本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛大意：

富特文格勒在战前就已经是优秀的指挥家，但对贝多芬的理解停留在音乐结构和组织上。

他选择留在法西斯德国的动机，有高尚的一面，也有自私的一面。

二战经历和良心的冲突，使他对更深入理解贝多芬音乐的精神层面。

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A survey of the life and artistry of Wilhelm Furtwängler –
his life Before the War, the War Years, the contrast with von Karajan; an assessment of his Artistry, the Wartime Recordings, his life After the War, his Post-War Career, his Post-War Recordings, Celibidache and the Furtwängler Legacy and my highly subjective choice of his Greatest Recordings.

For a 2004 update on the movie "Taking Sides," which dramatizes the Allied investigation into Furtwängler's wartime activities and loyalties,

Berlin. October 7, 1944. A typical day toward the end of the Third Reich. Soldiers die. Civilians suffer. Jews are murdered. Nothing special.

In the Beethovensaal a concert is about to begin, but the theater is empty, relieved of its usual audience studded with Nazi elite seeking a brief cultured respite from the stresses of war. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is on stage, awaiting its cue. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler stands awkwardly on the podium. The vague meandering of his baton summons the first shadowy note of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. A Radio Berlin engineer starts his Magnetophon. The most extraordinary orchestral recording of the century has just begun.

Genuinely transcendent musical events are rare. Their advent is hard to foresee. They often arise in improbable places and at chance times. And so it was on a grim fall afternoon in wartime Berlin that a lone Nazi technician bore witness to one of the most impassioned performances ever put on record.

Like all truly great artistic achievements, the intensity and conviction of Furtwängler's wartime work was distilled from hard-earned experience. In our era of pampered socialite classical superstars, it seems hard to conceive of a famous conductor genuinely torn by anguish. And yet, Furtwängler endured such extreme torment and pain that he was able to fully identify with the profound suffering from which the greatest composers wrested their most heartfelt and enduring masterpieces. Under pressure designed to crush any sensitive artist, he transmuted his distress into a vision of unprecedented insight and power.

The saga of how Furtwängler's incomparable artistry arose within the appalling abyss of Nazi Germany forces us to confront the terrible collision of art, society and morality.





The first two-thirds of Furtwängler's life held few clues of what was to come. He was born in Berlin in 1886 into an enviably comfortable environment. His father was a famed archeologist and his mother a gifted painter. Educated at home, the youngster was nurtured in German culture by tutors and family friends who included philosophers and artists.

Furtwängler's musical talent surfaced early. His deepest love was Beethoven. By age 12, Furtwängler reportedly had memorized most of the master's works and could play them on the piano. But above all else, Furtwängler aspired to be a composer and by age 10 had written trios, quartets and six piano sonatas. Following his father's death, though, he turned to conducting, primarily to support the family but also with the hope of fostering performances of his own works. The gesture was characteristic, and was but the first of many instances when Furtwängler would temper his ideals with practicality.

Furtwängler followed the usual route of a musical journeyman by serving as assistant and ultimately conductor in increasingly prestigious German musical posts. His mentors included Felix Mottl, a close associate of Wagner who had led the world premieres of several of his operas, Hans Pfitzner, one of Germany's foremost composers, and especially Artur Nikish, the greatest orchestral conductor of the era, known for mesmerizing musicians and audiences alike with his galvanizing fervor, deeply personal inflections and a unique orchestral "sound."

Furtwängler's rise was meteoric, conquering Breslau, Zurich, Munich, Strasbourg, Lubeck, Mannheim and Frankfort. He was touted by the press as "Das Wunder Furtwängler." ("Wunder" means amazing or incredible.) In 1922 he succeeded Nikish both at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, the most prestigious orchestra in Germany, and at the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus, whose unmatched century-long tradition of excellence had begun with Mendelssohn. By 1928, Furtwängler also held the top spot in Vienna, the musical capitol of Europe. In 1930 he became Music Director of the Bayreuth Festival, established by Wagner and regarded as the crown of German culture.

Furtwängler's only setback had been in America at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, where he had dazzled audiences for three seasons but then was edged out by a furiously jealous Toscanini, who cruelly exploited Furtwängler's solemnity, social awkwardness and refusal to grovel to the society sponsors who controlled the pursestrings. But no matter: oblivious to the political storm that was gathering, by 1932 Furtwängler stood at the pinnacle of artistic success and his future, in Europe at least, seemed limitless.

Furtwängler's recording career began in 1926. Over the following decade, he recorded for Polydor mostly German/Austrian fare from Bach to Wagner, but with some uncharacteristic Rossini and Johann Strauss as well. The full series is available on Koch 3-7059-2 K2 and 3-7073-2 K2 (2 CDs each) and is highlighted on Symposium 1046. While evidencing little of the visionary insight of his later readings, each of the records displays the unified ensemble of a great orchestra under a leader solidly versed in Germanic musical culture. Thus, the Bach is heavy and committed, the Mozart weighty and severe, the Weber mystical and ecstatic, the Wagner dark and brooding and the Beethoven noble and solid.

Furtwängler's early recordings clearly evidence an artist at the top of his professional world, a self-assured, solid exemplar of the rich German performing tradition. As the entry in the authoritative Grove's Dictionary of Music aptly put it at the time: "Control and balance are prominent characteristics of his conducting; his interpretations, though full of vitality, are not impulsive and his personal manner at the conductor's desk is usually restrained."

Then came Hitler.





The prolific German classical music scene soon became a vacuum. Among conductors alone, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Erich Kleiber – Furtwängler's chief rivals – all left. Some fled as a matter of conscience, but others had no choice; as Jews, they were barred by the new racial laws from performing, teaching and, ultimately, living. Soon after Hitler's ascent, Furtwängler was the only notable conductor left. He clearly bore no malice toward the horde of emigrants, as he naively invited many to return and appear with him in future seasons and seemed genuinely hurt when they all declined. Nearly all Furtwängler's former associates begged him to take a stand and join them; when he refused to leave, they branded him a traitor to humanity and shunned further contact.

The crucial question which would plague Furtwängler for the rest of his life was why he stayed behind when all the other great artists fled. The standard explanation is that he lacked moral fortitude. But, as so often emerges with ethical issues, the full story is far more complex. If anything, the opposite is true: Furtwängler stayed primarily out of a sincere, albeit naive, conviction.

