I am posting two works conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Furtwängler was one of the outstanding conductors of the twentieth century, but he stayed in Germany during World War II, and his unwilling support of the government followed him for the remainder of his life. He was cleared of having collaborated in 1946. In this post, I am not emphasizing his political mistakes; rather, I am emphasizing his enormous talent, his influence, and his musicality.
The first piece is an orchestral version of Isolde’s Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. I have also posted a link to his 1954 film of Don Giovanni, taken from the Salzburg performance in 1953. It is the full opera, but it is well worth the time to watch it. I hope that you enjoy this posting.
Wilhem Furtwängler
January 25, 1886 – November 30, 1954
Furtwängler was born into a cultured middle class German family: his father was an archaeologist and his mother an artist. As soon as it became clear that young Wilhem was exceptionally gifted, he was taken out of school and educated at home by private tutors. Music was his dominant interest: he soon learned to play the piano and was composing when he was seven years old. The boy was fascinated by Beethoven and is reputed to have memorized most of his works by the time he was twelve years old. By his late teens, he had composed several substantial works including a symphony, a string sextet, and several string quartets. He made his conducting debut in 1906 in Munich: the program included a symphonic poem by himself and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9.
Following the death of his father in 1902, Furtwängler decided to devote himself to conducting in order to support himself and his mother. He had served as a répétitur at Breslau during the 1905-1906 season, and the following season saw him at Zürich.
By the end of World War I, Furtwängler was clearly one of the pre-eminent conductors in Germany. He was engaged to conduct the Vienna Tonküntsler Orchestra for two seasons from 1919. During 1920, he became conductor of the concerts given by the orchestras of the Frankfurt Opera and the Berlin State Opera, succeeding Mengelberg and Richard Strauss. In 1922, Furtwängler was appointed chief conductor of both the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestras, and he began a close association with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, declining the directorship of the Vienna State Opera. Although Furtwängler conducted the Vienna Philharmonic until the end of his life, it was with the Berlin Philharmonic that he was to be most closely associated with. He toured at is head throughout Europe and began to make recordings with it from 1926 onwards. He appeared in England for the first time in 1924 and in the U.S. in 1925 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, to which he returned during the following two years.
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and its assumption of power in 1933 had a decisive effect upon Furtwängler’s career. He quickly ran into trouble when, in 1934, following the banning of Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler, which he was due to conduct at the Berlin State Opera, he resigned all his musical appointments; but despite many offers from abroad, which would have allowed him to leave the country, he continued to work in Germany. Having made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in 1931, with Tristan und Isolde, he returned to conduct there in 1936 and 1937, the year in which he also shared the conducting of the Coronation Season at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Sir Thomas Beecham, who greatly admired his musicianship. In the same year, he also appeared at the Paris World Exhibition.
His desire to remain and work in Germany, despite the declining political situation and the onset of hostilities, necessarily curtailed his activities in Europe outside the countries of the Axis powers. The best that can be said of Furtwängler during this period is that he was an unwilling, if ultimately compliant, tool in the hands of the Nazi party. The reality was that Nazi administration deliberately used culture as a key aspect of government, a fact to which Furtwängler appeared to be blind. As the pre-eminent conductor of his generation, and one who was fully recognized as such by all from Hitler downwards, he was thus an essential part of the state’s cultural apparatus. In 1942, he conducted Hitler’s birthday concert, a key date in both the state and cultural calendars. In addition, he conducted workers’ concerts – filmed for propaganda purposes – as well as the formal concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and returned to the Bayreuth Festival, a recognized Nazi stronghold, in 1934 and 1944. Eventually, as the Third Reich crumbled and his life became threatened, he fled to Switzerland early in 1945. Furtwängler was forbidden by the Allies from conducting until the end of 1946, when he was cleared of all allegations of collaboration with the Nazi government, although this association remained with him for the rest of his life and beyond. When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offered him the post of chief conductor in 1949, the uproar was so great that, inevitably, the idea came to nothing.
From 1947 onwards, until his death at the end of 1954, Furtwängler was active in all the major European musical centers. He resumed the chief conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947, and, from the same year onwards, appeared regularly at the Salzburg Festival. He conducted Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala in Milan in 1950 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 and made several highly distinguished recordings for Walter Legge and the Columbia label. He also conducted Legge’s Philharmonia Orchestra in London and on tour, notably, at the Lucerne Festival. Furtwängler suffered an illness during 1952 and collapsed while conducting in Vienna in 1953, and it is believed that the drugs which were prescribed as treatment may have affected his hearing detrimentally. By the middle of 1954, it was clear that he was becoming deaf to the point where he could not hear all the instruments of the orchestra clearly: ironically, this defect became obvious to the man himself at a rehearsal of his own music. With his life’s purpose thus negated, Furtwängler lost the will the live and died shortly afterwards in a sanitorium.
If some consider Furtwängler to have been a failure as a man, there can be no question that he was one of the very greatest interpretive musicians of the twentieth century. As a conductor, he possessed a highly personal technique, and he completely rejected the idea of the conductor as virtuoso. Films of him conducting shows his beat to have been frequently imprecise (at times deliberately so), and his gestures often appear strangely puppet-like. He favored a very rich bass line to his performances, the music frequently seeming to grow out of this and often realized through his evocative rather than precise gestures. Furtwängler considered music to be in a constant state of becoming: the ideal realization of a work was thus impossible, as so much depended upon temporary factors over which the conductor had little or no control. The insistence upon the multiple re-creations of a single view of a work was quite anathema to him, and performances of the same work conducted by Furtwängler were frequently quite different, depending on his immediate reaction to particular circumstances. His studies with Schenker gave him a powerful grasp of musical architecture, and he had an unrivaled capacity to reveal this in performance, as well as to create a sustained sense of mood, with a mastery of the moment. The results were frequently outstanding as well as unique, creating a sense of intensity equaled by few and exceeded by none.
Furtwängler’s discography is large and confusing and needs to be approached with care. He was active in the recording studio from 1926 until his death in 1954, but not all his studio recordings were especially successful. Many, however, are better than critical opinion may indicate. At the same time, following the development of tape recording in Germany with the Magnetophon, an early tape-recording machine, many performances conducted by him were recorded were recorded in actual concerts during World War II, or were recorded in an empty concert hall specifically for delayed broadcast. After he resumed conducting following his post-war ban, many of his performances were recorded informally either from radio broadcasts or directly from the concert hall. These, together with the wartime recordings, have received extensive circulation alongside his commercial recordings. With the lapsing of copyright, frequently the same recording – studio or live – has appeared on different labels; thus, correct identification of a recording’s provenance is worthwhile. Despite these difficulties, virtually every recording conducted by Furtwängler (and there are several misattributions to complicate matters) is of interest.
Taken from A-Z of Conductors, by David Patmore