A Brief Explanation of the Furtwängler Problem: Inconsistency and Fascism
Plus some of his great recordings
Every classical music aficionado or fan will have to at some point or another deal with Wilhelm Furtwängler, that legendary German conductor whose name is often synonymous with musical excellence and artistic transcendence. He made some amazing recordings, and some of them have almost never been equaled, such as his studio recording of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony on Deutsche Grammophon or his 1954 live recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Lucerne Festival with the Philharmonia Orchestra. These recordings are exhilarating, transcendental, and demonstrate a style of interpretation as only he could pull off in these specific works. When listening to them, it’s not hard to see why he gets so much acclaim.
But that’s until you actually listen to his other stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, Furtwängler was a great conductor. But his recorded legacy often doesn’t reflect that, and in his defense it’s more often than not not really his fault because he died before he could approve a lot of his live recordings for release. But what those live recordings show a large percent of the time, is a very uncoordinated conductor who seemed to be sloppy very, very, often. His standards of orchestral playing do not hold a candle to our modern standards, or even those set by his most famous contemporary/rival, Arturo Toscanini. Not to mention that live recordings back in the 30s and 40s usually sounded quite terrible in terms of audio engineering.
Furtwängler has a cult following around him, and because of this it’s very difficult to get people to listen to the fact that he was not very disciplined when it came to orchestral technique. People make all sorts of excuses, saying that it doesn’t matter because, “even on his worst days he was better than any other conductor on their best days,” which is utterly false and totally ridiculous. Some of his recordings are unlistenably bad. His Franck symphony was always terrible, and his Brahms Third Symphony on EMI is terrible as well. Even his Beethoven Ninths, a work he was known for doing well, from other dates are horribly sloppy and sometimes boring. One of the main problems with Furtwängler is his inconsistency. There are times where he could do two performances of a certain piece on two days one after the other (such as his recordings of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony from December Seventh and Eighth in 1952), and the second one would be brilliant and the first one would be boring and sloppy. His ability to galvanize an orchestra and make them play at their best was either off, or it was on. And when it was on, there were some really incandescent and brilliant moments, but when it was off, it could be at best boring and at worst one of the worst performances of anything ever. This is further exacerbated by the fact that there are so many recordings and bootleg copies of performances of the exact same repertoire from so many different dates–making it a real chore to wade through and listen to so many horrible performances on so many different record labels to find a merely adequate (or rarely amazing) performance of a certain piece. One of his most acclaimed recordings, a live version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, which, again, I find to be sloppily played (even though overall it’s a very good performance), has been issued so many times, on countless different labels, such as Tahra (now defunct), BIS, and Orfeo, and it’s a real chore to pick through them all to find which one has the best sound, which one has the ACTUAL performance of it (the “official” release is actually mostly made up of rehearsal tapes, overall the best version is without a doubt is the one on Orfeo), and which one is the most easily accessible. But the trouble doesn’t end there–this recording can easily be confused with another live version of Beethoven’s Ninth done at Bayreuth from 1954, which is also on Orfeo. The headache doesn’t stop there, as this whole rigmarole pretty much applies to any piece of repertoire that Furtwängler was known as being very good at.
Besides the issue of finding the right recordings and dealing with his fanatics (who approve and idolize things that Furtwängler himself would have never approved for release) , there are also some works that he never did well. His pedigree in Beethoven was never questioned. Maria Callas once remarked, after expressing boredom at hearing the great conductor George Szell play a Beethoven symphony, that to her, “Furtwängler was Beethoven.” One would think that having such a reputation in the music of Beethoven (and in the German standard repertoire in general) would mean that he was able to do all of the symphonies excellently, right? Wrong. Take the Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the “Pastorale”, one of Beethoven’s greatest achievements. Furtwängler never got it. I’ve listened to many recordings of him doing this piece with many different orchestras, and I’ve yet to find one that really lives up to the hype. He’s sluggish in that piece, and is also subpar in his attempts at the Fourth, First, Second, and Eighth symphonies. Compare this version of the Pastorale conducted by Furtwängler with the Vienna Philharmonic to this version conducted by Karl Böhm with the same orchestra, albeit later and in stereo. Anyone can hear the difference, and this kind of obvious denial of Furtwängler’s faults is really appalling and anti-musical. Is Furtwängler’s version the worst ever Beethoven Pastorale Symphony ever recorded? Of course not. But is it good? Also no.