Out of the depths of his cultural and intellectual roots, Furtwängler regarded Hitler and Nazism as a passing phase in German politics. Indeed, many observers at the time found it hard to take seriously the short, dark, brown-eyed Austrian's ranting about tall, blond Aryan supremacy. From the very outset, Furtwängler saw two Germanies: the permanent, cultural one of which he remained a proud member, and an irrelevant, political one which was a temporary nuisance. To Furtwängler, there was no such thing as Nazi Germany, but rather a Germany raped by Nazis. Furtwängler truly believed that by maintaining his artistic convictions he would succeed in resisting Hitler and upholding the everlasting purity of great German culture. All of his wartime activities were bent upon achieving this goal.

Furtwängler believed to the depth of his soul that music was a force for moral good, a route out of chaos that would assist the cause of humanity. In 1943, he wrote: "The message Beethoven gave mankind in his works ... seems to me never to have been more urgent than it is today." He later told the Chicago Daily Tribune: "It would have been much easier to emigrate, but there had to be a spiritual center of integrity for all the good and real Germans who had to stay behind. I felt that a really great work of music was a stronger and more essential contradiction of the spirit of Buchenwald and Auschwitz than words could be." Richard Wolff, the first violinist of the Berlin Philharmonic (whose Jewish wife remained unharmed during the war through Furtwängler's protection) agreed: "Furtwängler could have enjoyed a secure and comfortable life abroad during the dreadful years of the Nazi regime, but he felt it his responsibility to stay behind and help educate the younger German generation and to keep alive spiritual values in Germany in her darkest hour."

But all of these noble thoughts can be dismissed as facile rationalization by a gutless pawn, and indeed there were more practical reasons why Furtwängler remained. The Nazis reportedly threatened to imprison his mother. They harassed and ultimately expelled his Jewish personal secretary. Knowing Furtwängler's attachment to the Berlin Philharmonic, they hinted that they would disband and conscript the group in favor of a more loyal ensemble. Above all, they exploited Furtwängler's fear that his art would not be understood outside Germany: when Furtwängler was offered conducting posts abroad the government readily agreed, but subject to a new emigration law that would forever bar his return to Germany – a condition they knew Furtwängler could never accept. Thus, Furtwängler found himself effectively imprisoned in his homeland.

And the Nazis intended to keep it that way by poisoning Furtwängler's image abroad. Thus, when Furtwängler refused to join the Nazi party, he was made a Staatsrat (State Councilor) for life, an official-sounding but purely honorary title he could not legally refuse and which Nazi news releases often invoked to brand him with a rank outside his choice. When he refused to salute Hitler at a concert, the crafty F黨rer leaped to the stage and warmly grasped Furtwängler's hand, a moment captured by photographers and circulated worldwide as alleged evidence of capitulation. And when faced with Furtwängler's public silence, the Nazis routinely generated false news items proclaiming his support, enhanced by fabricated quotations in praise of Nazi policies and leadership.

The perverse efficiency of the Nazi propaganda machine was displayed in 1935, when Furtwängler was offered the helm of the New York Philharmonic upon Toscanini's retirement. His candidacy came with a seemingly ironclad guarantee of success – the insistence of the Maestro himself, acknowledged by an adoring American public to be the world's greatest conductor, that only Furtwängler was worthy to succeed him. The timing of the offer was propitious, as Furtwängler was upset with the Nazi regime and this once was sorely tempted. But as the heir apparent savored his options, Prime Minister G鰎ing announced that Furtwängler's rehabilitation was complete and that he would resume his duties at the Berlin State Opera. With that, the damage was done: despite Furtwängler's attempts to clarify his position, both the New York press and the Philharmonic subscribers now would have nothing to do with bringing an officially reconfirmed Nazi to their shores. Furtwängler tried to bow out graciously with a telegram "postponing" his US appearances "until the public realizes that music and politics have nothing to do with each other," but this was hardly a message apt to placate an isolationist America alarmed over reports of Nazi outrages.

As a final measure of insurance, the Nazis seized upon the most terrible and effective weapon of all. Herbert von Karajan was a brilliant and ambitious Austrian conductor who was everything Furtwängler was not: handsome, energetic, charismatic, young and utterly compliant and unprincipled. Throughout the war, the Nazis played the two against each other with diabolical brilliance, denying von Karajan the ultimate praise with which the state-controlled press kept showering Furtwängler while keeping the older man in perpetual fear that his rival might supplant him, even going so far as to tout him as "Das Wunder Karajan," a cruel echo of Furtwängler's own earlier moniker.

The fabricated rivalry with von Karajan hit Furtwängler at the very core of his being. Furtwängler lived and breathed music so thoroughly that he constantly conducted imaginary orchestras as he walked. Furtwängler had dedicated his entire life to perpetuating the traditions of German culture in which he had been immersed from his earliest youth and of which he had become the most visible champion. German music was the sole reason for his existence. Indeed, in 1938, after the annexation of Austria, the already overworked conductor doubled his duties by taking charge of all musical activity in Vienna, as he felt compelled to preserve that city's proud tradition and in particular the independence and excellence of its famed Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which was threatened with State control.

The Nazis needed Furtwängler as much as he needed Germany. Hitler deeply admired his artistry. The Party itself was keenly aware that Furtwängler was the foremost symbol of the past glory of German culture and that his loss would be a final blow to national prestige which would validate all the foreign criticism.

Throughout the era, Furtwängler took consistent advantage of the respect the Nazis were forced to accord him. When presented with contracts having "Aryan-only" clauses, he refused to sign and went on to tweak the promoters by spotlighting Jewish orchestra members as soloists. When ordered to replace his Jewish concertmaster, he threatened to cancel his concerts. When a ban was imposed on further performances by Jewish artists, Furtwängler demanded a meeting with Propaganda Minister Goebbels to get it rescinded. When the Berlin Philharmonic was to be "aryanized," he personally met with Hitler to reverse the decree. (Ultimately, of course, these measures of relief all were to be overturned, but that hardly diminishes their import at the time.)

Despite the appearances to the outside world, Furtwängler did not collaborate. Thus, he never gave the Nazi salute, even when Hitler was present at a concert. He refused to perform in halls in which swastikas were displayed. He avoided appearing at official government functions. He would not conduct orchestras in overrun countries. He never began concerts with the Nazi anthem. And he never played the fawning socialist-themed patriotic works that flooded other concert programs. That Furtwängler got away with such treasonous conduct attests to the esteem in which he was held by both the Party and the people.

Furtwängler's relationship to the Nazis was defined in 1934 when he programmed Paul Hindemith's new opera Mathis der Maler. The composer's wife was Jewish and therefore his music, as yet unheard, was automatically condemned as degenerate. The libretto (also by Hindemith) probably didn't help matters either. The title character is a visionary painter caught up in a civil war, desperately seeking a way to apply his talents to better mankind. Despite the opera's medieval setting, its central theme of an artist's duty to constructively embrace social issues was painfully modern, and the Nazis surely grasped its challenging parallels with current history – perhaps the very reason why Furtwängler resolved to champion a work that spoke so directly to his own gnawing concerns.

