"A Religious Rite": Otto Klemperer's Final Concerts in the United States

Two of the most tempestuous decades of history, personal and global, had passed by the time Otto Klemperer returned to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1962. Militarism, World War II, and the resulting seismic political and cultural shifts had left the world vastly changed from the one that existed at the time of his previous visit in 1936, when he aspired to succeed Leopold Stokowski.

In 1939 Klemperer was diagnosed with a right-sided acoustic neuroma—a brain tumor the size of a small apple sitting upon the nerve that transmits hearing and balance. The operation to remove it was a success; recovery less so. He suffered a permanent facial droop on his right side, partial atrophy of his tongue, and a years long manic episode that exasperated his family and colleagues. Thomas Mann noted that he appeared “unbalanced,” “noisy,” and “rather terrible.” His behavior soon became too much to bear for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose board terminated his contract in 1941.

“In the following years things went very bad for us financially,” he recalled. “I conducted very, very little. No one invited me.”

His erratic conduct worsened to the degree that he was considered unemployable, at least in the United States. Disillusioned, he eagerly returned to Europe as soon as the war ended, settling on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain in Hungary. His increasingly vociferous anti-Americanism stoked the suspicions of the FBI; his ironic skepticism of “socialist realism” irked Russian authorities. 

Finally in 1951 he earned the international breakthrough he and his family had so dearly been seeking. At the second of that year’s Festival of Britain concerts in London, Walter Legge—EMI’s producer-generalissimo—heard Klemperer’s performance of the Mozart “Jupiter” from the wings of the Royal Albert Hall. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eleven years later, Klemperer made his final appearances stateside, now as a celebrated elder statesman of the baton. To Eugene Ormandy, whom he privately excoriated over his thwarted Philadelphia ambitions in 1936, he cordially wrote that he looked forward to his forthcoming engagement with his orchestra. They almost did not come to pass.

Trouble was afoot. After a consultation, his psychiatrist in his new home in Zurich recommended that Klemperer cancel the concerts—advice that was duly ignored. He was at the beginning of a depressive spell that influenced his decision-making. Most regrettable for posterity was the collapse of recording plans with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Columbia, which hinged on not upsetting EMI in England, to whom he was contracted. Despite his initial enthusiasm for the project, as well as the personal involvement of Ormandy in its negotiations, Klemperer refused to accommodate these conditions and revise his programs of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms; he even scrapped plans to perform and record his own Symphony No. 2. 

On the eve of his performances, Klemperer was suffering from an unusually bad case of stage fright. As soon as he arrived with his daughter Lotte in New York City, he sealed himself off in his rented room and refused all visitors, save for his son Werner and a select group of close friends. He experienced a precipitous drop in weight and persistent insomnia.

Nevertheless, Legge continued to believe that Klemperer’s circumstances were a “fortunate state of affairs [that] almost guaranteed him a triumph with the Philadelphia Orchestra.” This turned out to not quite be the case. As had occurred twenty-five years earlier, audiences thrilled to Klemperer, but American musical critics—still under the sway of Arturo Toscanini, who had only passed away five years before—remained dismissive.

“There has been in England recently the same excitement about Klemperer. . . as there used to be about Toscanini. . . This talk was contradicted by the performances I heard in Carnegie Hall. . . Klemperer’s disregard of Beethoven’s directions and character produced strange slow-motion performances,” opined B. H. Haggin, longtime keeper of the late Maestro’s flame, before adding with a palpable disapproving sneer that these “somnolent performances. . . excited the audience to cheers.”

Others were more circumspect, if still cool. “Tempi were a bit slower and a shade more deliberate than those to which audiences in this country are accustomed,” was the guarded appraisal of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “[His concerts] had the aura. . . of a religious rite,” said Eric Salzman of the New York Times. “The public was awe-struck, the critics mainly skeptical.”

Although his planned series of recordings for Columbia fell through, broadcasts of Klemperer’s final Philadelphia Orchestra engagements have survived, and in decent sound besides. Whatever reservations that critics of that time may have had are hard to discern now that the high tide of the Toscanini cult has ebbed. Far from being “somnolent,” Klemperer’s performances are muscular; drawing from Ormandy’s Philadelphians an uncharacteristically manly, craggy sound. 

“A conductor must know how to hold attention,” Klemperer would muse near the end of his life. In these broadcasts he succeeds in that task, well after he and all those he loved in life have passed on into the eternity of history.

