2604- ‘Wilhelm Furtwängler’ Review: Apostle of Inwardness

‘Wilhelm Furtwängler’ Review: Apostle of Inwardness　　WSJ 2018.8.3

BOOK

‘Wilhelm Furtwängler’ Review: Apostle of Inwardness
Furtwängler was no Nazi but was a tool of Hitler and Goebbels. His insistence on being ‘nonpolitical’ was naive—and yet also, it seems, sincere.

 

One of the most thrilling documents of symphonic music in performance—readily accessible on YouTube—is a clip of Wilhelm Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the closing five minutes of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. Furtwängler is not commanding a performing army. Rather he is channeling a trembling state of heightened emotional awareness so irresistible as to obliterate, in the moment, all previous encounters with the music at hand. This experience is both empowering and—upon reflection—a little scary. And it occurred some three years after the implosion of Hitler’s Third Reich—a regime for which Furtwängler, though not exactly an advocate, was a potent cultural symbol.
In 20th-century classical music, the iconic embodiment of the fight for democratic freedoms was the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who fled Europe and galvanized opposition to Hitler and Mussolini. Furtwängler (1886-1954), who remained behind, was Toscanini’s iconic antipode, eschewing the objective clarity of Toscanini’s literalism in favor of Teutonic ideals of lofty subjective spirituality.

Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical
By Roger Allen
Boydell, 286 pages, $39.95
https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/178327283X/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1_1_1?smid=AN1VRQENFRJN5&psc=1

Furtwängler was inaccurately denounced in America as a Nazi. His de-Nazification proceedings were misreported in the New York Times. Afterward, he was prevented by a blacklist from conducting the Chicago Symphony or the Metropolitan Opera, both of which wanted him.
Furtwängler was no Nazi. Behind the scenes, he helped Jewish musicians. Before the war ended, he fled Germany for Switzerland. Even so, his insistence on being “nonpolitical” was naive and self-deluded. As a tool of Hitler and Goebbels, he potently abetted the German war effort. In effect, he lent his prestige to the Third Reich whenever he performed, whether in Berlin or abroad. He was also famously photographed shaking hands with Goebbels from the stage.
In “Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical,” Roger Allen, a fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, doesn’t dwell on any of this. Rather he undertakes a deeper inquiry and asks: Did Furtwängler espouse a characteristically German cultural-philosophical mind-set that in effect embedded Hitler? He answers yes. But the answer is glib.
Mr. Allen’s method is to cull a mountain of Furtwängler writings. That Furtwängler at all times embodied what Thomas Mann in 1945 called “the German-Romantic counter-revolution in intellectual history” is documented beyond question. He was an apostle of Germanic inwardness. He endorsed the philosophical precepts of Hegel and the musical analyses of Heinrich Schenker, for whom German composers mattered most. All this, Mr. Allen shows, propagated notions of “organic” authenticity recapitulated by Nazi ideologues.

Furtwängler’s writings as sampled here (others are better) are repetitious—and so, alas, is Mr. Allen’s commentary. The tensions and paradoxes complicating Furtwängler’s devil’s pact, his surrender to communal ecstasies ennobling or perilous, are reduced to simplistic presumption. Furtwängler’s murky Germanic thinking remains murky and uncontextualized. One would never know, from Mr. Allen’s exegesis, that Hegel formulated a sophisticated “holistic” alternative to the Enlightenment philosophies undergirding Anglo-American understandings of free will. One would never suspect that Schenkerian analysis, extrapolating the fundamental harmonic subcurrents upon which Furtwängler’s art feasted, is today alive and well.
Here’s an example. Furtwängler writes: “Bruckner is one of the few geniuses . . . whose appointed task was to express the transcendental in human terms, to weave the power of God into the fabric of human life. Be it in struggles against demonic forces, or in music of blissful transfiguration, his whole mind and spirit were infused with thoughts of the divine.” Mr. Allen comments: “It is this idea, with its anti-intellectual subtext, which associates Furtwängler so strongly with aspects of Nazi ideology. . . . That Bruckner’s music represents the power of God at work in the fabric of human existence, can be seen as an extension of the Nazi . . . belief in God as a mystical creative power.” But many who revere Brucknerian “divine bliss” are neither anti-intellectual nor religiously inclined.
A much more compelling section of Mr. Allen’s narrative comes at the end, when he observes that Furtwängler blithely maintained his musical ideology after World War II, with no evident pause for reflection. One can agree that this says something unpleasant about the Furtwängler persona, suggesting a nearly atavistic truculence. But it is reductionist to analogize Furtwängler’s unrelenting postwar hostility to nontonal music to “the non-rational censure of ‘degenerate’ art by the Nazis.” Far more interesting is Furtwängler’s own argument that the nontonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers lacks an “overview.” A calibrated long-range trajectory of musical thought was an essential ingredient of Furtwängler’s interpretive art. Absent the tension-and-release dynamic of tonal harmony, he had little to work with.
The political dangers inherent in German Romantic music are a familiar concern, beginning with Nietzsche’s skewerings of Wagner. The best writer on this topic remains Thomas Mann, who lived it. Here he is in “Reflections of a Non-Political Man” (1918): “Art will never be moral or virtuous in any political sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental tendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the ‘barbarism’ that begets beauty [is] indestructible; and although some may call this predilection . . . immoral to the point of endangering the world, yet it is an imperishable fact of life, and if one wanted to eradicate this aspect of art . . . then one might well have freed the world from a serious danger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself.”

