Furtwängler, (Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin) Wilhelm

(b Berlin, 25 Jan 1886; d Baden-Baden, 30 Nov 1954). German conductor, composer and author. He was the eldest child of the classical archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler and of Adelheid, née Wendt, who was a painter. He was brought up, first in Berlin and then near Munich (where his father was appointed professor in 1894), in the cultivated and liberal atmosphere of German humanism. When he showed signs of exceptional gifts, his parents decided to take him away from school and have him educated privately. His tutors were the archaeologist Ludwig Curtius, the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand and the art historian and musicologist Walter Riezler. Furtwängler spent some time at Hildebrand’s house outside Florence. He also accompanied his father on an excavation on Aegina.

Despite the breadth of his artistic sympathies, however, it was music that absorbed him most; music, for him, began where the other arts left off. He learnt the piano from an early age, and was composing by the time he was seven. Lessons in composition followed, with (successively) Anton Beer-Walbrunn, Joseph Rheinberger and Max von Schillings (and, later, piano lessons with Conrad Ansorge). By the time he was 17 Furtwängler had written a dozen substantial works, including a Symphony in D, a 17-movement setting of Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht, two Faust choruses, a string sextet, and several quartets, trios and sonatas, as well as many lesser pieces. The symphony was performed in Breslau during the 1903–4 season. It was a failure. Yet it is unlikely that this had anything significant to do with his decision to abandon, or at least set aside, his long-nurtured ambition to be a composer, and take up conducting instead. Furtwängler came to conducting through a combination of three separate factors: the wish to be able to conduct his own music; the passionate interest he had begun to take in the art of interpretation, an interest arising in the first place from his fascination with the music and mind of Beethoven; and the practical necessity of earning a living so as to be able to support himself and his mother after the death of his father in 1907. For a time, indeed, composition remained his goal. In June 1906 the programme of his first concert (with the Kaim Orchestra in Munich) had included, as well as Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony and Beethoven’s overture Die Weihe des Hauses, a symphonic Largo in B minor which was later to be the starting-point of the opening movement of his Symphony no.1 in the same key; and four years later a recently completed Te Deum of his was given in Breslau (1910). It was subsequently performed in Strasbourg (1911) and Essen (1914).

But by that time he had become irrevocably involved in the career of conductor and, despite an unconventional technique and a slightly awkward, gangling presence, had begun to reveal the interpretative genius and the quasi-hypnotic power which were to carry him rapidly to the top. Furtwängler’s apprenticeship was the normal one for aspiring German conductors. His first position was as a répétiteur at the Breslau Stadttheater (1905–6). From there he went to Zürich (1906–7). This was followed by two years at the Munich Hofoper under Felix Mottl (1907–9) and a year as third conductor at the Strasbourg Opera, where Hans Pfitzner was musical director (1910–11). The experience gained at these four theatres led to his first big appointment, at the age of only 25, as director of the Lübeck Opera and conductor of the orchestra’s subscription concerts (1911–15). In these four years and the five that followed at the Mannheim Opera (1915–20) Furtwängler emerged as the leading young conductor in Germany. In 1919 came the first of a series of regular autumn appearances with the Vienna Tonkünstlerorchester, and in the following year began a period of long and fruitful study with the great Viennese musical theorist Heinrich Schenker. Until Schenker’s death in 1935 Furtwängler regularly worked with him on the scores he was to conduct. In 1920 he was put in charge of the Frankfurt Museum concerts and the Berlin Staatsoper concerts (in succession, respectively, to Mengelberg and Richard Strauss). When Nikisch died in 1922, Furtwängler succeeded him as of right, as conductor both of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (where he stayed till 1928) and of the Berlin PO.

