Wilhelm Furtwängler (British TV documentary, date and provenance unknown)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I showed my husband Charles a documentary lasting just over an hour on the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängier. The show’s YouTube posting lasted just over an hour and cut off shortly before it was over, which made it even harder to tell what company made this or what its provenance was. The show’s Web link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2D_vGdwsUo, and though I couldn’t tell who had made it or how it was originally released (I’m guessing as a TV documentary) and the only opening title was “Wilhelm Furtwängler,” so I’m not sure whether or under what auspices it was made. I came to this YouTube documentary through a circuitous source: I had been struck by the use of the final “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the closing ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics, and that got me to thinking about how other authoritarians have used and abused that piece of music for propaganda purposes. I had also decided to accompany my writing about the film with a recording of Furtwängler’s Nazi-era performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which led me to run down a YouTube commentary on one of them by Classics Today editor David Hurwitz on “Why Furtwängler’s 1942 Nazi Ninth Really Sucks.”

Though the documentary Charles and I watched later isn’t connected to Hurwitz’s comment, it evokes the quiet, pastoral environment into which he was born. His father, Adolf Furtwängler, was a leading archaeologist and anthropologist who specialized in exploring ancient Greek ruins and took his young son with him on at least one expedition. His younger brother became a mountaineer and was one of the first people to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa – where a spur on the side of the mountain got named after him. Wilhelm was home-schooled from age eight and given particularly intense training in music after he started writing his own pieces by age seven. He learned both piano and violin, and seemed headed for a career as a great composer but got sidetracked into conducting, at first as a way of getting his own scores performed but later due to financial concerns: he saw that conductors, especially if they were good enough to land a job with a major orchestra, had a steadier income stream than composers. In 1922 he was appointed music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra following the death of Artur Nikisch, and with one exception (1945 to 1952) he remained in that post until his death in 1954.

The essence of the controversy surrounding Furtwängler is his decision to remain in Germany after the Nazis took power in January 1933 and stay until January 1945, when he was warned by Albert Speer that his name had been put on a Nazi hit list because of his secret activities on behalf of Jewish musicians. Furtwängler’s attitude towards the Nazis mirrored that of Richard Strauss (another towering musical figure who sucked up to the Nazis in public while at least partially working against them in private, though in Strauss’s case it seems to have been more about keeping his Jewish daughter-in-law alive than anything else) or Dmitri Shostakovich being forced by Stalin to compose bombastic cantatas honoring the Soviet regime while either disliking or actively detesting it in private. Critic David Hurwitz, whose commentary on the 1942 Furtwängler recording of Beethoven’s Ninth is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBRXDrrXqLM, argues that Furtwängler was part of the German academic and intellectual elite who regarded all politics as beneath them, and as such they were easy prey for the Nazis’ nationalistic appeals and offered no effective resistance to the regime even as they kvetched about its excesses in private. (In that they were a lot like the Republicans like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins who have told people in private how much they hate Donald Trump while they continue to stand behind him in public.)

The film includes a clip from, one of the Nazi-era Furtwängler performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with a giant swastika mounted on the stage expressing the Nazis’ view of this work as a monument to the superiority of German art and culture; what we view as a hymn to joy, peace and brotherhood, the Nazis regarded as yet another nationalistic triumph of the will. The effect is creepy and shows both how artists can be perverted by politics and how they can allow themselves to be used for propaganda purposes – as Furtwängler definitely was. Reading Furtwängler’s Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Furtwängler, one is struck by how hard Hitler, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Reichsmarschall Herrmann Göring tried to keep Furtwängler in Germany and to stage events that would make it look like he was a Nazi supporter, even though he never joined the Nazi Party (as compared to the young Herbert von Karajan, who joined as early as 1933), never wrote the “Heil Hitler!” salute on his letters (even when he was writing to Hitler!) or gave the outstretched Nazi salute, and on at least some occasions played the music of banned composers like Mendelssohn and Hindemith. (In 1934 Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic gave the world premiere of the symphony Hindemith had composed based on themes from his opera Mathis der Maler – about the struggle of the painter Matthias Grünewald for individual rights against a corrupt dictatorship – even though the directors of the Berlin State Opera pulled their invitation to premiere the complete opera and it was not performed until 1938 in Zürich, Switzerland, the only city in the world then that had a German-speaking theatre and was not ruled by the Nazis.)

Goebbels and Göring had to keep saving Furtwängler’s bacon from other Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler and “racial theorist” Alfred Rosenberg, who literally wanted to send him to a concentration camp – until early 1945, when Furtwängler received word that the Nazis had put him on a hit list and he fled across the border to Switzerland. There he was not allowed to work as a conductor until a de-Nazification tribunal cleared him of the charge of Nazi sympathies, and he spent the next two years working on his Symphony No. 2 (the most famous of his compositions) and recovering from the strains of life in Germany under a war the country was losing. The Furtwängler documentary featured interviews with various musicians, including Jewish ones like Jascha Horenstein (who had worked as an assistant to Furtwängler in the pre-Nazi years and was fired at the Nazis’ insistence; he later settled in Britain and became a major conductor there, including making a scorching recording of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony and tone poem Saga-Drøm), Yehudi Menuhin (who made a point of appearing with Furtwängler after the war because he thought critics were giving him a raw deal and making him out to be a Nazi when he was nothing of the sort), and Daniel Barenboim (who was born in Argentina from a German-Jewish family but is shown performing the solo piano part in one of Furtwängler’s compositions and in 1965, 11 years after Furtwängler’s death, made a record of Furtwängler’s Symphony No. 2).

There are also non-Jewish interviewees, including Hans Keller (whom it’s hard to watch since he’s wearing what sure looks like a clip-on Groucho Marx moustache), making the film’s overall case that Furtwängler has gotten a bum rap from historians. Given how the United States has come close to authoritarianism of late – the Republican Party has definitively rejected democracy and in the states it controls has committed itself to rigging the next two elections to stay in power, and those of us who have been able to feel smug in the certainty and security of our democracy may find ourselves very soon in the position that Furtwängler and other Germans who hated the Nazis but decided to stay in the country, we too may be facing moments of courage (or cowardice) very soon in our own country and have to deal ourselves with the same moral dilemmas and agonies Furtwängler did.