When G鰎ing banned the work, Furtwängler scheduled an orchestral suite of the opera's music instead. The concert received enormous acclaim as a rallying point for anti-Nazi frustrations. Furtwängler then published a lengthy article in defense of Hindemith in which he insisted that ideology was irrelevant and that the only valid aesthetic criterion was the quality of the artistry itself. He was attacked by the state press, led by Goebbels, who insisted with equal vigor that only ardent Nazis could be true artists. Sickened over the regime's repressive ideology, Furtwängler resigned all his positions (except, of course, the permanent Staatsrat), devoted himself to composition and gazed wistfully overseas. (It was at this point that the opportune New York Philharmonic offer was made.)

During the following months the conductor was miserable, torn from the means of promoting great German music of which he considered himself the guardian. The government was upset as well: substitute concerts were sparsely attended, subscribers demanded refunds, the orchestra was plunged into deficit and the foreign press exploited the incident to denounce the oppression of a regime that apparently had to silence its foremost artist.

The standoff finally was resolved when Furtwängler agreed to publicly acknowledge Hitler's dominance of artistic policies (which could hardly be denied) in exchange for being allowed to work free-lance and never to have to accept a political position or perform at any state function. True to form, the state press reported the matter as Furtwängler's full capitulation and never mentioned the rest of the deal.

But Furtwängler did not simply retreat into himself or the sanctum of art. Rather, according to numerous testimonials, he displayed enormous moral courage, constantly placing his life and reputation in jeopardy. For the next decade, he spent much of his time intervening with party officials in nearly impossible tasks of protection and rescue for potential victims who sought his assistance, including strangers and even professional enemies. Although the evidence is often anecdotal, archivist Fred Prieberg claims that his research alone has documented over eighty people at risk who were saved by Furtwängler's efforts.

While Furtwängler's outward passivity (quashed beneath distorted Nazi news reports) was interpreted abroad as collaboration, we now know that his quiet heroism saved far more lives than abrasive ranting or symbolic emigration. As Paul Minchin, Chairman of the English Furtwängler Society, has aptly observed: "It takes far more courage to oppose a totalitarian regime from within." It is clear that Furtwängler had at least as much courage as the self-proclaimed champions of humanity who branded him a coward but who lobbed all their verbal grenades from the safe harbor of the free world.

So was Furtwängler a neglected saint? Not quite. There is, unfortunately, a less laudable side to his wartime activities.

Notwithstanding his courage, Furtwängler did not act out of pure altruism. Nearly everything he did was intended to preserve the integrity of German music. But since Furtwängler considered himself the foremost exemplar of that art, his activity served to solidify his status and gratify his ego. Furtwängler can hardly be compared to Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler and other heroes who had nothing to gain and acted purely as a matter of conscience, ultimately sacrificing all they had in order to oppose Nazi genocide. Focussed solely on art, Furtwängler simply did not concern himself with the larger social context.

This narrow focus produced mixed results. Inextricably tied to each of Furtwängler's laudable goals and achievements was an unintended drawback. Despite his valid cultural intentions, he unwittingly bolstered the German war effort.

For example, Furtwängler accepted the Vice Presidency of the mandatory performers' union and served on a commission that approved the programs of all public concerts. He assumed these positions of leadership in order to maximize his impact upon preserving cultural integrity and assuring exposure to composers and artists of quality. But his constant visibility also served to legitimize and lend credibility to the Nazi regime, not only in the eyes of foreign observers, but to the citizenry as well: after all, how could the Nazis be thoroughly depraved barbarians if someone like Furtwängler could coexist with them?

Similarly, after the War many asserted that Furtwängler concerts had served to rally Resistance members. These events succeeded in assembling a core group of cultural leaders for a post-war Germany who would vaunt humanism over militarism. Even outside Germany, many emigrants were inspired by Furtwängler as a symbol of their dissent. Thus, Furtwängler's wartime activities may have produced lasting humanitarian benefits. In the short run, though, they had the opposite effect.

As biographer Sam Shirakawa aptly notes, Furtwängler may have offered his art for the sake of "true Germans," but he had no control over its dissemination. Thus, his concerts were broadcast to bolster troop morale. Worse, Hitler and his top henchmen often attended Furtwängler concerts to bask in his musical balm. That same balm may have lulled the frustrations of intellectuals and artists into indifference and diverted their energies from actively opposing the ongoing war and genocide. Furtwängler only saw music as a force for moral redemption. He once told Toscanini: "Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played and if they are not free at first, they are freed while listening to these works." But the hearts of Nazi soldiers did not melt and the souls of their leaders proved impervious to aesthetic redemption. Were those responsible for (or at best indifferent toward) the liquidation of innocent millions really entitled to have their consciences set free by the liberating glory of music?

Nor was Furtwängler's personal outlook free of paradox. Indeed, even his attitude toward Jews was inconsistent. One of the axioms of Nazi social engineering was that Jews were incapable of being true spiritual Germans and therefore were less than fully human and a social pollution. Nowhere was the absurdity of this assumption more apparent than in classical music, as many of Germany's finest performers were Jews. Indeed, the pianist Artur Schnabel, a Jew, was universally hailed as the preeminent exponent of Mozart, Schubert and especially Beethoven, the quintessential German musicians. And yet, although he was ideally equipped to reject the Nazi racist view, Furtwängler often drew distinctions between two classes of Jews.

On the one hand, he ardently supported Jews who had arrived at the top of their musical, artistic, scientific or academic professions. Furtwängler vehemently opposed Nazi efforts to oust such individuals, as they had become an integral part of, and significant contributors to, German culture. The vast majority of Jews whom Furtwängler assisted were professionals (or their families or acquaintances).

On the other hand, though, Furtwängler apparently felt that Jews outside these exalted ranks were potentially subversive and therefore expendable. He endorsed attacks upon alleged Jewish domination of newspapers because, in his view, this supplanted the development of a truly "German" press. Similarly, he seemed to indulge boycotts of Jewish commerce, protesting only the resultant adverse foreign publicity and the threat of a spill-over that could deplete the arts.