In the same year began what was to be a close and lasting connection with the Vienna PO. But it was the Berlin PO that, for the rest of his career, was Furtwängler’s chief instrument. With it he undertook a series of European tours – Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, Italy and Hungary. At the same time he began to conduct orchestras outside Germany and Austria. 1924 saw the first of many appearances in London (where in 1937 he shared with Beecham the direction of the Coronation season at Covent Garden, conducting – and again in 1938 – two cycles of the Ring). In 1925 and in the two following years Furtwängler went to America as a guest conductor of the New York PO. His impact on audiences and musicians alike was momentous. Yet these visits sowed the seeds of future conflict between Furtwängler and the USA. His highly individual interpretations of the German classics offended one or two important critics dedicated to the cult of objectivity which was later to be associated with Toscanini. At the same time his failure to pay court to the orchestra’s board members (whose power and influence was something unknown in Europe) tended to make him personally unpopular with them. The result was that, despite his public following and his immense prestige with the orchestra, a pretext was found for not re-engaging him. Instead, Toscanini became associate (with Mengelberg), and later principal, conductor, and in the event Furtwängler never again conducted in America. When, nine years later, in 1936, he was invited to become Toscanini’s successor (at Toscanini’s own suggestion), there was such a storm of protest that he withdrew and Barbirolli was appointed.

By that time Furtwängler had become, willy-nilly, deeply involved in political issues. Like many German liberals, he was slow to take Nazism seriously. In a sense, he never really did. Yet he was never remotely an adherent of the Hitler regime, and he dissociated himself from it and opposed it in all kinds of ways, great and small: for example, by always refusing to give the obligatory Nazi salute at public concerts, even when Hitler was present, by constantly using his influence to save the lives of Jewish musicians, obscure as well as famous, by rejecting numerous commands to conduct in occupied countries during the war, and by speaking his mind quite openly. In 1934, when Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler was banned, Furtwängler resigned all his posts and, though wooed by the Nazis, never resumed them.

All this required courage, even in a man of Furtwängler’s eminence. Indeed, when he finally escaped to Switzerland in January 1945 he was within a few hours of being arrested. He could have emigrated long before, as many non-Jewish German musicians did; it would certainly have made life easier for him. But he thought that art could be kept apart from politics, and he saw it as his responsibility to stay. There were those who felt he was right to do so: Arnold Schoenberg, for instance (‘You must stay, and conduct good music’), or the Jewish theatre director Max Reinhardt: ‘People like Furtwängler must stay, if Germany is to survive’. But, for the vast majority of people outside Germany, Furtwängler, by continuing to live there and make public appearances, was identifying himself with the regime. There was, in the context of the time, a naivety in his attitude; his position was equivocal, and the Nazis were adept at taking advantage of it for propaganda purposes.

In consequence, the last ten years of Furtwängler’s life were darkened by controversy. Whereas German artists who had actively sympathized with Nazism or cynically run along with it were quite quickly cleared, he had to endure a long period of delay and vilification. The American Military Government did not finally denazify him until December 1946, and it was only in the following April, when the decision was ratified, that he was able to conduct again. In America the anti-Furtwängler movement continued. It culminated, in 1949, in a propaganda campaign involving some of the leading musicians in the country, a compound of high-mindedness, ignorance and professional jealousy, aimed at keeping him out and in particular preventing him from becoming director of the Chicago SO, to which he had been appointed. The Chicago board was forced to withdraw its offer.

In Europe he was welcomed everywhere. He appeared, with the Berlin or Vienna PO, or with local orchestras, in London, Paris, Rome, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Lucerne, Salzburg and Milan (including a Ring cycle with Flagstad at La Scala in 1950). In 1951 a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by him opened the first postwar Bayreuth Festival (where he had first appeared in 1930). Despite failing health – he had been ill in 1952 and had collapsed at a concert in Vienna in 1953 – Furtwängler again conducted at the 1954 Bayreuth, Salzburg and Lucerne festivals. A USA tour with the Berlin PO was even being planned for 1955, when he died of pneumonia in November, at the age of 68.

