Wilhelm Furtwängler

Although Wilhelm Furtwängler picked up the conductor’s baton largely out of necessity and had once intended to devote himself chiefly to writing music, he is now recalled as one of the twentieth century’s most significant and fiercely debated podium figures. The Bruckner-like scores he created hold only fleeting interest today; it was solely when standing before an orchestra that he revealed himself as an intensely personal and genuinely original creative force. He treated every performance as an act of recomposition, reshaping another composer’s score through a powerful injection of his own interpretive vision and temperament. In weaker moments these realizations could appear affected, marked by abrupt and seemingly arbitrary alterations of pace. Yet at their finest—and recordings preserve far more successes than shortcomings—his interpretations sparkled with unforeseen yet revealing details that produced continuous excitement while also illuminating the music’s overarching design. By the close of his career such a highly subjective manner had fallen out of favor, and the watchwords of the three decades after his death became “objectivity” and “fidelity to the text.” Over time, however, his singular imagination regained appreciation, and his discs are now prized as invigorating alternatives to the accurate but often interchangeable readings that dominate concert halls today.

Furtwängler’s artistic outlook belonged squarely to the nineteenth century. Raised in a refined, intellectually lively and liberal home, he benefited from a father who was a distinguished archaeologist and a mother who painted with real skill; instead of conventional schooling the talented youth received private lessons from an archaeologist, a sculptor, and an art historian who also taught musicology. Growing up in Munich close to open fields, he combined his scholarly pursuits with a love of swimming, skiing, and other vigorous outdoor activities. Under these influences it was natural that he became a German nationalist—emphatically not a National Socialist, despite the later misreadings prompted by his ambiguous dealings with the Nazi regime, but someone convinced that the deepest expressions of human dignity, intellect, and spirit resided in German culture. This conviction remained purely aesthetic; politics, he naively assumed, must be kept entirely apart from art. His unrealistic idealism shielded him through much of the Nazi period yet also branded him a collaborator and restricted his opportunities abroad for the final twenty years of his life.

In the years leading up to that later phase, Furtwängler advanced swiftly to the top ranks of his profession, though the achievement brought him mixed feelings. He had begun composing at seven and by seventeen had completed substantial pieces, among them a symphony, a large choral setting of Goethe’s “Die Erste Walpurgisnacht,” and several chamber works. Practical considerations and the wish to present his own music prompted him to turn to conducting. His Munich debut at twenty featured his own Adagio for large orchestra together with Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9. Still, his motives were not merely financial; he felt a genuine urge to interpret other composers’ music, particularly Beethoven’s. From the outset he viewed every musical task through a composer’s lens and paid little attention to routine technical drills. Although he could play the piano adequately, most of his training had not concerned performance; private study with composers Josef Rheinberger and Max von Schillings left him without the basic tools of the podium. To the end of his days his beat remained so sweeping and indistinct that players joked the only reliable signal for the downbeat was the moment his baton reached the third button of his waistcoat, regardless of the stick’s subsequent path.

Tall, ungainly, and possessed of an exceptionally long neck, Furtwängler maintained a habitually disheveled appearance offstage that lent him a slightly comical air, yet he steadily advanced his career. Beginning in 1905 he progressed through a succession of provincial opera posts in Breslau, Zürich, Munich, Strasbourg, Lübeck, and, during the First World War, Mannheim. He also assumed concert series previously led by Willem Mengelberg in Frankfurt and by Richard Strauss with the Berlin Opera Orchestra. When Arthur Nikisch died in 1922, two major positions became vacant—the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic—and Furtwängler inherited both. He stayed with the Leipzig ensemble for six seasons but retained a lifelong connection with the Berlin Philharmonic; around the same period he forged an equally enduring partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic.

The early and middle 1920s marked a decisive shift in Furtwängler’s life. Heavy performing commitments left him no opportunity to compose anything substantial until the late 1930s, yet between 1920 and 1935 he worked with the influential theorist Heinrich Schenker. While this study offered little immediate help in his own writing, it deepened his grasp of the structural foundations of the music he conducted. At the same time he carried forward a German interpretive tradition that had begun with Richard Wagner in the 1840s and passed through Nikisch, his immediate predecessor in Berlin. In this tradition the conductor acted, in effect, as a collaborator who enriched each score with countless adjustments of tempo, balance, and accent that reflected his personal understanding. More than any of his contemporaries, Furtwängler fused Wagner’s ideas about the performer’s role in shaping the drama of individual phrases with Schenker’s vision of a work’s underlying architectural unity.

Wagner had advanced his performance theory partly in opposition to Felix Mendelssohn’s practice. Mendelssohn favored steady, usually brisk tempos through principal sections, aiming for precision and transparency so the score could speak without heavy intervention. That approach generated its own lineage, reaching its most celebrated exponent in Arturo Toscanini. Critics of the era therefore cast Toscanini and Furtwängler as polar opposites. The two men privately found fault with each other’s work yet remained on civil terms until political events of the 1930s intervened.