Even as late as May 1945, Furtwängler did not seem to fully grasp the consequence of Nazi racism. From the geographic and historical perspective of sanctuary in Switzerland, he had ample time to reflect upon the prior decade. His principal concern, though, became a fear that in the aftermath of defeat the now-publicized atrocities would be blamed upon the entire German people, thus unfairly ignoring their cultural greatness and inner nobility. Despite all he had witnessed, Furtwängler simply could not accept that the culture which once had produced Goethe and Beethoven had now rotted into a mire of jackboots and crematoria. Fred Prieberg calls this a protective mythology which Furtwängler created to shield himself from accountability in a real world in which civilizations do fail, in which people are held responsible for their leaders, and in which art cannot be so conveniently isolated from politics. Furtwängler's tragedy was that he had to believe this illusion of permanent German cultural merit in order to justify his life's work. Concludes Prieberg: "Furtwängler sacrificed himself to his own fiction."

In recent years, we have been regaled by a pathetic parade of aged German artists claiming dewy-eyed ignorance of the Holocaust. Would Furtwängler have been one of these? Other than a few post-war expressions of shame, there is no evidence that he ever took a stand against the awful culmination of his casual tolerance of antisemitism. Indeed, it seems inconceivable that a man who spent so much of his time closely studying political leaders and social trends and successfully manipulating them to his professional benefit could have been genuinely ignorant of this cornerstone of Nazi activity and policy. Or, knowing, did he view the world through artistic blinders and simply not care?

Speculation as to Furtwängler's state of mind is confusing and inconclusive. Fortunately, though, there is a far more reliable index to his conscience. When we listen to wartime performances by Strauss, B鰄m, von Karajan, Krauss, Mengelberg and other Axis amoralists, we hear conductors utterly at peace with themselves, blissfully oblivious to the horrors around them, comfortably nestled in their insular worlds of abstract artistic contentment.

But Furtwängler's output of the time is of a wholly different dimension, ranging far beyond the bounds of accepted classical tradition, distended by brutally twisted structures, outrageous tempos, jagged phrasing, bizarre balances and violent dynamics. This is simply not the expression of a cold-hearted Nazi. Rather, it clearly and irrefutably signifies a sensitive but deeply troubled man torn by inner conflict and soul-wrenching doubt, constantly on the verge of exploding with torment.

Debate over Furtwängler's wartime politics may continue to swirl among academics, historians and social philosophers, but his artistry confers the ultimate proof of his humanity. There is no room for subtlety or doubt. No one sensitive to the interpretation of music can possibly mistake it.





The degradation of Furtwängler's reputation stands in shameful contrast to the glorious career of Herbert von Karajan, whose authorized biographies tend to make only passing mention of his war years, and with very good reason. While von Karajan's apologists cloak his activities in the heady mantles of artistry and at worst opportunism, the facts decree otherwise.

Von Karajan later insisted he was apolitical, and claimed to have had no enthusiasm for the Nazis. And yet, while no other musician of note ever bothered to join the National Socialist Party (not even Richard Strauss, Hitler's favorite living composer), von Karajan joined not just once but twice! The dates were of particular significance. Von Karajan first registered on April 8, 1933 – one day after enactment of a new civil service law that removed Jews from state organizations. He reenlisted on May 1, 1933 – the very day before a freeze on new party members. As Norman Lebrecht observed in The Maestro Myth: "For ambitious and unprincipled musicians, party affiliation in 1933 offered a rapid route to the plum jobs suddenly vacated by Jewish outcasts."

Von Karajan soon catapulted himself to prominence. He was appointed music director at Aaschen and stepped up to the Berlin State Opera following Furtwängler's resignation over the Hindemith episode. He ingratiated himself with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna and was trotted out to conduct in occupied countries when Furtwängler refused to do so. He proudly led oratorios in praise of Hitler, scheduled special performances for Nazi brass to commemorate military victories and routinely opened his concerts with the "Horst Wessel" Nazi anthem, which included in its rousing lyrics the boast that "Jewish blood spurts from our knives." (To give his claim of political indifference some credence, though, von Karajan wilfully destroyed his reputation in 1942 by marrying a woman of quarter-Jewish ancestry – the Nazis were so precise about such calculations – and was then relieved of his posts and relegated to occasional free-lance jobs until the end of the war.)

But beyond everything else, while claiming to embody the highest ideals of an artist, von Karajan consistently lied about his Nazi party membership after the war. That worked until 1957, when his membership certificates belatedly surfaced from wartime archives. Even when confronted with this seemingly undeniable evidence, von Karajan insisted that the documents must have been forged, since they lacked his signature. Fatal to that stand, though, was the fact that the cards never required the signature of the member, but only of the registering party official.

While Furtwängler was vilified as an unrepentant old Nazi to the end of his days, von Karajan successfully buried his far more sensitive past to become the most prosperous musician in history, leaving an estate estimated at a half billion dollars.





Several critics have explained Furtwängler's art as melding two often conflicting principles. The first, a structural logic, sense of proportion and intellectual probing, was derived from Furtwängler's upbringing and is clearly evident in his early Polydors. The second – unbridled emotion and improvisation – was forged in the hideous caldron of Nazi Germany.

Great music never emerges from comfort, well-being and privilege. Rather, throughout the history of music, the finest work arises from the most trying of circumstances. All of the great artists – composers and performers – were tortured souls. Even Beethoven was a gifted but largely derivative composer until driven to the brink of suicide by deafness, the cruellest blow of all for a budding musician. Like his idol, Furtwängler's art was fueled by the loss of his own most treasured possession: the stability of an absolute artist, sheltered from sordid social and political reality.

All conductors take their music seriously, but Furtwängler was driven by a deeper urge: he saw music as a moral force which had the power to impel listeners toward the good. He believed that music was a biological index that reinforced the ideals of humanity, its sonic struggles between tension and relaxation moving the listener toward an objective understanding of one's position in the universe. Music to Furtwängler was nothing less than a search for the meaning of existence.

Furtwängler's spirituality lent a deeply religious aura to his concerts. Some reportedly ended in meditative silence, the audience quietly leaving without daring to break the rarified mood with applause. This phenomenon is suggested by a recording of a 1950 Stockholm concert (on Music & Arts CD-799) in which a smattering of hesitant clapping begins a full 20 seconds after the final sustained note of Sibelius's En Saga evaporates.

Furtwängler's method was the antithesis of the typical autocratic conductor who forces himself upon an orchestra. Henry Holst, who played under both leaders, recalled that Toscanini demanded, whereas Furtwängler persuaded. Rather than imposing a rigid frame on his musicians, Furtwängler wanted to cultivate an organic performance by nurturing his orchestra's inspiration. Furtwängler explained the conductor's role as "the outpouring of spiritual energy into a body of instrumentalists [which] creates the material quality of the sound produced, together with its rhythmical, harmonic and tonal life."