I think the apex of this Furtwänglerian cognitive dissonance really shows itself when people talk about the famous recording of Beethoven’s Ninth from 1942, recorded on Hitler’s birthday with the Berlin Philharmonic, when Joseph Goebbels and many other top Nazis in the audience (this is the infamous recording where at the end of the concert Furtwängler shook Goebbels’s hand). It’s a really terrible performance musically, and it’s even more horribly recorded. First of all, the main reason why people like it is because of the sheer historical connotation, and I don’t need to explain that to you. Furtwängler cult followers, even when explaining why it’s bad, like to make excuses by saying things like “well, it’s supposed to be a symbol of protest against the Nazi regime, and that’s the reason why it’s bad,” or “this performance is good because you can hear the anxiety and edge that it has.” That’s all complete bullshit, because if you do real comparative listening you can hear Furtwängler do almost identical terrible performances on different dates even when there weren’t any excuses for why he would have been on edge. Listen to the performance. You can’t hear anything besides the timpani, and when you do hear things they often sound bad. Sloppy string playing, out of tune woodwinds, uncoordinated Brass. It’s a hot mess.
This brings me to my next point which is the political Furtwängler problem. By the time the Nazis came to power, Furtwängler was already a classical music superstar. While other conductors and musicians left Germany in protest of the Nazis, Furtwängler stayed. He briefly resigned all of his musical posts in protest, but was soon to step back into the limelight, because he believed that Germany “needed great art” and that it could somehow overcome the horrors of the war. I don’t really believe that all that much. I think Furtwängler saw an opportunity to achieve great success and acclaim in his career, and that he took it. However, by no means was Furtwängler a Nazi–he never joined the party, and was outwardly critical of Hitler and the Nazis, refusing to start his concerts with the Horst-Wessel-Lied, refusing to salute Hitler, and helping Jewish musicians escape, even refusing to end his letters to Hitler with Heil Hitler. He believed it to be antithetical to his own views of what German culture was and how art should work.
What Furtwängler undoubtedly was though, was one of the most effective propaganda tools for the Third Reich. He avoided execution and deportation to a concentration camp because Goebbels thought that he was such an effective propaganda tool—playing concerts during the war for Nazi officials, for Hitler’s birthday, and being used in videos to showcase the supposed supremacy of German Art. Taking this all into account, Furtwängler’s willingness to be the tool of one of the most evil and genocidal regimes in history for the supposed excuse of preserving great art shows incredible moral bankruptcy and stupidity–one of the remnants of dreadful 19th century romanticism in which people believed that art was superhuman and godlike, and that great art triumphed over evil. In some cases it is and it does, but in Furtwängler’s case it is not and it does not. The Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler was one of the Nazi Regime’s most powerful and effective propaganda machines. And Furtwängler must have realized that, and it meant that he was okay with it, only fleeing Germany towards the end of the war.
If I had to guess why people are so drawn to Furtwängler and idolize him as if he were a sort of mythical figure, it’s because he embodies this sort of stupid “tortured artist” motif that the romantics and others seem to love–he was “forced” to choose between his art and great evil–-and he chose to be a tool for great evil, which in some people’s minds makes him a tragic figure. I don’t think he was a tragic figure at all. I think he was an idiot outside of music, and a willfully ignorant idiot at that. His actions during the Nazi regime were despicable and appalling.
If this sort of biographical detail and difficulty locating his great performances turns you off of Furtwängler’s recordings, then I don’t blame you for a second. There is other great music and the reasons for not listening to him are completely understandable. But if you’re still curious and want to hear some of the greatest recordings ever made, I will make a list down below so perhaps you can see what the hype is all about. I love some of Furtwängler’s recordings. I believe that if you don’t listen to them then you’re missing out on some truly amazing music. But is he all that? Please.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, “Choral” (live at the Lucerne Festival, August 22nd, 1954. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Elsa Cavelti, alto, Ernst Häfliger, tenor, Otto Edelmann, Bass.) Tahra Records.