(This essay will be included as liner notes in a future Japanese release of Klemperer’s Philadelphia concerts.)

He did it his way: Otto Klemperer rehearsing the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1962.

He did it his way: Otto Klemperer rehearsing the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1962.

Hans Knappertsbusch, Maverick Maestro

Hans Knappertsbusch has always stood apart from other great German conductors of the 20th century, a dark horse among his more glamorous (and consistent) colleagues. Non-conformist by nature, he preferred to cut his own path, even when doing so risked making matters more difficult for himself. “Kna,” as he is affectionately called by his admirers, was an unrepentant monarchist in the midst of Weimar democracy, an open skeptic of the Nazis during the Third Reich, a stubbornly persistent adherent of the bowdlerized Bruckner of Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe; his surface bearing concealing an inner courtly gentlemanliness. 

In 1975, a decade after the conductor’s death, the German music critic Karl Schumann said of him: “I have never come across an artist who so impressed, so fascinated me as Hans Knappertsbusch.” Had his studio discography been all that was bequeathed to posterity, there would be little there to corroborate this generous assessment. Like others of his time and place, Knappertsbusch trusted the instincts of the moment to guide him through a performance. “Gentlemen, you know the piece, I know the piece—see you tonight,” became something of his signature phrase to orchestras before shrugging off the rehearsals he notoriously disdained. Such a spontaneous approach could potentially ignite fireworks in the concert hall. In the recording studio, however, which requires at least a degree of calculation and planning, his carefree attitude of Bavarian gemütlichkeit often worked against him. His listless Meistersinger on Decca, which would cost him the honor of leading the label’s flagship stereo Ring cycle, immediately comes to mind.

Fortunately for his posthumous legacy, a significant and seemingly ever-growing discography of live performances have survived as a bracing rejoinder to his studio work. With the gritty, sonorous power Knappertsbusch drew from orchestras being particularly well suited to Wagner, it is natural that his work in Bayreuth’s orchestra pit has become his best known. Two officially approved traversals of Parsifal have become milestones for any serious record collecting Wagnerite, but perhaps even more remarkable is his Götterdämmerung from Bayreuth’s postwar inauguration; a rendering of such volcanic impetuosity that it leaves the listener second guessing John Culshaw’s later decision to ditch Knappertsbusch in favor of the young Georg Solti.

He could be no less compelling on the concert podium, even when startlingly fallible. Eyebrows may find themselves twitching at Henri Büsser’s review of a Knappertsbusch engagement in Paris from 1956 wherein his “sobriety and precision”—neither of them qualities typically associated with this conductor—are singled out for praise. Germany, where Virgil Thomson noted conductors had traditionally cultivated a “rough” sound that contrasted markedly with American expectations of ensemble synchronization, had its tastes reshaped after World War II by the ascendance of younger conductors such as Rudolf Kempe and Herbert von Karajan (with Erich Kleiber as spiritual godfather) whose sleek exactitude owed more to Arturo Toscanini than to their own elder compatriots. Borne from an aesthetic outlook steeped in the waning, twilit Romanticism of late Wilhelmine Germany, Knappertsbusch’s postwar recordings—especially his late ones for Westminster—can sound as though the shadow of the 20th century had never darkened his existence, so thoroughly and comparatively remote did his style remain against the rapid changes of the 1950s and 1960s. 

In his overview of the Salzburg Festival during the NSDAP period, Andreas Novak pithily captured the essence of Knapperstbusch’s character when he referred to him as a “gruff humanist.” As tends to occur with strong-willed individualists, their singular vision can clash against the narrow concerns of more mundane folk. As Arthur Vogel, the music section chief of the American occupation government in Bavaria noted, “the same character of independence and pride” which had kept him aloof from the Nazis also made him difficult to work with and “reluctant to give up even a small part of his Teutonic, heavily Wagnerian bias.” Solti, who took the reins of the Bavarian State Opera from Knappertsbusch in 1946, would long chafe with resentment over the “hysterical screams of approval” that greeted his elder colleague whenever he approached the podium. “Coexisting with him was terribly difficult for me,” he recalled nearly half a century later.

A few years before, Knappertsbusch ran afoul of a detractor with far more capacity to derail his career than any young conducting upstart. 