From these final years date the recordings of Tristan and Die Walküre which, together with more recent issues of Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, Schumann, Beethoven and Haydn, often from broadcast performances, have given Furtwängler a very large posthumous following, not least among musicians (Casals spoke for many when he called him ‘the greatest conductor I have known’). His controversial position under the Third Reich has been gradually forgotten, in admiration of the revelatory splendour 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. ‘With music we enter a new world’, he said, ‘and are delivered from the other’. But, for him, music was the real world.

Furtwängler has been described as ‘an ambassador from another world, a world holding him firmly in its power; he broke free of it only because he had a message to impart’ (Kokoschka). ‘In listening to him, it is the impression of vast, pulsating space which is most overwhelming’ (Menuhin). Such language is an attempt to put into words the almost mystical effect that Furtwängler’s conducting had on those who experienced it. He seemed to be searching for music’s essential being at a deeper level than anybody else. As Neville Cardus put it, ‘he did not regard the printed notes as a final statement but rather as so many symbols in an imaginative conception, ever changing and always to be felt and realised subjectively’.

The fact that he brought a composer’s mind and instincts to conducting was certainly a contributory factor; but it was also his natural inheritance. Furtwängler was a product, perhaps the supreme expression, of the interpretative tradition of Wagner and von Bülow. In Germany his conducting was regarded as the synthesis of Bülow’s spirituality and Nikisch’s improvisatory genius and sense of colour. Furtwängler’s performances combined in an extraordinary way lofty thought and spontaneity, impulsiveness and long meditation. Nothing for him was fixed and laid down. Each performance was a fresh attempt to discover the truth; rarely was one like another, or even like the rehearsal that had just preceded it. He deliberately cultivated an imprecise beat, so as to achieve a large, unforced sonority, growing from the bass. (The improvement of the cello and bass section, with the consequent enrichment of the whole body of string tone, and the introduction of continuous vibrato into German and Austrian orchestras, were among his important contributions to the development of orchestral playing.)

The freedom of tempo that he allowed himself was the opposite pole from Toscanini’s insistence on the sanctity of the printed score as medium of the composer’s intentions (the interpretative tradition of Berlioz), in the light of which Furtwängler’s fluctuations of tempo struck many as arbitrary and unacceptable. Yet they were an inevitable concomitant of Furtwängler’s method, his constant quest for music’s inner meaning and hidden laws. He aimed at achieving, at the profoundest level, an organic unity which should be the result not of conformity to the exact letter of the law but of a concentration on each particular expressive moment within a deeply considered general idea of the work. He was a master of transition, of the art of moulding musical phrases and periods into a spacious design, varied but grandly coherent, as can be heard in his finest recordings, especially in the last and, to many, greatest period of his career (although the recording process itself is not naturally favourable to so immediate and spontaneous an art). These performances have a sweep, an urgency and tragic intensity that silence objections. The spread of Furtwängler’s influence, through the diffusion of his recordings, has itself brought about a change in attitudes to musical interpretation, as a result of which his apparent eccentricities seem after all a small price to pay for such visionary splendours. Although German music from Bach to Hindemith (including Mahler) was his province, he often conducted Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius; and the presence of works by Schoenberg, Bloch, Stravinsky and Bartók in his programmes shows that his advocacy of 20th-century music was far from beginning and ending with Hindemith.

Furtwängler went on composing until his death; and in times of diminished public activity – for example most of the Hitler period – it once again bulked large in his life. His music is a highly personal extension of the twin traditions of Bruckner and Brahms. Superficially speaking, its neo-Romantic style has long been outmoded; but several of his mature works – notably the Piano Concerto and the three symphonies – have had modern performances and have been recorded.