To achieve this partnership, Furtwängler used the most unconventional baton technique ever known. He refused to give the types of precise cues upon which musicians rely for cohesion and ensemble. Rather, as Holst observed, "Furtwängler wanted a precision that grew out of the players' own initiative, as in chamber music." Hans Peter Schmitz, a flutist in the Berlin Philharmonic, recalled that Furtwängler never beat time as such, but rather drew melodic shapes in an effort to depict the organic cohesion of a piece. Karl Schumann described Furtwängler's bizarre gestures as "agogic," concerned only with flow, continuity and expression.

Music works best as an autonomous form of art. While music

occasionally can blend well with certain other art forms such as dance (to produce ballet) and poetry (to create song), the most affecting musical experiences have no need of such linkage. The greatest music, like all great performing art, rarely translates well into verbiage. The mere fact that Furtwängler's technique was so often described, both by himself and by others, in such vague and abstract terms serves as powerful testimony to the depth of his intrinsically musical quality. And yet, such obtuse language carries with it an underlying frustration in denying us the ability to envision and to understand just how Furtwängler achieved what he did.

Attempts to crystallize such nebulous accounts into a visual image would be all but impossible were it not for a few precious newsreel clips of Furtwängler rehearsals. Several are contained in a recent video, The Art of Conducting: Great Conductors of the Past (Teldec 4504-95038-3). The most intriguing clip shows Furtwängler in the throes of eliciting an emotion-drenched account of the last three minutes of the Brahms Symphony # 4.

Words can barely convey the bizarre spectacle of Furtwängler's technique, which violinist Hugh Bean once described as "a puppet on a string" (to which perhaps should be added: "held by a spastic puppeteer"). His right hand and baton roughly keep the beat, his left hand weaves round, flowing patterns having no apparent connection with the music, and his head and torso constantly jerk convulsively. How any orchestra could derive meaningful, much less expressive, cues from such seemingly random movements is amazing; that the Berlin Philharmonic could produce readings of compelling unity and power is simply miraculous.

But despite our natural fascination with seeing the process of artistic creation, of far greater significance is an artist's success in translating his technique into valid musical terms. For that, we have the resource of Furtwängler's recorded legacy.

Furtwängler flatly rejected the modernist notion of a standardized process by which a conductor simply assures the accurate playing of the written score. Legend has it that he once stormed out of a Toscanini concert, cursing the Maestro as a mere "time-beater." Furtwängler felt that a valid performance required him to internalize a score, completely identify with the composer and then vicariously repeat the act of creation, transmitting anew the tonal conception he heard inwardly. In the process, Furtwängler sought to master all the unique gestures and details of a work and then weave them into an organic whole. His vision, although deeply personal, was never arbitrary, but always sought inspiration in the mind of the composer.

One of the clearest examples of the validity of his unusual approach is found in the opening of Beethoven's Symphony # 7. The work begins with four full orchestral chords, separated by increasingly complex wind figures. There is nothing in the score to indicate anything other than a sharp attack; indeed, every other known recording presents the chords with as much precision as the orchestra can muster – a rapt call to attention and nothing more. In each Furtwängler recording, though, the chords are blurred and rough, each instrument emerging tentatively and out of synch. The impression is one of great effort, as if the chords had to struggle to overcome the smothering silence.

This is no mere empty rhetorical flourish. Rather, it reflects Furtwängler's rethinking of the entire work. Most conductors adhere to Berlioz's famous characterization of the Symphony # 7 as an apotheosis of the dance and emphasize its abundant grace and rhythmic drive. Furtwängler, though, placed the work in a far deeper region of Beethoven's psyche and performs it as a profound meditation on the elemental struggle between energy and fatigue, lightness and dark, motion and stasis. His opening chords are both the introduction to and the distillation of his vision.

Another extraordinary example of Furtwängler's art can be heard in his very last recording. The third act of Wagner's Die Walk黵e begins with the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" (often heard as an orchestral excerpt) in which the swirling excitement builds to wave after wave of thrilling climaxes. As eight warrior-sisters arrive at a rocky summit and boast of their exploits, the effect is indeed thrilling, with the sopranos belting out their ecstatic lines over the thrashing full orchestra. But Furtwängler recognized the inherent problem with playing this scene at full boil, a temptation which no other conductor seems able to resist: the remaining hour of the act, in which all of the important thematic action occurs, can seem awfully lax by comparison.

To Furtwängler, the "Ride of the Valkyries," as exciting as it can be, must yield to the far more serious business of Act III: the battle of wills between Brunhilde, the errant oldest daughter, and her father Wotan, the head of the gods. In a long, deeply moving scene, she begs forgiveness which he cannot grant without destroying his own authority, and ultimately is punished with banishment and mortality. Furtwängler deliberately forgoes the initial thrill for a more valid overall dramatic progression.

His recording heralds the drama perfectly, both in tempo and in texture. He begins the "Ride" at a brisk pace, but then gradually decelerates so that Brunhilde arrives not on a buoyant note of ecstasy but crushed by impending tragedy. The feeling is reinforced by the orchestral balances: shimmering and nearly devoid of bass at the outset but then gradually deepening so that the climax is mired in a heavy sludge of sound. As with the Beethoven, there is nothing in the score to suggest this; rather, Furtwängler reconceives the score in highly individual terms in order to elicit Wagner's overall meaning.

Furtwängler is often described as a "slow" conductor, but that reputation is only half true. Furtwängler favored extreme tempos, both slow and fast. The overall feeling of torpor is due far more to the bass-heavy sonority and reverberant concert halls Furtwängler favored than to the pulse itself.

Perhaps the most striking instance of Furtwängler's exaggerated tempos is found at the very end of Beethoven's Symphony # 9 ("Choral"), which Furtwängler regarded as the greatest of masterworks. Right before the end the final words of the chorus are slow and stately. This passage leads abruptly to an orchestral coda, marked "presto," which most conductors indeed take at a healthy clip. In each of his recordings, though, Furtwängler brings the pulse to a near-halt and then plunges into the coda at a superhuman pace more than twice as fast as any other recording, so fast that the musicians cannot possibly play the notes accurately. The musical sense becomes utterly lost and the work invariably ends in a jumble of confusion.