“He with his blond hair and blue eyes was certainly a German, but unfortunately he believed that even with no ear he could with his temperament still produce good music,” Adolf Hitler privately opined. “To attend the [Bavarian State] Opera when he was conducting was a real punishment.” (Despite this and a temporary ban on performance, Knappertsbusch’s name was included among those exempt from compulsory military mobilization in the Gottbegnadeten-Liste.)

Just a little over a decade after the war’s end, Knappertsbusch drifted into his Indian summer, with he and the Munich Philharmonic (whom he maintained a close relationship with in his final decade) each settling into comfortable conservatism. On October 18, 1956 they stood before an audience in Ascona, Switzerland, which sits along the shores of Lake Maggiore, less than 5 miles from the Italian border. Whatever expectations the audience in the Aule delle Scuole may have had for conductor and orchestra on that date were likely confounded by the ruggedly idiosyncratic performances on this disc. 

In his treatise on conducting, Wagner bemoaned the condescension which musicians of his time took towards Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8: “[They] came to regard the entire symphony as a sort of accidental hors d’oeuvre of [the composer’s] muse—who after the exertions of the [Symphony No. 7] had chosen ‘to take things rather easily.’” As befits a noted Bayreuthian, Knappertsbusch’s interpretation carefully heeds the advice Wagner dispenses for conductors tackling the score. Far from being the lightweight “silly symphony” it often is depicted as, he dispatches the humor of the Beethoven Eighth with savage delivery, investing it with a sardonic tone that pointedly heightens the score’s deceptive sophistication. His pacing is deliberate; the cumulative effect massive, weighty, nearly crushing. 

Cut from the same cloth is his expansive reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 2. Its pastoral opening movement, which emerges as if drawn out in a single breath, stands as one of the most remarkable performances in Knappertsbusch’s discography. Each note, played for its full value, tells. A bewitching illusion of having vanished the music’s pulse is cast over the listener, with the conductor coaxing a stream of Wagnerian unendliche Melodie unfettered by bar lines. Momentary instrumental lapses—and there are a number of them—are conquered by the sheer charisma of Knappertsbusch’s direction. 

Another officer (and musical academic) attached with the postwar Allied occupation of Bavaria, John Evarts, ruefully noted in his diary the “outrageous liberties” that Knappertsbusch took upon his return to the podium after a brief ban imposed by the Military Government. “[His] admirers were wildly enthusiastic about the eye-and-ear-full [sic] which they received.” Judging from the results on display in this recording at least, Kna’s supporters had ample reason for their unrestrained acclaim.

(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion as liner notes in a forthcoming Knappertsbusch release.)

Uncompromising, occasionally uncouth: Hans Knappertsbusch at the podium (circa late 1950s).

Uncompromising, occasionally uncouth: Hans Knappertsbusch at the podium (circa late 1950s).

Wilhelm Furtwängler in Stockholm

Tod und Verklärung

As Wilhelm Furtwängler was laid to rest at the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof on December 4, 1954, few among his mourners could have anticipated the dramatic reversal of fortune his legacy would begin to enjoy within two years of his death. 

In those immediate postwar years, many perceived Furtwängler as having been tarnished by the ambiguity of his public conduct in Germany during the Nazi period; which resulted in endless fodder for squabbling by subsequent generations of listeners, musicians, and music critics. In a private diary entry from 1933, Thomas Mann excoriated Furtwängler as a “lackey” of the Third Reich. A few years later Arturo Toscanini would harshly admonish his colleague face-to-face for his political vacillation. He would not be the only conductor to do so. 

“Please bear in mind that your art was used over the years as an extremely effective means of foreign propaganda for the regime of the devil,” Bruno Walter wrote to him in 1949. “The presence and activity of a musician of your standing in Germany at that time lent those terrible criminals cultural and moral credibility, or at least helped them considerably in its acquisition.”

Despite enduring a bruising de-Nazification trial which in 1947 would clear him of all charges, antipathy to Furtwängler remained strong in former Allied territories, especially in North America where a vociferous and well-coordinated campaign had prevented him from taking the reins of the Chicago Symphony from Artur Rodziński in 1949. The memories of that incident remained at the forefront of his mind as the Berlin Philharmonic prepared for its first tour of the United States, which was scheduled for the winter of 1955. 

