Wilhelm Furtwängler: German Refugee in Switzerland

In those years when Central Europe began to rebuild itself upon the rubble of World War II, a number of German conductors—emigrés and wartime remainers alike—had already fled to their homeland’s alpine neighbor to the south. Switzerland, memorably gibed by another postwar cultural figure as a five-hundred year peaceful democracy whose greatest contribution to world culture was the cuckoo clock, would be the setting where Otto Klemperer, Carl Schuricht, and Hans Rosbaud all breathed their last. 

Although his dying weeks were spent in Wiesbaden, Germany (and was ultimately laid to rest about an hour’s drive south in Heidelberg), it was in Clarens—today a suburban municipality of Montreux, the second largest city in the majority Francophone canton of Vaud—where Wilhelm Furtwängler made his final home. He had known the country well since his journeyman days as third conductor at the Opernhaus Zürich, a brief and rocky engagement which drew to an abrupt close after a disastrous performance of The Merry Widow. As a lifelong mountaineer and skier, the Swiss Alps were naturally his frequent vacation destinations. But the chain of events which made Switzerland his adopted homeland was borne out of more worrisome considerations. 

On January 23, 1945, Furtwängler led his last concert in Nazi Berlin. Allied bombing had pulverized the old Philharmonie and Staatsoper, forcing the Berlin Philharmonic to decamp for the Blüthner-Saal. At the concert’s intermission none other than Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, came to pay the conductor a visit in the green room. He pointedly asked Furtwängler what his plans in the near future would be. Only days before, Speer had learned of the Soviet capture of the strategic industrial region of Silesia, an outcome which terminated any wild hopes the Nazi leadership may have entertained for a conclusion to the war that resulted in anything other than Germany’s unconditional surrender. When Furtwängler replied that he was engaged to conduct in Switzerland in a matter of weeks, Speer subtly suggested that he extend his stay there. “After all,” he coolly remarked to the conductor, “you look so very tired.” The hint was taken. 

Five days later in Vienna, Furtwängler conducted his final concert in the crumbling German Reich: A program of Franck, Brahms, and Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic (an event gratefully preserved for posterity). Earlier that day, he had slipped on ice and suffered a concussion. Not only did this threaten to derail the concert, but it also jeopardized his ulterior motive for which the performance had served as pretext. Recuperating at the city’s Hotel Imperial, which only a few weeks later would be among the many structures damaged and destroyed in the Allied bombing of Vienna, he received an urgent call from a mysterious bureaucrat at the Foreign Office in Berlin demanding to know who signed off on Furtwängler’s exit visa. In the early hours of the next morning, the conductor was surreptitiously led out of the hotel, placed on a milk train, and (after a number of stops and changes) eventually arrived at the town of Dornbirn along the Austro-Swiss border. Days later, after a last burst of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, Furtwängler crossed over into Switzerland. 

While he and his family were grateful for the safe passage provided to them by the Swiss authorities, the country’s press and many of its citizens were less than thrilled about receiving a man they considered a Nazi cultural grandee. Leftist publications and political groups called for a ban on his performances, claiming that the purity of Swiss neutrality was at stake. In late February, a Furtwängler concert in Winterthur was disrupted by protesters with stink bombs, dispersing only when local police turned water hoses on them. Heeding the advice of friends who suggested that he step away from public life at least for a time, the conductor checked himself into a sanatorium in Clarens where he waited out the inevitable end to the war. 

By the time of this Lugano concert on May 15, 1954, that animosity had long dissipated. Thanks to friends and colleagues such as Ernest Ansermet and Edwin Fischer, Furtwängler firmly established himself in Swiss musical life, becoming especially associated with the Lucerne Festival. Few in the audience at the Teatro Apollo that day would have guessed that this would be among the conductor’s very last public performances, although his intimates were well aware of the hearing loss which was making him increasingly despondent. Whether his sorrow over that played a part in the valedictory tone of these performances (or in his death six months later) is impossible to ascertain. But there is a sense, such as one hears in this performance of the Beethoven Pastoral, of its “cheerful and thankful feelings” for life made bittersweet by one’s awareness of its transience. It would be a mistake to believe, however, that these performances are exhausted, weak. While his earlier studio recordings of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel are more polished, neither matches this performance’s fusion of tragic power and grim irony. Equally rewarding and revealing is his accompaniment to Yvonne Lefébure’s magisterial interpretation of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20, the best known part of this concert, as well as the only recorded collaboration between these two extraordinary artists. 

One wonders whether Furtwängler was familiar with Miguel de Unamuno’s Of the Tragic Feeling of Life: “Only the weak resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.” Regardless, something of that permeates this concert; a testament to the inextinguishable lifeforce of music, of the artists documented here, long since vanished into the eternity of history.