When Furtwängler first appeared with the New York Philharmonic—Toscanini’s own orchestra—in 1925, local critics already forming a “cult of objectivity” around Toscanini condemned the German conductor’s flexible readings. The concerts nevertheless drew enthusiastic audiences, and further engagements followed until 1927, when adverse notices and Furtwängler’s reluctance or inability to court the board ended the association. In 1936 Toscanini himself proposed that Furtwängler succeed him as the Philharmonic’s music director, but protests arose and Furtwängler never returned to the United States after those early seasons.

By 1936 the New York opposition had additional grounds for complaint. Furtwängler had failed to grasp the true nature of Nazism; while many prominent musicians fled Germany either on principle or for safety, he clung to the belief that he could accomplish more by remaining in Berlin. He insisted that art and politics occupied entirely separate spheres and that Germany required someone of his stature to preserve its great artistic heritage amid upheaval. In his view the concerts constituted a loftier form of morale support for civilians. “Music transports (people) to regions where the Gestapo can do them no harm,” he asserted—a statement possible only for someone absorbed in the life of the mind.

Toscanini’s 1936 recommendation that Furtwängler take the New York post foundered on the same domestic opposition that had kept him from America earlier, together with a German government warning that accepting a foreign residency would bar him from performing at home. The refusal sparked a permanent rupture with Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival several months later, when the Italian conductor, by then an outspoken anti-Fascist, declared that remaining in Germany and accommodating the authorities made Furtwängler indistinguishable from a Nazi.

Furtwängler’s prolonged hesitation over how to respond to German fascism stemmed from a temperamental flaw unrelated to politics. Throughout his life he was hampered by chronic indecision. This trait lent his performances an element of spontaneity, since many details remained unresolved in rehearsal; he sometimes made little effort to articulate his intentions to the players. His remarks could be as imprecise as his gestures. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, once principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic, later recalled in his memoirs a typical rehearsal exchange in which Furtwängler pleaded, “Gentlemen, this phrase must be—it must—it must—you know what I mean—please try again—please,” only to remark afterward to Piatigorsky, “You see how important it is for a conductor to convey his wishes clearly?” Remarkably, the orchestra understood what he wanted. The same vagueness allowed him to drift into the favor of Hitler’s circle. A few years into the regime he remained Germany’s only internationally renowned conductor, and the Third Reich needed him for propaganda.

His letters to officials now read as ambiguous, mixing occasional Nazi slogans and concessions with demands for artistic freedom or defenses of composer Paul Hindemith, who had incurred official displeasure. Attempts to shield the Berlin Philharmonic’s Jewish members ultimately proved ineffective, though not from want of effort. During the war BBC staff received a stream of German refugee musicians bearing warm letters of recommendation from Furtwängler regardless of their actual ability. He sought to distance himself from the regime while preserving his right to perform, refusing—with three exceptions—to conduct in occupied countries, insisting that swastika banners (“those rags”) be removed before a Vienna concert, and adopting the practice of entering the stage already holding his baton so he could not render the required salute. A widely circulated photograph of him reaching down to shake Hitler’s hand was in fact a staged trap arranged by the Nazis in retaliation for his resistance. Such gestures of independence may appear slight today, yet in that era individuals were arrested and killed for far less.

For political reasons Furtwängler resigned the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1934; although he continued to lead the orchestra until nearly the war’s end, he declined to sign an administrative contract until 1951. He operated within the system almost to the close of hostilities, offering politically neutral concerts in return for remaining a somewhat awkward propaganda asset. Early in 1945, however, Albert Speer warned him that Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler was preparing to arrest him. In February Furtwängler traveled to Switzerland with his family for a scheduled engagement and stayed there until the war ended. Once peace arrived he faced a barrage of Allied accusations of Nazi sympathy. Not until mid-1947 was he cleared and permitted to conduct again, even though the card-carrying Nazi Herbert von Karajan returned to the podium earlier through the efforts of English record producer Walter Legge.

Despite official denazification, accusations of collaboration pursued Furtwängler for the remainder of his life, especially in the United States. In 1949 he was offered the Chicago Symphony directorship, but protests—including from leading musicians—forced withdrawal of the invitation. A similar opportunity to head the Metropolitan Opera in 1951 was likewise blocked. His only prominent American defender was violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who, after careful investigation as a Jewish musician, concluded that Furtwängler had acted honorably during the war.

David Cairns later summarized the conductor’s situation with precision in The New Grove Dictionary of Music: “His controversial position under the Third Reich has been gradually forgotten, in admiration of the revelatory splendor of his music-making at its best. Yet the two things were in a deep sense one. His social unworldliness, his inability to deal with people with whom he felt nothing in common, his indecisiveness before the practical decisions of life, his profound sense of Germanness, his obstinate belief that art had nothing to do with politics—all these and the grand idealism of his interpretations were expressions of the same nature, the same exalted philosophical outlook; they reflected the sheltered, highly civilized upbringing he had received.”

In Europe, rehabilitation came quickly. Furtwängler resumed regular appearances with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, maintained annual engagements at the Lucerne Festival, reopened the formerly compromised Bayreuth Festival in 1951 with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and made a series of studio recordings—a process he disliked almost as much as he disliked his EMI producer, Legge.

