Feeling The Spirit: Toscanini’s 1939 Beethoven Cycle

If ever there was a single figure of whom it could be said was the representation in music of what Henry Luce had famously dubbed the “American Century,” then no better example could be found than the Italian-born conductor Arturo Toscanini. Throughout the last decades of his life‍, and even years after his death in 1957, the diminutive, mustachioed, white-haired man was in the United States practically the embodiment of the art over which he ruled virtually unchallenged. Even in a time and place where men like Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, and many others were not only active, but commanded their own wide legions of admirers, Toscanini stood apart. His purported ideal of com’e scritto—fidelity to the score, eschewing of personal idiosyncrasies, consistency of tempi—became the defining paradigm of musical performance in the postwar era, with its echo continuing to resound into our present day. 

While this remarkable achievement was owed primarily to Toscanini’s blend of musicianship and sheer tenacity in achieving his artistic objectives, there is no doubt that he was also aided enormously by the American press machine. Practically from the time of his arrival in the United States, Toscanini was spoken of by the nation’s critical establishment mostly in tones of adulatory praise that verged on the hysterical, some of it embarrassing by contemporary standards. 

“Only American audacity would dare to approach the god of all conductors; and having won, proceed to build an orchestra worthy of him‍,” gushed Marcia Davenport in a 1937 issue of Stage magazine wherein she reported on the orchestra that David Sarnoff had created for Toscanini. While it would be tempting to dismiss this as merely an example of NBC’s marketing, the American cult of Toscanini worship was thriving years before the advent of the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. In the late 1920s, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald-Tribune declared the conductor to be the “custodian of holy things” and “vicar of the immortals.” Meanwhile his counterpart at the New York Times, Olin Downes, rhapsodized: “If ever there was a man who justified the theory of aristocracy built upon the fundamental conception that men are not born free and equal, that some are immeasurably superior to others, and that their superiority is justification for their control of others’ acts and destinies, that man is Arturo Toscanini.” Not for nothing did an anonymous Musical Times author sarcastically roll his eyes when commenting upon the conductor’s recent appearance at the London Music Festival for the June 1939 issue of the periodical: “Can the king do no wrong?” 

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the luster of Toscanini’s legacy has dimmed concurrently with the dramatic reappraisal of conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, rivals who were each in their respective ways the antithesis of the Toscaninian ideal. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that the most widely available of Toscanini’s recordings, his RCA sessions from the 1950s, can sometimes not quite match the hype that surrounded them long ago. One must regret the timing of the conductor’s retirement, which occurred at the very dawn of the hi-fi era. How his posthumous legacy would have been enriched had he been given the chance to record in “Living Stereo” can only be guessed at. Suffice to say that though his late recordings reward the careful listener with their own hard-won beauties and insights, the Apollonian brilliance and energy, the near Technicolor panoply of sound that had so excited his admirers is rarely found there. To find that Toscanini, one must turn to his earlier recordings from the 1930s. Among these, perhaps nowhere else is his art displayed at its consistent finest than in this 1939 Beethoven cycle for NBC which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Expectations for the cycle ran high at the time. Many anticipated it to be the most important showcase to date of this musical partnership, while others hoped it would symbolize the fulfillment of Sarnoff’s stated hope that the orchestra would “further stimulate and enrich musical appreciation” in America. 

Writing to his mistress, Ada Colleoni Mainardi, Toscanini expressed his wonder over this already virtuoso ensemble’s development: “Impossible though it seems, I can tell you that the orchestra has improved even more.” 

By this point, the composer’s symphonies and orchestral works had become long-recognized specialties of the conductor’s, and he was much in demand to perform them. In fact, this NBC cycle had been preceded by another that he had led across the Atlantic only months earlier with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Notably, this 1939 cycle was also one of the rare occasions in which Toscanini led his own arrangement of the Septet, and was possibly the only time he performed the Choral Fantasy. (Vladimir Horowitz had recommended to his father-in-law the engagement of his friend, Ania Dorfmann, as soloist for the latter work.)

The hectoring inflexibility and dullness of tone that sometimes mars his late recordings is nowhere to be found on this cycle. Nevertheless, the listener must permit certain allowances, such as the powder-dry acoustic of Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H. Even after the acoustic modifications performed upon it in 1939, its cramped sound could hardly mislead anybody into thinking that it was the Musikvereinsaal or Concertgebouw. 

Caveats notwithstanding, the melodic suppleness, rhythmic flexibility, and variety of nuance on display here have few equals in Toscanini’s discography. 

Critical and popular reactions were predictably rapturous, with NBC’s marketing team ever ready to capitalize on the occasion. 

“Toscanini’s Beethoven ‘heard’ by Helen Keller,” blared a New York Times headline from November 1939, which described in breathless prose the deaf-mute author-activist’s attendance of one of the Beethoven cycle concerts. “You are just as I always pictured you,” she was quoted saying of Toscanini, adding that his conducting had left her “overcome with joy” for allowing her to “feel the spirit of Beethoven.” 

The enthusiasm of American musical critics was only slightly less euphoric. Olin Downes led the way, remarking in a review of the cycle’s final concert: “Every element in the score took its place as part of one thought and design. Every idea glowed with life and beauty…. Each element was merged in the conception of a single despotic spirit—that of Toscanini—and, together with Toscanini, glorified Beethoven.”

Even at the time, this 1939 Beethoven cycle was considered one of the peaks of Toscanini’s already storied career. Posterity has only confirmed this verdict. He himself had accorded tremendous importance to the cycle, sparing no effort in its preparation. 

“Oh, how hard it is to repeat the same music after a short lapse and to find a way to make new life flow into all of it!,” he wrote on the eve of the first concert in the cycle. “I can still bring off this miracle! At least I think so!!!” 

Eighty years later, the miracle he pulled off in this series of six concerts continues to burn as brightly as ever, a vivid testimonial to the truth and vitality of Toscanini’s art. 

This essay will be included in the liner notes for a forthcoming reissue by ATS of Toscanini’s 1939 NBC Beethoven cycle.

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.