This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming reissue of Furtwängler’s May 1954 Lugano concert on the Japanese ATS label.

Furtwängler (left) with Ernest Ansermet shortly after fleeing to Switzerland, February 1945.

Furtwängler (left) with Ernest Ansermet shortly after fleeing to Switzerland, February 1945.

CD Review: Stoki's expressionistic Beethoven with the NBC

The destiny and legacy of the NBC Symphony and Arturo Toscanini are so inextricably bound that it is sometimes easy to forget that each had a life of its own, occasionally even far apart. Throughout the orchestra’s existence they collaborated with a long rotating list of guest conductors. But for a brief period spanning the 1941 – 1942 season, the Maestro split altogether, fallout from a fracas with NBC’s management. Though he eventually would return, Leopold Stokowski was appointed his replacement during the interregnum, enlivening the repertoire with a number of world and local premieres of the sort of music Toscanini never touched.

Stokowski also was, as a recent compilation from Pristine Audio reminds the listener, himself a superb Beethoven interpreter, if of a totally different type from his elder colleague. Whereas Toscanini cultivated a lean and tight sound that highlighted the music’s freshness, Stokowski’s interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh are dark-hued, imposing, and Romantic; with flexible tempi, grand rhetorical gestures (listen to the opening “fate” motif of the Fifth), and a quasi-cinematic breadth of sonority. Stokowski had recorded Beethoven before and would do so again much later, but these NBC interpretations arguably capture him at his best. 

The gem of this compilation may be his Reubenesque rendering of the Seventh, which has a voluptuousness of tone rarely heard in Beethoven (or from the NBC Symphony, for that matter). It is songful, yet heaven-storming; with an “Allegretto” whose funereal cast is like something out of the expressionistic world of Murnau and Lang. Nothing drags, however, and it is followed by propulsive and vigorous readings of the final two movements that leave one clutching their seat. How the audience at Studio 8-H managed to keep themselves from screaming their heads off at the vertiginous excitement that Stoki goaded from the NBC strings at the finale’s coda is beyond me.

Of his various recordings of the Beethoven Fifth, this NBC performance may be Stoki’s finest, aided by a touch of rhythmic tightness that sharpens the contours of its drama. When the finale’s blaze of light erupts upon the scherzo, Stoki conveys a sense of implacable triumph: Nothing can (and does) stop Beethoven’s victory.

Stoki’s super sleek approach to the Beethoven Sixth, fine performance though it is, has little of the earthy bumptiousness this music demands. (It is the “Pastoral,” after all.) His is very much an urbanite’s glossy daydream of country life rather than the thing itself; the central scherzo sounding more like the frolicking of impeccably airbrushed models for The Gap, than that of peasants.

Also in this collection are some of Stoki’s Wagner performances with NBC; appropriate given the conductor’s Wagnerian approach to Beethoven, including a steamy, XXX-rated rendition of the “Prelude to Act I” and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde that practically scorches one’s speakers.

While this material has been made available before, the sound restoration by Andrew Rose polishes it further to a lustrous gleam. Nowhere can this be heard better than on Stoki’s NBC Beethoven Seventh, previously heard on a deleted Cala disc which suffered from an unusually over-filtered transfer. Bad memories of that CD are immediately cast aside by this present reissue, with the strings especially taking on a vivid presence nothing like the boxiness one normally expects from this venue.

Here’s to hoping Pristine keeps the treasures from NBC’s vault coming.

Lustrous and bold: Stokowski’s Beethoven with the NBC Symphony.

Lustrous and bold: Stokowski’s Beethoven with the NBC Symphony.

CD Review: Mengelberg and “His” Concertgebouw’s living “lingua franca,” courtesy of Pristine audio

It has been a bit of a sentimental journey listening to Pristine Audio’s latest release. Thanks to a $20 gift certificate to The Wherehouse a friend gave me on my 18th birthday, these recordings, albeit in a now long out-of-print compilation from the defunct Pearl label, were my gateway to Willem Mengelberg and historical recordings about 20 years ago. What dazzled me then continues to now: The crisp, tart sound of the Concertgebouw Orchestra; and the marshalling of its musicians into feats of seemingly spontaneous virtuosity by their music director with the shock of red hair that matched his temper.

Of course, these recordings hardly need another recommendation. The just over 100 sides that Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra cut with English Columbia represent some of the finest things ever preserved on records. Their glittering reading of the once popular Anacréon overture by Cherubini is a capsule demonstration of the best qualities of this artistic partnership: Vibrant tone color that is skillfully blended and offset as needed, flexibility of phrasing held together by steely ensemble unanimity; all of it embodying a belief in musical performance not as ossified ritual, but as a living act of the moment. Then there is their flashy strut through Beethoven’s “Turkish March” from The Ruins of Athens, which with its sly charm and play of color gives Sir Thomas Beecham a run for his money. Best of all, arguably, is the June 1929 recording of Liszt’s Les préludes, a swashbuckling symphonic drama in miniature approached by very few other conductors and surpassed by none. 