There was another subtler, yet perhaps more significant reason why some audiences were wary of Furtwängler. Already before the First World War, Arturo Toscanini’s career had become in the United States the glittering stuff of legend. By the year of Furtwängler’s death—which coincidentally was also when Toscanini retired—he had become the Colossus of Rhodes of the symphony orchestra, his career straddling imposingly across the Old and New Worlds. He was “The Maestro,” a symbol not only of the intense respect he had earned in America for his music-making and defiance of fascism, but also of the effectiveness of NBC’s marketing during his tenure with the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. Whereas Toscanini promulgated the notion of the performer as faithful servant, Furtwängler regarded his role akin to what a later age would refer to as an auteur: An executant who interprets the vagaries of musical notation with the authority of a collaborator to the composer. More importantly (and despite the fact that he was nearly 20 years older than Furtwängler) Toscanini’s manner of music-making—propulsively paced, sharply-etched, and direct—was reflective of the chrome-plated optimism that fueled the Atomic Age’s pursuit of the logical, its technocentric crusade against the mystical. Furtwängler’s art, on the other hand, with its subjective and tragic connotations seemed a sepia-tinted relic from a time long bygone. The fact that much of his postwar studio discography, most of which had been produced by EMI under strained circumstances, failed to live up to his reputation did not help. Next to the phonogenic polish and precision of the likes of Toscanini and Karajan, Furtwängler’s studio recordings can sound stodgy and insecure. 

As the last mounds of dirt piled upon the casket being buried in the shadow of the Königstuhl, even Furtwängler’s family and close friends would probably have at least conceded that at the time of his death his reputation had seen better days. 

Auferstehung

Yet the same label with which he had a testy relationship in life would prove to be the catalyst for the posthumous reevaluation of Furtwängler the man and artist. 

Less than two years after his death, EMI would issue a recording under his direction of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, assembled from the rehearsals and concert for the Bayreuth Festival’s postwar inauguration in 1951. Although presented in less than ideal sound even for the twilight of the mono era, Furtwängler’s searching, wayward, occasionally fallible, and often visionary performance was a thunderous retort to Toscaninian objectivity. It also revealed something else that his previous officially released recordings had failed to disclose: Furtwängler was far more charismatic and compelling live than he was in the studio. 

With listeners’ appetites whetted, record labels—some of them with the approval of Furtwängler’s estate, others sneaking under the radar in ephemeral bootleg issues—began mining public and private archives in Central Europe for more broadcasts under his direction. Over the next decades various hitherto unheard live performances would be released on LP and, later, CD. 

Now in 2019, 65 years after his death, nearly all of Furtwängler’s extant recordings have been discovered and made available commercially to the public. With this abundance of riches, it would seem that his admirers (and his detractors) have by now heard everything there is to hear from this great and often controversial figure. 

Or have they?


Swedish Rhapsody

Most of Furtwängler’s recordings were made with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. Another smaller, but sizable portion was made with the Philharmonia and Lucerne Festival Orchestras. Frequently overlooked, however, are his small, but revealing set of broadcast recordings that he made with yet another ensemble: The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Though sporadic, their relationship would last from 1920 to 1948—nearly three decades.

When Furtwängler first appeared with the orchestra then known as the Stockholm Concert Society, he was 34 years old and a rising star in the German musical firmament. Already he was among the most sought after conductors in Europe, boasting not only recent appointments to the Wiener Tonkünstler Orchestra and the symphony concerts of the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, but also an impressive tenure as music director of the Mannheim National Theatre. Despite these artistic successes, the young Furtwängler was eager to earn foreign cash as Germany, still reeling from the Treaty of Versailles, was suffering its worst economic crisis since reunification. When Scandinavia beckoned him with a guest series of nine concerts and payment in kronor, the opportunity was simply too good to pass. 

Furtwängler enjoyed his stay in Stockholm, as well as the kindness of his Swedish hosts. Nevertheless, admiration for this city he described as “likeable and cozy” mingled with scorn over what he considered was the poverty of its cultural life. “Everything else [here], especially the so-called ‘spiritual’ interests exist only on the surface. A thousand times would I rather live in vanquished, depleted Germany than here among wealth and well-being which suffocates everything,” Furtwängler wrote to his mother, adding disdainfully in a foretaste of his later, deeply held skepticism of Anglo-American cultural priorities that in Sweden “you get a good idea of how things look like in England and America.” 

