Wilhelm Furtwängler
Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler was a German conductor and composer. He is regarded as one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century. He was a major influence for many later conductors, and his name is often mentioned when discussing their interpretative styles.
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born into a prominent family in Schöneberg, Germany (now a district/borough of Berlin). His father, Adolf Furtwängler, was an archaeologist, and his mother was a painter. Most of his childhood was spent in Munich, where his father taught at the city's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). He was given a musical education from an early age, and developed a great love for Ludwig van Beethoven, a composer with whose works he remained closely associated throughout his life. As a boy he sometimes stayed with his grandmother in Mannheim. Through her family he met the Geissmars, a Jewish family who were leading lawyers and amateur musicians in the town. Berta Geissmar later wrote, "Furtwängler became so good at [skiing] as to attain almost professional skill... Almost every sport appealed to him: he loved tennis, sailing and swimming... He was a good horseman..." She also said that he was a strong mountain climber and hiker.
Although Furtwängler achieved fame chiefly from his conducting, he regarded himself foremost as a composer. He began conducting in order to perform his own works. By age of twenty, he had composed several works. However, they were not well received, and that, combined with the financial insecurity of a career as a composer, led him to concentrate on conducting. He made his conducting debut with the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic) in Anton Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. He subsequently held conducting posts at Munich, Strasbourg, Lübeck, Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Vienna. Furtwangler succeeded Artur Bodanzky as principal conductor of the Mannheim Opera and Music Academy in 1915, remaining until 1920. Berta Geissmar subsequently became his secretary and business manager, in Mannheim and later in Berlin, until she was forced to leave Germany in 1935. From 1921 onwards, Furtwängler shared holidays in the Engadin with Berta and her mother. In 1924 he bought a house there. After he married, the house was open to a wide circle of friends.
Furtwängler was very critical of Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany, at the end of January 1933 and was convinced that Hitler would not stay in power for long. He had said of Hitler in 1932, "This hissing street pedlar will never get anywhere in Germany." In 1933, Furtwängler met with Hitler to try to stop his new antisemitic policy in the domain of music. He had prepared a list of significant Jewish musicians: these included the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the musicologist Curt Sachs, the violinist Carl Flesch, and Jewish members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Hitler did not listen to Furtwängler, who lost patience, and the meeting became a shouting match. Berta Geissmar wrote, "After the audience, he told me that he knew now what was behind Hitler's narrow-minded measures. This is not only antisemitism, but the rejection of any form of artistic, philosophical thought, the rejection of any form of free culture..."
1933 Mannheim concert
On 26 April 1933, Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic performed a joint concert in Mannheim with the local orchestra to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Wagner's death and raise funds for the Mannheim orchestra. The concert had been planned long before the Nazis came to power. However, the Nazi-controlled Mannheim Orchestra Committee demanded that Szymon Goldberg, the Jewish leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, step aside for the evening to allow the leader of the Mannheim orchestra to take his place. Furtwängler firmly refused, and the concert proceeded as originally scheduled. Before the banquet organized for the evening, members of the Mannheim Orchestra Committee confronted Furtwängler, accusing him of "a lack of national sentiment." Furious, Furtwängler left the venue before the banquet and rejoined Berta Geissmar and her mother. His decision to spend the evening with his "Jewish friends" rather than attending the event hosted by the Nazi authorities sparked significant controversy. In protest, Furtwängler refused to conduct in Mannheim again, and it was not until 21 years later, in 1954, that he returned to the city.
"The Hindemith Case"
In 1934, Furtwängler publicly described Hitler as an "enemy of the human race" and the political situation in Germany as a Schweinerei ("disgrace", literally: "swinishness"). On 25 November 1934, he wrote a letter in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, "Der Fall Hindemith" ("The Hindemith Case"), in support of the composer Paul Hindemith. Hindemith had been labelled a degenerate artist by the Nazis. Furtwängler also conducted a piece by Hindemith, Mathis der Maler, although the work had been banned by the Nazis. The concert received enormous acclaim and unleashed a political storm. The Nazis (especially Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist) formed a violent conspiracy against the conductor, who resigned from his official positions, including as the vice-president of the Reichsmusikkammer and as a member of the Prussian State Council. His resignation from the latter position was refused by Göring. He was also forced by Goebbels to give up all his artistic positions.
Compromise of 1935
On 28 February 1935, Furtwängler met Goebbels, who wanted to keep Furtwängler in Germany, since he considered him, like Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner, a "national treasure". Goebbels asked him to pledge allegiance publicly to the new regime. Furtwängler refused. Goebbels then proposed that Furtwängler acknowledge publicly that Hitler was in charge of cultural policy. Furtwängler accepted: Hitler was a dictator and controlled everything in the country. But he added that it must be clear that he wanted nothing to do with the policy and that he would remain as a non-political artist, without any official position. The agreement was reached. Goebbels made an announcement declaring that Furtwängler's letter on Hindemith was not political: Furtwängler had spoken only from an artistic point of view, and it was Hitler who was in charge of the cultural policy in Germany.