Only the fallible (and cut) recordings of Mendelssohn and Berlioz stumble, but even giants must trip every now and again. 

Some of this repertoire was re-recorded for Telefunken (or captured in live broadcasts) a few years later, but by then interpretive bloat and a perceptible drop in the orchestra’s near-superhuman standards crept in. It is in these recordings made between 1926 – 1931 where Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw can be heard at their staggering prewar peak; a partnership which combined interpretive verve, orchestral color, precision, and flexibility of response that was equaled perhaps only by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

The second volume of that aforementioned Pearl set had been fetching handsome sums on the second-hand market for years, which alone makes this new and inexpensive recompilation from Pristine something to celebrate. Better still, these discs now sound better than ever thanks to fresh transfers by Mark Obert-Thorn (who also transferred that earlier set, as well as selections of this material for Naxos Historical). Much has changed since the 1990s and that era’s preferences for taming as much as possible the inevitable “bacon fry” that 78 RPM records make as the needle drags through their shellac grooves. The unavoidable trade-offs, however, were often fuzzy sounding instrumental attacks, tubby bass, and a glassy treble. Some collectors continue to have their sleep disturbed by the horrific, chalky, over-CEDARed nightmares produced by the likes of Grammofono 2000 and Iron Needle (“Rusty Needle” would have been more fitting). These present transfers are discreetly noisier than their predecessors, but gain over them considerably in depth and presence. 

Compare the opening attack of Mengelberg’s dramatic recording of Beethoven’s Coriolan with previous iterations. The articulative bite of the Dutch strings finally comes through with an arresting immediacy and sharpness, underlining the surface gloss with a sense of danger. Tuttis cut through, rather than thump; textures sound taut. Or listen to their joyous romp through Weber’s Euryanthe overture, a deceptively tricky score with overlapping and contrasting layers that shift with dizzying speed. For once, listeners hear the immaculately etched lines that Mengelberg (and Weber) surely intended, rather than runny pastels. 

“I study the score daily and continue to discover new things,” Mengelberg once admonished his orchestra who was languishing under one of his infamously intensive rehearsals of a work they knew well. Garrulous though he may have been in life, these stunning series of recordings are a poignant testament to a time when the language of Bach, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn, were a living lingua franca, not dusty relics codifying rituals in a dead language. 

(A previous Pristine compilation of Mengelberg’s Tchaikovsky for Columbia and Odéon can be found here.)

Latest release from Pristine Audio: The first of a two-part compilation of maestro-auteur Willem Mengelberg and “his” Concertgebouw Orchestra’s recordings for Columbia.

Latest release from Pristine Audio: The first of a two-part compilation of maestro-auteur Willem Mengelberg and “his” Concertgebouw Orchestra’s recordings for Columbia.

"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.

Otto Klemperer’s “Philadelphia Story” In Great Depression America

A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”

Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.

“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.

“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . .  have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.” 

Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him. 

Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”) 

Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.

“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”

Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.

“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”

A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

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).

“He will live on in the hearts of all of us”: Bruno Walter’s final tribute to Arturo Toscanini

Late in life, Bruno Walter would muse upon the didactic value of sound recordings to Columbia Records’ Arnold Michaelis. Tellingly, he singled out the recorded legacy of one conductor as being particularly valuable to future generations: 

“I am really very happy about this idea that the disappearance of all the traces of our lives as performing musicians is not anymore to be feared. That we really. . . can live on in our best efforts. . . It is a kind of school. So it is for young conductors who can hear how Toscanini conducted this or that.”

The conducting profession has never been conducive to the forging of warm friendships among its most famous practitioners, especially during the golden age of the maestro-auteur in the early 20th century. Walter himself was aware that his mentor, Gustav Mahler, had been a fierce rival of Arturo Toscanini’s when happenstance brought both conductors to New York City during the same period. The disparity of their respective backgrounds and ages notwithstanding, a firm friendship based on mutual respect would be forged between these two conductors which would endure their entire lives. 

They first crossed paths in 1926 when Walter, then among the leading lights of the German musical world, was invited as a guest conductor to La Scala. Writing about the occasion in his memoirs, Theme and Variations, Walter recalled: “The meeting, casual though it was, made a deep and lasting impression upon me. I wished I would come to know the man better and fathom the secret of so exponential a being.”

Toscanini, though sometimes grumbling disapprovingly over his colleague’s interpretations, was nonetheless appreciative of Walter as both friend and musician

“When I see the good Bruno Walter,” he confided to his mistress, Ada Colleone Mainardi, “I really feel that I’m ten years younger than he!”