Why mangle the final sublime moment of the ultimate orchestral work of the greatest composer in this way? Because Furtwängler reminds us just who Beethoven was – not a gentle genius but the great rebel who constantly pushed music into uncharted territory. Thus, Furtwängler ends the symphony not with a refined and satisfying aesthetic touch but with an uncontrolled explosive outburst, blowing away the bounds of musicianship and culture just as the composer himself had done. In a single gesture, Furtwängler transcends the immediate moment and even the symphony itself to integrate the coda into the entire life, personality and outlook of its composer. At the same time his daring approach empowers the modern listener to relive the shock felt by Beethoven's own audiences.

Furtwängler was a conceptual artist: his "why" is far more important than his "what." Furtwängler's conducting often seems mannered, quixotic and even arbitrary until we discern his reasons and then recognize that his artistry is driven by genius.

Hearing inspired Furtwängler interpretations like these is revelatory, leaving other performances to sound flat and routine. The depth of his thought is simply staggering. Furtwängler's true magic was his ability to convey worlds of new meaning within even the most familiar pieces.





In 1937, Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic switched labels to HMV and recorded a Beethoven Symphony # 5. Aside from richer sound and a first movement repeat, the performance is virtually identical to their earlier 1926 Polydor reading. The next year, they returned to the studio for a solid Tchaikovsky Symphony # 6 ("Pathetique") and several Wagner excerpts. All the HMVs are now on Biddulph WHL 006-7 (2 CDs). During the War itself, they recorded only Gluck's Alceste Overture, the Adagio from Bruckner's Symphony # 7 and an orchestration of the Cavatina from Beethoven's Quartet in B Flat, Opus 130. All three are collected on Teldec CD 9031-76435-2 and are far more remarkable for the unrelieved somberness of the repertoire than for any particular musical insight.

In purely artistic terms, the wartime studio recordings are barely significant. But from a psychological perspective, it seems amazing that such a sensitive artist was able to so fully suppress the turmoil and anguish that buffeted his personal and professional life. Perhaps this was an instinctive aversion to the unnatural mechanics of the recording process in which music was chopped into four-minute fragments and often recorded out of sequence, a system utterly repugnant to Furtwängler's organic approach to music. Or perhaps it was a measure of the extreme will power by which Furtwängler was able to erect a shield of artistic purity against which he refused to allow even the most intense outside political forces to intrude.

Whatever the reason, Furtwängler's emotional dam burst in concert. The first documentation of this change is heard in two marvelous London performances from May, 1937. Act III from Wagner's Die Walk黵e (on Myto MCD 914.43) boasts a magnificent sense of headstrong flow and inevitability, while Beethoven's Symphony # 9 (on Music & Arts CD 818) is gripping and highly inflected. While lacking the ultimate abandon that would emerge during the war itself, these live renditions are far more intense and overtly dramatic than the Wagner and Beethoven pieces Furtwängler was recording in the studio for HMV.

Other than his own Symphonic Concerto and some snippets from Wagner operas, we seem to have no further live Furtwängler recordings until 1942 to 1944, when Radio Berlin taped twenty concerts. By then, Furtwängler's artistry had become completely transformed.

The pickup consisted of a principal microphone at the podium, mixed at the back of the hall with 3 others; all were omnidirectional and picked up a lot of audience noise. The sound was relayed by telephone line to Radio Berlin headquarters, where it was recorded on machines in 20 minute segments on 14 inch reels of iron oxide tape running at 30 inches per second. Although 49 pieces reportedly were recorded, many of the tapes were lost, damaged or erased for reuse. The survivors were removed by Soviet occupation forces. After generating decades of Russian LP bootlegs, 22 were returned to Berlin in 1987. Nineteen were issued on ten DGG CDs in 1989. Now out of print, many have emerged on the American Music & Arts label.

Admittedly, it is rather difficult to listen to them today, knowing that the recordings originally were made to boost combat morale and that the highly audible audience coughs arose from the pampered throats of Nazi military and government elite. But such perverse uses of art aside, perhaps we can take some comfort in Furtwängler's hope that these broadcasts would also bolster the courage and humanity of civilian listeners. In any event, our ears know little of political correctness; none of the performances is less than fascinating, and more than a few are among the most intense of all time.

If there is a single common quality to all of these performances, it is the extreme cohesion between conductor and orchestra, hard enough to find in standard readings but nearly impossible to achieve when the interpretation is impulsive and radically reconceived. This remarkable quality arose from the symbiosis between Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic, whose mutual needs were both artistic and practical. The orchestra needed Furtwängler, without whose adoration by Hitler they would have lost their government subsidy and faced disbandment; indeed, the intensity of their playing has been ascribed to the fear that each performance might have been their last. And Furtwängler equally needed his players, his self-described "right arm," whose 20-year association enabled the musicians to understand and respond meaningfully to his bizarre gestures in a way that no other ensemble ever approached.

The magic bond is confirmed by both records and anecdotes. Wartime concerts have recently surfaced featuring Furtwängler conducting the Beethoven Symphony # 9 with the Stockholm Philharmonic (on Music & Arts CD-2002) and the Bruckner Symphony # 8 with the Vienna Philharmonic (on Music & Arts CD-764). Both works were Furtwängler specialties, but the readings lack even a hint of the gripping tension he regularly achieved with the Berlin Philharmonic. Also indicative of the Berlin players' unique understanding of their leader are the abundant tales from other orchestras, ranging from the Italian concertmaster who mistook Furtwängler's incomprehensible baton motions for nervousness and sought to reassure him, to the quip of a German musician that he knew when to start playing only by sitting down and counting to ten.

Among the highlights of the DGG series is a Strauss Sinfonia Domestica (on 427 781-2) that actually makes structural and dramatic sense of this diffuse, sprawling drivel; a frighteningly intense Beethoven Symphony # 7 (on 427 775-2) in which the finale accelerates completely out of control; a deeply-felt Brahms Piano Concerto # 2 (on 427 776-2) with Furtwängler's philosophical soul-mate Edwin Fischer as soloist; a haunting Sibelius En Saga (on 421 783-2, the effect of which unfortunately is compromised by extreme audience noise); a boldly impassioned Bruckner Symphony # 5 (on 427 774-2); a deeply mystical Beethoven Symphony # 4 (on 421 777-2); and, perhaps most surprising, a soaring Ravel Daphnis et Chloe Suite (on 427 783-2). Perhaps the best DGG disc of all is 427 781-2, which combines a powerful Schubert Symphony # 9 with a Weber Freischutz Overture that ranks as the finest example on record of Furtwängler's acclaimed ability to color and shape each individual phrase with a world of expressive insight.