Despite his reservations, Furtwängler’s Stockholm Concert Society programs—aided by a healthy complement of musical works by local favorites including Franz Berwald, Ture Rangström, and Andreas Hallén—were a sensation. Eager to nab this magnetic talent, the ensemble’s board quickly offered him the role of music director. This piqued the ire of Georg Schnéevoigt, then the current holder of the title, who was chagrined at being blindsided by a young upstart. Bolstered by his own supporters, Schnéevoigt managed to make a scandal out of this unsolicited designation of successor, eventually forcing the resignation of his opponent’s supporters from the orchestra’s board. 

Aside from a pair of concerts in 1921, Furtwängler would not return to conduct the Stockholm Concert Society until 1925, a year after Schnéevoigt had finally departed. By then Furtwängler would have little time for Sweden. Not only had he succeeded Arthur Nikisch as chief of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, but he was taking on increasing responsibilities with the Vienna Philharmonic, and as if that were not enough he would soon cast his ambitions across the Atlantic to conduct the New York Philharmonic. (Stockholm would, at any rate, appoint the talented Václav Talich as its next music director.)

Another 16 years and the initiation of hostilities in a Second World War would pass when Furtwängler again sailed the Baltic Sea to stand before Swedish audiences. He would conduct only a single concert in Stockholm in 1941, but in 1942 and 1943 would lead five and four concerts in the city respectively. At the time of his return, the armies of the Third Reich were sprawled across a wide swathe of Europe, and Furtwängler was under pressure to act as a cultural ambassador in newly conquered regions. Sweden, with its delicate state of official neutrality, would be one of the few European countries where Furtwängler, who was unwilling to be used as a propaganda figure in German-occupied territories, would perform as a guest in wartime. 

After the war, Sweden would be one of the first countries he appeared in after his de-Nazification tribunal. He conducted the Stockholm Concert Society in 1947, and would return for a final appearance the following year. A further scheduled engagement with the orchestra in 1953 was cancelled because of medical problems, although Swedish audiences managed to hear him one last time in 1950 when he led the Vienna Philharmonic on tour through Scandinavia. 


Stora landsvägen

Whereas wide variances in tempi, articulation, and textural nuance can occur in the discographies of other major conductors of the early to mid-20th century, including Walter and even Toscanini, Furtwängler’s recordings—whether in the studio or in the concert hall—demonstrate a consistency of approach that may be surprising. Far from being the improvisatory things that they are often described as, Furtwängler’s various performances of the same score generally hew to an established interpretational road map, differing only in small, but crucial details from performance to performance. His work with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia benefit not only from being made with ensembles which were among the world’s finest, but also by their intimate familiarity with Furtwängler’s working methods. Each one had learned to intuitively and successfully respond to his array of physical gestures and occasionally inarticulate utterances in rehearsal. The result was as if composer, orchestra, and conductor had seamlessly fused into a single, indivisible entity. 

Today’s Royal Stockholm Philharmonic has taken its place as one of Europe’s finest orchestras, with a distinguished and growing discography providing ample testimony of their virtuosity. However, the Stockholm Concert Society of the 1940s, was a fine, but undeniably scrappy ensemble that, comparatively speaking, was considerably below the calibre of the best European orchestras from that period. Because of that, these recordings are often looked upon by collectors as being the stepchildren in Furtwängler’s discography. Closer and unbiased examination of these Stockholm performances, nevertheless, reveal not only a number of insights into the conductor’s art unavailable elsewhere, but they also possess qualities which make them worthy of enjoyment in their own right. Despite—or perhaps because—of the orchestra’s limitations and their comparative unfamiliarity with Furtwängler’s performing approach, there is a sense of playful risk-taking evident here, an awareness of walking a tightrope with no safety net below that the conductor’s better-known recordings in Berlin, Vienna, and London do not quite match. Moreover, whether by design or by default, these Stockholm performances bear a sunny glint unique among Furtwängler’s recordings. 

Consider the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on disc 1 of this set. The bright uplift of this Swedish performance from December 8, 1943 is worlds away from the tragic intensity of the famous Berlin performance from 20 months prior. True, the Stockholm Concert Society is pushed to the limits of its abilities here, with its woodwinds notably sounding taxed, especially in the finale. But the joyous energy of this performance, auguring the conductor’s ebullient postwar readings of this symphony, is infectious. Even Furtwängler himself seems carried away by the euphoric jubilation of it all, with his gravelly baritone audibly joining the choir in the coda. The sound, too, is an improvement over Berlin 1942; better realizing the wide spectrum of Furtwängler’s dynamic shadings, and improving significantly upon the compressed sound that mars the former recording. Newly remastered in this set, this performance takes its rightful place among the conductor’s finest. 