With the coming of Hitler, Mann changed his tune and moved to California. The most impressive pages of Mr. Allen’s book come in an appendix: Mann’s lecture “Germany and the Germans,” delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945. Mann here becomes a proud American: “Everything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence. As an American I am a citizen of the world.”
It is pertinent to remember that seven years later, having witnessed the Cold War and the Red Scare, Mann deserted the U.S. for Switzerland; as early as 1951 he wrote to a friend: “I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil to which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me.”
Wilhelm Furtwängler’s refusal to emigrate, however else construed, is not irrelevant here. He processed much differently the stresses that drove Thomas Mann into permanent exile.

—Mr. Horowitz is the author of “Understanding Toscanini,” among many other books.
Appeared in the August 4, 2018, print edition as 'Apostle of Inwardness.'

 

2603- ‘George Szell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection’ Review:

‘George Szell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection’ Review: A Maestro’s Time in Cleveland Still Shines
wsj 2018.8.22

Music Review
‘George Szell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection’ Review: A Maestro’s Time in Cleveland Still Shines
This 106-CD set assembles almost all of the conductor’s recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra, along with a few Szell made with the New York Philharmonic, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and as a remarkably vibrant chamber-music pianist.




When George Szell died, in 1970, he was revered for having built the Cleveland Orchestra into one of the world’s great ensembles in a 24-year tenure that began in 1946, and as an interpreter whose streamlined but high-power readings were rooted in his belief that a composer’s intentions were sacrosanct. But though he played down the Romantic notion that interpretation should also reflect the performer’s personality, Szell’s readings were always identifiable by their structural logic, textural clarity, unerring balances and sheer energy. Under Szell’s baton, an orchestra was a highly polished, precision machine, and in music by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Dvo?ak and Wagner, he was untouchable.
Yet, at the time of his death, the music world as Szell knew it was hurtling toward obsolescence. One of the last great podium martinets, Szell wielded absolute authority and executed it with severity?an approach that vanished once unions began asserting themselves in matters of how musicians should be treated. Vanished, too, is the kind of devotion Szell showed to the Cleveland Orchestra. These days, a tenure lasting nearly a quarter century is rare; beyond a decade, critics wonder (often abetted by off-the-record carping from the players) whether the relationship is growing stale.

Szell’s, with Cleveland, never did; the chemistry between them consistently yielded both heat and light. Their recordings for the Epic and CBS Masterworks labels, starting in 1947, were exemplary in their day, and they remain so now, a point Sony Classical makes vividly in its 106-CD “George Szell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection,” out now. Except for some live recordings issued by the orchestra itself, all of Szell’s Cleveland recordings are here, along with a few Szell made with the New York Philharmonic, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and as a remarkably vibrant chamber-music pianist. The discs are beautifully remastered, and packaged in sleeves that replicate their original artwork and liner notes, with period-correct labels and a hardcover book that provides all the recording details.
Mammoth boxes like this, which have become plentiful lately, are the last gasps of the physical record industry, intent on presenting its wares as they were in their heyday, one last time before streaming blows away the tactile side of music collecting entirely. They are comprehensive, relatively inexpensive (the Szell set can be had for less than $2 a disc) and provide the eerie sense that you are holding the full shape and substance of a great musician’s career in your hands.
The Szell box is a fascinating glimpse at how the supposedly ossified classical canon has evolved (albeit slowly) over the decades. There is, for example, very little Mahler or Bruckner, indispensable staples of a conducting career now. But what there is?most notably, a rich-hued 1966 Mahler Fourth Symphony, and a broad-boned 1970 Bruckner Eighth?stands up well to modern competition. It is also hard to imagine a conductor today recording 106 discs with only a handful devoted to contemporary music and, of that, only a single Stravinsky work, the “Firebird” Suite.
Yet when Szell considered a new work worth recording?for example, a spiky, high-contrast account of Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, with John Browning; or taut, colorful performances of Walton’s Partita for Orchestra and Symphony No. 2; or a curious reading of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra that begins sedately but eventually explodes from the speaker?he is an eloquent advocate, as focused on detail, balance and the subtleties of color as he is in the great Romantic works.
There are occasional disappointments that have more to do with changing interpretive fashion than with any deficiencies of Szell’s. His Mozart, Haydn and Bach, for example, sound a bit ponderous by today’s standards. And despite his reputation as a literalist, he often jettisoned exposition repeats, arguing in interviews (several are included in the set) that repeats were necessary only when works were new and audiences were unfamiliar with them.
Szell’s specialty was the Romantic repertory. His Beethoven and Brahms Symphonies remain among the most tightly reasoned and precisely executed on the market, and his collaborations on those composers’ piano concertos, with Leon Fleisher, are still the gold standard. It’s not easy to find a recording that captures the same level of urgency and anxiety Szell brought to Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration,” and his Wagner Overtures are truly regal. Even pieces that, today, are typically curtain-raisers or encores?Rossini Overtures, the Dvo?ak “Slavonic Dances”?have an uncommon intensity that makes them sound like major statements.
Lately, the sweep of reductive history has elevated Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan to almost mythic status, leaving the other great conductors of the 20th century as footnotes that only specialist collectors care about. That’s not how it seemed at the time, of course. And the new Sony box is a reminder, disc for disc, that Szell deserves a place in that pantheon.

?Mr. Kozinn writes about music for the Journal.