The very best of the wartime performances, though, are found outside the DGG series. A December 1944 Beethoven Symphony # 3 ("Eroica") (Music & Arts CD 814) is massive but with a sharp nervous undertone unmatched in any other recording. A 1943 performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with George Kulenkampff transforms the usual fleet virtuostic display piece into a mournful study of mystery and menace. There is also an emphatic 1942 "Prelude and Leibestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Music & Arts CD 730) and ecstatic Brahms Symphonies 2 and 4 from January 1945 and November 1943 (Music & Arts CD 804). An absolutely staggering January 1945 account of the finale of the Brahms Symphony # 1 (Music & Arts CD 805) was recorded at the Berlin concert Furtwängler knew would be his last and fully reflects the unbearable emotions of that occasion.

Even more startling is a March 1942 performance of Beethoven's Symphony # 9 on Music & Arts CD 653. John Ardoin's fine notes aptly describe it as a reading "of cyclonic fury, ... frightening and exhausting, ... drenched with torment, anger and a sense of struggle." Ardoin attributes this approach to Furtwängler's "acute awareness that ... one of the noblest utterances of the human spirit was being voiced in a country engaged in some of the most appalling atrocities to be committed in the 20th century," which led Furtwängler to "somehow attempt through the music to alter or reverse the events surrounding him." Regardless of whether this performance qualifies as idiomatic Beethoven, it is an astounding example of Furtwängler's ability to fully internalize and then regenerate a work as his own.

But even these extraordinary achievements pale beside the miracle of the 1944 Bruckner Symphony # 9, which after mediocre LP transfers has been restored to remarkably decent sound on Music & Arts CD 730. Unlike the other wartime performances, on this particular occasion there was no audience to intrude upon the intensely private communion between conductor and orchestra. The sole witnesses were the microphones, to preserve the event for broadcast. But in a deeper sense there was another essential participant: Bruckner himself.

Traditional classical music is a recreative art: a composer writes down his musical thoughts, which artists of other cultures and generations must revitalize. All musicians struggle to wrest from the cold notation their understanding of what the composer wanted to communicate, but the gulf of years and unique personalities are formidable barriers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the performer reigned supreme, and fidelity to creators' intentions was a foreign concept, at best of purely academic interest.

Furtwängler inherited this outlook. Even though he labored to find the inner meaning of each work, he had such an overwhelming personality that his approach, despite the validity of his musical thought, was not necessarily on the same wavelength as the composers themselves. All the more remarkable, then, that for one critical moment his personal torment coincided so precisely with that of Bruckner that it yielded a performance that is as close as we will ever come to a perfect melding of composer and performer.

The composition of the Symphony # 9 consumed the last agonized decade of Bruckner's life. He was a peasant who craved acceptance but was crushed by the snubs of society and the critical establishment. His music was strikingly original, but the cultural gatekeepers of the time insisted on editing and reorchestrating it to conform to their own artistic norms. He was obsessed with morbidity, and was increasingly terrified by his own imminent end. He was deeply religious and dedicated his final work to God, but could not comprehend how God could refuse him the strength and inspiration to finish it.

The symphony is incomplete in far more than the immediate sense of lacking a final movement; Bruckner clearly struggled for something new and far-reaching but ultimately died unable to realize it. The first movement, in particular, seems fragmentary and rough. Every other conductor tries to smooth the score into a cohesive whole. Furtwängler's approach, though, is far, far different.

Furtwängler once said that "an interpreter can render only what he has first lived through." Of all the conductors who have grappled with the complex challenges of the Bruckner Ninth, Furtwängler was best positioned to understand what Bruckner had achieved. Bruno Walter had hinted at this when he observed that he never understood Bruckner until he became mortally ill. The Ninth is not a failed attempt at a cohesive artistic statement. Rather, it is a complete and perfect musical depiction of a tortured mind: a desperate snatch at a vision that grew ever more elusive, a vain quest for understanding and fulfillment in a world that would not provide it, a fevered groping for fragments of life in the lengthening shadow of death. As he wrestled with his Ninth Symphony, Bruckner stood at the very edge of that abyss. By late 1944, Furtwängler stood there too.

The first climax of the first movement heralds his emotion. The Berlin Philharmonic is fully controlled and its ensemble perfectly together, and yet the tempo is so unstable and dynamically alive that no note falls quite where its predecessors would suggest, as if to reflect the entire orchestra's heaving, nervous desperation. Furtwängler often spent entire rehearsals polishing crucial transitions, but not here; he chops the first movement into dozens of inconclusive fragments, deliberately wrenching the mood from lilting lyricism to raw savagery, the tempos from standstill to runaway, and dynamics from inaudible to heavily overloaded. The movement ends in screaming trumpets, a primordial burst of sheer abject terror as both Bruckner and Furtwängler confronted the most horrifying fear of all: that at the very end of their struggles there would be only a void.

Although nothing could eclipse the unparalleled power of the opening, the wonders of this radical reworking of the Bruckner Ninth do not end with the shattering climax of the first movement. Furtwängler whips the scherzo and trio from a slightly menacing waltz and bucolic pastorale into a furiously driven, vertiginous ride to damnation. He then gradually builds the unintended adagio finale to a terrifying dissonance, after which the exhausted fragments wither into eternal silence.

None of this is explicit in the score. It took Furtwängler to recognize and recreate an absolutely perfect depiction of a single mind and, by extension, an entire world on the brink of collapse.





Furtwängler may have been pushed to the very edge by the pressure and ambivalence of his role, but by early 1945 Nazi tolerance of Furtwängler's insolence had reached the breaking point as well. As the Thousand Year Reich lurched toward its early end, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler prepared to launch a grim final legacy: improving the world by ridding it of disloyal Germans who had thwarted faultless leadership and betrayed their nation's destiny of global domination.

The Gestapo had compiled a huge dossier on Furtwängler, who was near the top of their blacklist; as Himmler so delicately put it, "There is no Jew, filthy as he may be, for whom Furtwängler does not stretch out a helping hand." Under pretext of complicity in a failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Furtwängler was targeted for liquidation. Albert Speer, chief architect of the Reich and an ardent admirer, warned Furtwängler that he had to flee for his life.

After conducting in Vienna, Furtwängler claimed to have fallen and suffered a concussion and informed Berlin that his return would have to be delayed until he recuperated. On February 7, 1945 he escaped to Switzerland. There, he reunited with his wife, who had gone earlier to give birth to his only legitimate child. (Furtwängler had fathered at least four other children, all of whom he acknowledged and supported.)

In Switzerland, he was in limbo. German sympathizers considered him a traitor, while others deemed him a collaborator. In a sense, Furtwängler's predicament was fundamentally unfair. We rarely condemn doctors or clergymen who stay behind to attend to the medical or spiritual needs of the civilian population in wartime. Why, then, should an artist who tries to preserve the cultural health of the populace be held to a different humanitarian standard?