On disc 2 is included a program of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, which was a favorite pairing of Furtwängler’s in his late years. His 1951 Vienna recording of the former score, like many of his EMI productions, has its virtues, but lacks the sense of headlong adventure that this Stockholm recording from November 12, 1948 has in abundance. While the thin Swedish strings are no match for the richness and depth of their Viennese counterparts, their articulative bite, to say nothing of the entire orchestra’s willingness to treat this occasion as anything but routine makes this among the more immediately thrilling outings of Furtwängler’s postwar career. What would be ponderous in the studio is here weighty and muscular, surging with purpose. Listen to the taut lines of the “Allegretto,” which evince none of the droop of the later performance; and with orchestra and conductor erupting at its expressive nodal points like the impassioned oratory of an evangelist exulting in the unvarnished truth of religious scripture. The might of the scherzo and finale, meanwhile, hurtle forward like a champion athlete in full stride, conquering and transcending all. 

Thanks to its perennial inclusion in the conductor’s Beethoven cycle for EMI, this Stockholm reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 has been the best known of Furtwängler’s Swedish broadcasts. Its familiarity bears no loss of freshness and vigor for all that. A tricky stumbling block for many conductors, Furtwängler is among the few alert to the symphony’s complexities and deeper implications. The wild harmonic modulations in the first movement’s development, for example, swing between daring and danger, foreshadowing the much later music of Carl Nielsen (somewhat appropriate given the Scandinavian provenance of this concert). Under the direction of most conductors, Beethoven’s Eighth sounds like a misfire, a curious stylistic hiccup. In Furtwängler’s hands the symphony is revealed as a remarkably prescient neoclassical statement, anticipating by a century Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s works in that vein; its irony a potent and unsettling statement on the Enlightenment’s twilight and the horizons of human reason. 

From November 19, 1948 comes one of three extant recordings of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem that emerged from his baton. Although it is hobbled by comparatively inferior vocal soloists, this Stockholm performance is also the only one that has survived complete, and in fairly decent sound no less. It is fitting that Furtwängler’s final guest appearance before the Stockholm Concert Society should also be his most successful, with the orchestra clearly playing at the utmost of their collective powers. The sound which emerges from this tape is simultaneously dignified and richly expressive, making palpable its deeply felt mourning, limning its sorrow with the glimmer of a gentle, consoling trust that even death, too, will pass. Every breath tells, even in those long moments of stillness when conductor and orchestra both seem to look over the edge into the hereafter; beautifully molding each movement into a human-scaled monument to the impermanence of our existence, and the grief of those from whom we must inevitably take leave. 

We return to wartime in the first two tracks of the final disc on this set. Strauss’ Don Juan and the Prelude to Act I and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were Furtwängler specialties and no stranger to his admirers. Both these recordings from November 25, 1942 exhibit the fine, if at moments strained playing (especially audible in the virtuoso Strauss score) that is displayed in more attractive light elsewhere on this set. 

The disc’s final track, however, affords the listener a valuable opportunity to hear Furtwängler in rehearsal. This excerpt of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 is all the more fascinating because it displays the conductor in a more talkative mood than on surviving rehearsals with the Berlin Philharmonic. Given that the Stockholm Concert Society had nothing like the almost familial bond that their German counterparts enjoyed with the conductor, his more communicative demeanor here ought not to come as a surprise, although his very matter-of-fact remarks to the musicians concerning phrasing and shifts in tempi may just be, especially considering the metaphysical qualities ascribed to his art. More than words, Furtwängler relies mainly on singing to the musicians in order to convey the sounds he wishes to hear from them. Apart from being simply stunning, the results of this rehearsal—as the Stockholmers set upon the overture’s coda at first tentatively, then bursting forth with incandescent brilliance—serve as a vivid and touching memento of a partnership that, intermittent as it was, was of lasting consequence for both Furtwängler and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. 


This essay was previously published as the liner notes for Weitblick’s reissue of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s broadcast recordings with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (formerly the Stockholm Concerts Society Orchestra). The 4-CD set is available for export from Amazon Japan, HMV Japan, and Tower Records Japan.