[asin]B000024OJI[/asin]