Furtwängler, who had five children, was twice married, first in 1923 to Zitla Lund, secondly in 1943 to Elisabeth Ackermann.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAVID CAIRNS (text, bibliography), JAMES ELLIS (work-list)

Furtwängler, Wilhelm

WORKS

unpublished unless otherwise stated

Furtwängler, Wilhelm

WRITINGS

‘Der Fall Hindemith’, Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung (25 Nov 1934)

Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner (Leipzig, 1941)

Gespräche über Musik (Vienna and Zürich, 1948, 9/1978; Eng. trans., 1953, as Concerning Music)

Ton und Wort: Aufsätze und Vorträge 1918 bis 1954 (Wiesbaden, 1954, 9/1966/R)

Der Musiker und sein Publikum (Zürich, 1955)

Vermächtnis: nachgelassene Schriften (Wiesbaden, 1956)

Briefe, ed. F. Thiess (Wiesbaden, 1964)

ed. R. Taylor: Furtwängler on Music: Essays and Addresses (Aldershot, 1991)

Furtwängler, Wilhelm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Schrenk: Wilhelm Furtwängler: eine Studie (Berlin, 1940)

F. Herzfeld: Wilhelm Furtwängler: Weg und Wesen (Leipzig, 1941, 2/1950)

J. Erskine: The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York (New York, 1943)

B. Geissmar: The Baton and the Jackboot (London, 1944/R)

L. Curtius: Deutsche und antike Welt: Lebenserinnerungen (Stuttgart, 1950)

W. Seibert: Furtwängler: Mensch und Künstler (Buenos Aires, 1950)

A. Della Corte: L’interpretazione musicale e gli interpreti (Turin, 1951)

F. Herzfeld: Magie des Taktstocks (Berlin, 1953)

C. Riess: Furtwängler: Musik und Politik (Berne, 1953; Eng. trans., 1955, as Wilhelm Furtwängler: a Biography)

M. Hürlimann, ed.: Wilhelm Furtwängler im Urteil seiner Zeit (Zürich, 1955)

H. Keller: ‘Wilhelm Furtwängler, 1886–1954: an Appreciation’, Opera, vi (1955), 99–101

A. Einstein: ‘Wilhelm Furtwängler’, Von Schütz bis Hindemith (Zürich, 1957)

P. Wackernagel, ed.: Wilhelm Furtwängler: die Programme der Konzerte mit dem Berliner Philharmonischen Orchester, 1922–1954 (Wiesbaden, 1958, 2/1965)

K. Höcker: Wilhelm Furtwängler: Begegnungen und Gespräche (Berlin, 1961)

O. Jonas: ‘Heinrich Schenker und grosse Interpreten’, ÖMz, xix (1964), 584–9

D. Gillis, ed.: Furtwängler Recalled (Zürich, 1965)

K. Höcker: Wilhelm Furtwängler: Dokumente, Berichte und Bilder, Aufzeichnungen (Berlin, 1968)

D. Gillis: Furtwängler and America (New York, 1970)

H.S. Olsen: Wilhelm Furtwängler: a Discography (Copenhagen, 1970, 2/1973)

H.S. Olsen: Wilhelm Furtwängler: Konzertprogramme, Opern und Vorträge, 1947 bis 1954 (Wiesbaden, 1972)

M. Chauvy: Hommage à Wilhelm Furtwängler (Lausanne, 1974)

W. Oehlmann: Das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester (Kassel, 1974)

E. Furtwängler: Über Wilhelm Furtwängler (Wiesbaden, 1979; Eng. trans., 1993)

B. Wessling: Furtwängler: eine kritische Biographie (Stuttgart, 1985)

G. Kraus: Ein Mass, das heute fehlt: Wilhelm Futwängler im Echo der Nachwelt (Salzburg, 1986)

F.K. Prieberg: Die Kraftprobe: Wilhelm Furtwängler in Dritten Reich (Wiesbaden, 1986; Eng. trans., 1991)

H.-H. Schönzeler: Furtwängler (London, 1990)

S. Shirakawa: The Devil’s Music Master: the Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (New York, 1992)

J. Ardoin: The Furtwängler Record (Portland, OR, 1994)