New York Philharmonic
In September 1935, the baritone Oskar Jölli, a member of the Nazi party, reported to the Gestapo that Furtwängler had said, "Those in power should all be shot, and things in Germany would not change until this was done". Hitler forbade him to conduct for several months, until Furtwängler's fiftieth birthday in January 1936. Hitler and Goebbels allowed him to conduct again and offered him presents: Hitler an annual pension of 40,000 Reichsmarks, and Goebbels an ornate baton made of gold and ivory. Furtwängler refused them. Furtwängler was offered the principal conductor's post at the New York Philharmonic, which was then the most desirable and best paid position in international musical life. He was to have followed Arturo Toscanini, who had declared that Furtwängler was the only man to succeed him. Furtwängler accepted the post, but his telephone conversations were recorded by the Gestapo.
1936 to 1937
Furtwängler consistently included Jewish and other non-Aryan musicians in his overseas tours during the 1930s, even as the Nazi regime tightened its grip. This was evident during his performances in France in April 1934, where he conducted Wagner operas. Hans Mayer, a professor of literature and a communist Jew who had fled Germany, reported after the war that Furtwängler had deliberately chosen a cast made up almost entirely of Jews or individuals who had been driven out of Germany for these concerts. Similarly, during the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937, Furtwängler held a series of Wagnerian concerts that were hailed as a triumph. Goebbels proclaimed in the German press that Furtwängler and Wagner had been celebrated in Paris. However, the true source of this acclaim was the German émigré community in Paris, many of whom were Jewish and viewed Furtwängler as a symbol of anti-Nazi resistance.
Herbert von Karajan
The Nazi leaders searched for another conductor to counterbalance Furtwängler. A young, gifted Austrian conductor now appeared in Nazi Germany: Herbert von Karajan. Karajan had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1935, and was much more willing to participate in the propaganda of the new regime than Furtwängler. Furtwängler had attended several of Karajan's concerts, praising his technical abilities but criticizing his conducting style. At the time, Furtwängler did not view Karajan as a serious competitor. However, this perception changed when Karajan conducted Fidelio and Tristan und Isolde in Berlin in late 1938. Göring, recognizing an opportunity, decided to take the initiative.
Furtwängler possessed a unique and deeply personal philosophy of music. He viewed symphonic works as creations of nature, which could only be realized subjectively through sound. Neville Cardus, writing in the Manchester Guardian in 1954, eloquently described Furtwängler’s conducting style: "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 realized subjectively..." Similarly, conductor Henry Lewis remarked: "I admire Furtwängler for his originality and honesty. He liberated himself from the slavery of the score; he understood that the notes printed on the page are nothing but SYMBOLS. The score is neither the essence nor the spirit of the music. Furtwängler had the rare and extraordinary gift of transcending the written notes to reveal the true essence of music." Many commentators and critics regard him as the greatest conductor in history.[excessive citations] Musicologist Walter Frisch, in his book on the symphonies of Johannes Brahms, describes Furtwängler as "the finest Brahms conductor of his generation, perhaps of all time." Frisch highlights Furtwängler’s recordings as demonstrating "at once a greater attention to detail and to Brahms' markings than his contemporaries, and at the same time a larger sense of rhythmic-temporal flow that is never deflected by individual nuances." He praises Furtwängler’s ability "not only to respect, but to make musical sense of, dynamic markings and the indications of crescendo and diminuendo."
One of Furtwängler's early protégés was the piano prodigy Karlrobert Kreiten, who was killed by the Nazis in 1943 because he had criticized Hitler. Furtwängler was an important influence on the Argentine-born pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who decided to become a conductor when he was eight years old during a concert performance of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion conducted by Furtwängler in Buenos Aires in 1950. (Furtwängler's widow, Elisabeth, later said of Barenboim's conducting, "Er furtwänglert" ("He furtwänglers"). Barenboim recorded Furtwängler's 2nd Symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Other conductors known to speak admiringly of Furtwängler include Valery Gergiev, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Carlo Maria Giulini, Simon Rattle, Sergiu Celibidache, Otto Klemperer, Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Christoph Eschenbach, Alexander Frey, Philippe Herreweghe, Eugen Jochum, Zubin Mehta, Ernest Ansermet, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Bernard Haitink (who decided to become a conductor as a child and bedridden while listening to a Furtwängler concert on the radio during the second world war), Rafael Kubelík, Gustavo Dudamel, Jascha Horenstein (who had worked as an assistant to Furtwängler in Berlin during the 1920s), Kurt Masur and Christian Thielemann.
There are a huge number of Furtwängler recordings currently available, mostly live. Many of these were made during World War II using experimental tape technology. After the war they were confiscated by the Soviet Union for decades, and have only recently become widely available, often on multiple labels. In spite of their limitations, the recordings from this era are widely admired by Furtwängler devotees. The following represents only a small selection of some of Furtwängler's most famed recordings.