In 1952 a course of antibiotics taken during pneumonia permanently impaired Furtwängler’s hearing. Two years later, after recording Wagner’s “Die Walküre” in what was intended as the start of a complete Ring cycle, he again contracted pneumonia. Depressed by his hearing loss and by the moral collapse of his culture, he yielded to the illness and died peacefully in a clinic near Baden-Baden.

Between the Nazi takeover and his death Furtwängler returned to composition, completing three large symphonies, a piano concerto, and two violin sonatas. The symphonic writing shows clear debts to Anton Bruckner in thematic shape and formal layout, though it rarely resorts to that composer’s massive repetition. Harmonically it remains staunchly tonal, sharing something of the lush, late-Romantic idiom of interwar Austro-German figures such as his former teacher Max von Schillings, Franz Schreker, and Franz Schmidt. The melodies, however, lack strong profile, and the structures feel protracted; on the strength of these works alone Furtwängler would scarcely be remembered today.

Posterity’s interest rests instead on his conducting. He disliked the recording studio, objecting to the reduction of symphonies and concertos to brief, isolated segments repeated until technically flawless. Consequently most of his preserved legacy consists of concert performances, chiefly from the 1940s and 1950s, some captured under favorable broadcast conditions and others in decidedly inferior sound. Little of this material reached the public in the decade after his death. Since then his audience has expanded from a small circle of enthusiasts to a broad following prepared to accept the sonic constraints of vintage recordings—limited frequency range, distorted climaxes, hiss or surface noise that swallows pianissimos—in hopes of encountering surprise, illumination, or provocation, responses seldom elicited by today’s polished yet often interchangeable performances.

Contemporary orchestral sonority favors brilliance and a treble emphasis. Furtwängler’s sound, by contrast, was built on rich strings and solidly grounded brass and woodwinds that emerged from a firm bass foundation. This texture supplied both weight and a balance that allowed the bass line unusual prominence. In the celebrated 1951 Bayreuth recording of Beethoven’s Ninth, for instance, passages in the first movement permit the cellos and double basses to step forward and emphasize figures that ordinarily remain mere accompaniment.

Furtwängler’s bass emphasis arose as much from theoretical conviction as from timbral preference. Schenkerian analysis, which he studied, aims to uncover a work’s fundamental tonal relationships by stripping away surface melody and rhythm. The method is most applicable to Austrian and German composers from Bach to Brahms, who consciously constructed their music on specific tonal frameworks. Such repertoire formed the core of Furtwängler’s programs, and Schenker’s principles helped him perceive the large-scale architecture of a movement or symphony. Hence his decision to bring the bass into relief.

A further consequence of this analytical approach was that he shaped performances not bar by bar—his fluid gestures were ill-suited to that task anyway—but in extended phrases that combined into larger, contrasting yet interdependent sections joined by crucial transitions. Realizing the distinct character of each section and phrase demanded constant tempo fluctuation, which Furtwängler typically determined in performance rather than in rehearsal.

He is frequently described as a “slow” conductor in opposition to the “fast” Toscanini. Neither label is wholly accurate. More precisely, Furtwängler cultivated extremes: his slow passages were uncommonly spacious, yet his quick passages could be electrifyingly swift. Returning to the Bayreuth Ninth, the slow movement stretches to nearly twenty minutes in a meditative yet somewhat earthbound reading, while the finale’s closing section hurtles forward at the limit of the players’ technical capacity. Between these extremes lie numerous gradations, and the shifts can be startling. Furtwängler intended this continuous particularity of expression to serve the work’s larger meaning. His readings were at once improvisatory and spiritual, impulsive and questing. The tension between structural coherence and emotional urgency animated his greatest performances.

His most compelling—and, to critics, most disconcerting—interpretations date from the war years. These performances, many now readily available, pulse with intensified drama, urgency, and tragic depth. One of the most gripping Brahms recordings ever made is the January 23, 1945 account of the finale of Symphony No. 1 by Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic—feverish and thrillingly headlong, and all that survives from his last Berlin concert before he left under threat of arrest. Toscanini and his successors, who presented themselves as faithful servants of the score, asked through their performances, “What does this music mean in its essence?” Furtwängler’s performances asked instead, “What does this music mean to me, in this particular time and place?”

In a 1948 BBC interview Furtwängler stated: “The conductor has one arch-enemy to fight: routine. Routine is very human, very understandable, it is the line of least resistance and there is no denying that in daily life it has its advantages. But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music, especially in the performance of old and familiar works. In fact routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoar-frost on the performance of the most beautiful and best-known works.”

Today, when rehearsal time is scarce, clarity and efficiency prevail, allowing routine to exert quiet control. Most listeners recognize that realizing the true character of a score involves more than merely playing the notes accurately, yet practical considerations have led many to accept precision in place of genuine insight. Furtwängler’s performances, however debatable they may sometimes appear, matter more now than they did in the second quarter of the twentieth century. He challenges listeners to participate in a vigorous, occasionally exasperating musical dialogue. He is not for those who seek music merely as relaxation.