Within less than a decade of their first meeting, the lives of both conductors would be tossed asunder by the epochal winds of history about to blow through Europe. Toscanini, by the late 1930s permanently residing in America, emerged from retirement to assume the role as music director of NBC’s newly created flagship orchestra. Though prone to professional jealousies, he extended guest invitations to conductors fleeing the Old World in search of refuge and a chance to restart their careers in the New World. Among those whom he helped was Walter, who had fled the Anschluss and the imminent invasion of France, and was mourning the murder of his daughter Gretel besides. He made his first post-exile American appearance in March and April 1939 with the NBC Symphony in a five-concert series—a generous engagement reflective of Toscanini’s admiration. This was followed next season with another five-concert guest series which included, among other things, an electrifying reading of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Curiously, Walter would not be invited to conduct the NBC Symphony again until February 1951, when he replaced Toscanini, then recovering from a knee injury. 

After Toscanini’s final retirement in April 1954, NBC disbanded what had by then essentially become “his” orchestra. Instead of walking away, the ensemble independently reconstituted as the Symphony of the Air, promoting itself as “the orchestra that refused to die.” Don Gillis, composer and former producer for the NBC Symphony’s broadcasts, cabled the ensemble’s former music director an invitation to lead their first concert. He politely, but firmly rejected the orchestra’s “touching and kind [message],” stating that his advanced age and frail health precluded any possibility of considering any conducting engagements. 

If not presiding in person, Toscanini’s spirit at least hovered over the orchestra as strong as ever, even while the man himself rapidly wasted away. By the time his former orchestra was planning its elaborate concert commemorating his ninetieth birthday, Toscanini mental faculties had deteriorated to such a degree that one wonders whether he was even aware of the forthcoming occasion. Early in the morning of January 1, 1957, Toscanini would suffer a debilitating stroke—two weeks later he was dead. 

 “I am too deeply shocked by the passing of my dear and revered friend,” Walter wrote in a memorial tribute. “In him was greatness and I am sure the memories of his glorious activities. . . will live on in the hearts of all of us.”

Walter, himself an octogenarian and not in robust health, was moved to make out his last will and testament during this time. A few weeks later, his fragile physical state forced him to decline being a pallbearer for Toscanini at his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. 

Already from the year before, when he was approaching his eightieth birthday, Walter was beginning to curtail his conducting engagements. In a letter to the New York Philharmonic’s manager, Bruno Zirato, he announced that he would not renew his regular guest appearances with the orchestra after the 1956 – 1957 season. 

“I feel the hour has struck for me to discontinue an activity which has meant so much to me,” he wrote. 

In his final years, he would cease performing live altogether, instead venturing from his Beverly Hills home only as far as a relatively short drive to Hollywood and Eagle Rock in order to conduct the pick-up Columbia Symphony Orchestra. These final recording sessions—covering repertoire ranging from Mozart to Mahler—have remained Walter’s best known, with the fire and verve of his early years mellowed (some would argue “dulled”) into agreeable geniality. 

But on February 3, 1957, as he (along with Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch) stepped before Toscanini’s old orchestra for the last time, much of that old fire returned in a triumphantly blazing performance of the Beethoven Eroica that is perhaps the finest of all Walter’s extant recordings of the symphony. 

Unsurprisingly given the occasion and ensemble, the performance has a Toscanini-like grip quite unlike Walter’s contemporary performances, be they in the studio or the concert hall. It also is a reminder of the orchestra’s reluctance to play according to Walter’s preferences. Violinist Felix Galimir remarked that members of the NBC Symphony would often “not even watch whatever [the guest conductor] was doing.” 

Replying to an admirer who had also commented on this unique aspect of this performance, Walter wrote: “I presume your impression may be explained by the fact that it was an orchestra which had played the same work under Toscanini for many years.”

The performance does not suffer in the least for all that, which is markedly superior to the stereo commercial recording he would make shortly afterwards. From the moment those twin E-flat chords pound forth, Walter’s interpretation surges with an irresistible sense of momentum tempered by subtle flexibility of line and sonority. It is tempting to wonder whether Walter’s traversal would have earned the admiration of Toscanini had he lived to hear it. Certainly it proves to not only be a fitting tribute to his recently deceased friend, but an inadvertently touching memento of the elemental power that Walter still managed to rouse from himself on occasion. 

Just over a month later, on March 7, 1957, he suffered a heart attack, the first of two that year, leaving a permanent mark on his career and performance style. The final curtain upon Bruno Walter’s career had begun to be drawn. 

Walter and Toscanini, unlikely friends, looking cozy in Leipzig during the latter’s 1930 European tour with the New York Philharmonic.

Walter and Toscanini, unlikely friends, looking cozy in Leipzig during the latter’s 1930 European tour with the New York Philharmonic.

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.