In any event, Furtwängler was unable to work pending a denazification investigation, which was delayed until the conclusion of the Nuremburg war crimes trial, a proceeding that ultimately consumed an entire year. The Allied command was not to be rushed, as they considered Furtwängler's celebrity to be a useful symbol of defeated Germany.

During this period, Furtwängler composed his Symphony # 2, which he intended as his artistic testament. But instead of the seething, emotional catharsis suggested by the circumstances of its composition, or a beleaguered artist's visionary escape into new tonal territory, the sprawling work is a pastiche of older styles, meandering among glimmers of Brahms, Strauss, Sibelius and Bruckner without ever asserting an identity of its own. Admittedly, its virtues are obscured by the blandness of its only modern recording (on Marco Polo CD 8.223436) and by Furtwängler's own indifferent 1951 studio runthrough. Far more convincing is his blazing 1953 Vienna concert version (on Orfeo CD 375 941). Even so, it is clear that Furtwängler sought refuge in the past and that his talent lay in interpretation rather than innovation.

Furtwängler's trial began on December 11, 1946. Based on its preliminary investigation, the tribunal conceded that Furtwängler was not part of any National Socialist organization, that he avoided outward obeisance to the Nazis and that he tried to help persecuted people because of their race. Even so, Furtwängler stood accused of holding one official position (the nettlesome Staatsrat), performing at one Nazi function, uttering one anti-Semitic slur, and generally serving the purposes of the Nazi regime. The first three were readily rebutted or explained, but the last was troublesome. It was, quite simply, guilt by association.

Furtwängler had no attorney and was ill prepared to defend himself. As Yehudi Menuhin observed: "Furtwängler was the last of an age that did not expect a man to be both a creator and a salesman at the same time. He explained himself badly." Even so, Furtwängler tried to convince the tribunal that he had to cooperate with the government to some extent in order to work against it from within the system. This, of course, is the principle of all underground movements. Thus, Furtwängler conceded that he had to couch correspondence in the Nazis' preferred racial language: "To a certain degree I had to fight with their weapons; otherwise I could not have achieved anything."

After a week-long recess, Furtwängler presented several persuasive character witnesses who swore to his unstinting rescue efforts. Furtwängler's summation proudly defended his record: "The fear of being misused for propaganda purposes was wiped out by the greater concern for preserving German music as far as this was possible. I could not leave Germany in her deepest misery. To get out at that moment would have been a shameful flight. I am a German, whatever may be thought of that abroad. I do not regret having done it for the German people."

Furtwängler was fully acquitted. The New York Times, though, published a distorted account of the trial and its outcome, implying that the charges against Furtwängler essentially had been proven. This influential report was picked up by wire services, spread throughout the free world, and hardened public opinion against Furtwängler.

The persistence of this cruel fiction throughout the rest of Furtwängler's life is preserved in two reference books published in 1954, his final year. David Ewen's Encyclopedia of Concert Music refers to Furtwängler's "intimate associations with the Nazi regime," and the updated Grove's Dictionary of Music noted: "Under the Nazi regime in Germany, and particularly during the second world war, Furtwängler seems to have enjoyed a privileged position." Only in recent times has such innuendo been superseded by a more balanced view. Thus, the current edition of Compton's Encyclopedia reports: "He had difficulties with the Nazi government in the early 1930s but an uneasy truce was made. In Germany he was generally considered anti-Nazi, but elsewhere a conspirator." Encarta goes even further: "Although he remained in Germany through most of World War II, he opposed the Nazi regime and was exonerated of charges of collaboration."

Even though he had been completely absolved, Furtwängler still could not work until the Allied Command certified to his "normalization," a procedure that dragged on for 5 months. At long last, the papers were issued and the final phase of Furtwängler's career was at hand.

For a 2004 update on the movie "Taking Sides," which dramatizes the Allied investigation into Furtwängler's wartime activities and loyalties, please click here





For his first concert in over two years Furtwängler chose an all-Beethoven program with the Berlin Philharmonic, which was hurriedly scheduled for May 25, 1947. Fittingly, the program duplicated the first concert Furtwängler had led upon resuming activity after the Hindemith affair.

Throughout the war, to minimize friction over his refusal to give the Nazi salute, Furtwängler had briskly strode to the podium, baton in hand, and immediately began conducting. This time, he made a normal entrance. The audience understood the gesture and gave him a fifteen minute ovation. Furtwängler then proceeded to pour into Beethoven all of the repressed emotions he had withheld from his own second symphony. The Symphony # 5 progresses from a grimly powerful opening to an ecstatic explosion of triumph. And the transition from the thunderstorm to the pastoral hymn of thanksgiving in the Symphony # 6 has never been rendered with such exquisite earnestness. The event is preserved on Music & Arts CD-789.

Clearly, Furtwängler seized upon the deep symbolism of these works and through them recreated his own personal odyssey from misery to freedom. The symbolism was extended two weeks later, when Furtwängler devoted his first post-war concert with the Vienna Philharmonic to an all-Mendelssohn program, whose works had been among the first to have been banned by the Nazis.

Furtwängler quickly reestablished his reputation in most of Europe. Even Toscanini, who had demonized Furtwängler throughout the war, was quoted in 1948 as considering him the second best conductor in the world (Toscanini, of course, being the first).

But much of the rest of the world did not forget as quickly. Furtwängler concerts outside of German-speaking countries were protested, especially in England and Holland. Plagued with guilt over his country's misdeeds, Furtwängler refused to challenge misperceptions over his past and backed away from confrontation. As a sad indication of this extreme post-war sensitivity, Joachim Kaiser recalls how Furtwängler was greatly impressed at a 1950 Leonard Bernstein concert in Amsterdam but resisted any attempt to express his admiration for fear that even a passing contact could damage the young American's career.

America remained especially elusive. In 1949, Furtwängler was offered the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but the announcement provoked a firestorm of protests, fueled by rumors of collaboration and fanned by jealous rival conductors. The most sought-after soloists, including Artur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz, all warned that they would boycott any orchestra that engaged Furtwängler. Yehudi Menuhin, who had heard many testimonials among the displaced people for whom he played in Europe following the war and who was the first Jew to perform again with Furtwängler, attempted to air the facts, but to little avail. Bruno Walter accurately summed up the problem as the one which would haunt Furtwängler for the rest of his life: as Germany's most prominent musician, he became an unwitting magnet for anti-German frustrations. The matter was concluded when the Chicago musicians union refused Furtwängler a work 更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net