During spare free moments over the past week I’ve been dipping into the Library of America’s omnibus of one of the grand old men of American musical criticism, Virgil Thomson. My appreciation of his work is mixed. On the one hand I admire his knowledge, his passion for the new music of his time. But on the other, his dry, one-damn-thing-after-another style of writing leaves me cold. Then there was his pettiness in print towards his rival composers; his barbaric view that the worth of a work of musical art was only commensurate with its economic value. Every now and then, however, one finds a surprising and valuable insight.
In a review of a mostly French program with the New York Philharmonic from March 1947, Thomson takes the guest conductor to task for the “Romantic liberties” he permitted himself in interpreting the works of Debussy and Ravel. The performance of the former’s Ibéria, Thomson argued, “sacrificed color to dynamics, and metrics to accent.”
“This was all disappointing from a conductor who has been both a first-class musician and a Frenchman long enough to know better,” the review continued.
It is remarkable enough that the conductor coming under Thomson’s withering criticism was none other than Charles Munch, whose stylish recordings are considered models of French orchestral performance. But even more remarkable was the conductor whom Thomson praised as Munch’s superior in the rendering of French music: Wilhelm Furtwängler.
“[Munch] certainly plays French music better than any of the German conductors now working in Germany,” Thomson opined. “Though many a German not now working in Germany, Furtwängler included*, has had a sounder understanding of the French Impressionist style.”
This opinion wasn’t an anomaly in Thomson’s critiques. Elsewhere in the collection, one finds other instances of the critic’s high regard for Furtwängler’s performances of French music; at one point ranking his excellence in this repertoire alongside that of Pierre Monteux’s, referring to them both as “magical.”
The German conductor is, of course, famous for his recordings of Austro-German music. However, his surviving discography hardly suggests the breadth of his repertoire, which even in his late years included Bartók (tapes of a Swiss broadcast of the Concerto for Orchestra existed at some point, but were destroyed), Korngold, and Shostakovich. Nor does it suggest the affinity he apparently did feel for Debussy, whom he regarded as a “modern Schumann.” This is borne out in his notebooks, even if his esteem for the composer is at times mingled with personal misgivings.
In his blistering (and, frankly, jealous) critique of a Toscanini concert in Berlin, Furtwängler’s most passionate outburst against his rival is reserved not for his performances of Haydn and Beethoven, but for his rendering of Debussy’s La mer.
“[Toscanini’s] even, primitive, and unintellectual manner so consistently, and with such a naïve lack of awareness, ignored Debussy’s sensitive tonal language, that one could only wonder why he performed the work at all,” Furtwängler jotted down in a notebook entry from 1930.
Unfortunately, little evidence remains of Furtwängler’s persuasiveness in the French repertoire. Yet what is extant does appear to corroborate Thomson’s opinions.
A live Berlin Philharmonic performance in Italy of the first two movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes is among these precious few testimonials. One would think that the dark and sometimes rough blend typical of Furtwängler’s sound would have been a poor fit for Debussy. Instead, the results are startlingly revelatory. Rarely does one hear the sense of gauzy, pregnant mystery, the dazzling juxtapositions in tone color in “Nuages” and “Fêtes” that one finds here. Debussy’s smoky part writing seamlessly wends before the listener, emerging from the darkness before it nearly imperceptibly retreats into it again. The effect is almost that of a music permanently imprinted into the air, only awaiting the moment for a listener to step in momentarily to draw it in. Whereas so many contemporary orchestral performances of Debussy renders his art into staid prose, here his music is delivered as the hushed, ecstatic poetry it certainly must be.
“The Germans are rather messy when they play their own music,” Thomson wrote in another review earlier in the 1940s. “Some are excellent with French music; Furtwängler, for instance.” Listening to this Debussy broadcast, one can only agree—and deeply regret the typecasting that the conductor was subjected to by EMI and Deutsche Grammophon.
(*: When Thomson wrote this review in 1947, a number of Germany’s most famous conductors had still not been able to resume their public careers pending the outcomes of their respective de-Nazification tribunals.)
