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.

Monsieur Furtwängler, Debussyiste

During spare free moments over the past week I’ve been dipping into the Library of America’s omnibus of one of the grand old men of American musical criticism, Virgil Thomson. My appreciation of his work is mixed. On the one hand I admire his knowledge, his passion for the new music of his time. But on the other, his dry, one-damn-thing-after-another style of writing leaves me cold. Then there was his pettiness in print towards his rival composers; his barbaric view that the worth of a work of musical art was only commensurate with its economic value. Every now and then, however, one finds a surprising and valuable insight. 

In a review of a mostly French program with the New York Philharmonic from March 1947, Thomson takes the guest conductor to task for the “Romantic liberties” he permitted himself in interpreting the works of Debussy and Ravel. The performance of the former’s Ibéria, Thomson argued, “sacrificed color to dynamics, and metrics to accent.” 

“This was all disappointing from a conductor who has been both a first-class musician and a Frenchman long enough to know better,” the review continued. 

It is remarkable enough that the conductor coming under Thomson’s withering criticism was none other than Charles Munch, whose stylish recordings are considered models of French orchestral performance. But even more remarkable was the conductor whom Thomson praised as Munch’s superior in the rendering of French music: Wilhelm Furtwängler. 

“[Munch] certainly plays French music better than any of the German conductors now working in Germany,” Thomson opined. “Though many a German not now working in Germany, Furtwängler included*, has had a sounder understanding of the French Impressionist style.”

This opinion wasn’t an anomaly in Thomson’s critiques. Elsewhere in the collection, one finds other instances of the critic’s high regard for Furtwängler’s performances of French music; at one point ranking his excellence in this repertoire alongside that of Pierre Monteux’s, referring to them both as “magical.”

The German conductor is, of course, famous for his recordings of Austro-German music. However, his surviving discography hardly suggests the breadth of his repertoire, which even in his late years included Bartók (tapes of a Swiss broadcast of the Concerto for Orchestra existed at some point, but were destroyed), Korngold, and Shostakovich. Nor does it suggest the affinity he apparently did feel for Debussy, whom he regarded as a “modern Schumann.” This is borne out in his notebooks, even if his esteem for the composer is at times mingled with personal misgivings. 

In his blistering (and, frankly, jealous) critique of a Toscanini concert in Berlin, Furtwängler’s most passionate outburst against his rival is reserved not for his performances of Haydn and Beethoven, but for his rendering of Debussy’s La mer.

“[Toscanini’s] even, primitive, and unintellectual manner so consistently, and with such a naïve lack of awareness, ignored Debussy’s sensitive tonal language, that one could only wonder why he performed the work at all,” Furtwängler jotted down in a notebook entry from 1930. 

Unfortunately, little evidence remains of Furtwängler’s persuasiveness in the French repertoire. Yet what is extant does appear to corroborate Thomson’s opinions. 

A live Berlin Philharmonic performance in Italy of the first two movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes is among these precious few testimonials. One would think that the dark and sometimes rough blend typical of Furtwängler’s sound would have been a poor fit for Debussy. Instead, the results are startlingly revelatory. Rarely does one hear the sense of gauzy, pregnant mystery, the dazzling juxtapositions in tone color in “Nuages” and “Fêtes” that one finds here. Debussy’s smoky part writing seamlessly wends before the listener, emerging from the darkness before it nearly imperceptibly retreats into it again. The effect is almost that of a music permanently imprinted into the air, only awaiting the moment for a listener to step in momentarily to draw it in. Whereas so many contemporary orchestral performances of Debussy renders his art into staid prose, here his music is delivered as the hushed, ecstatic poetry it certainly must be. 

“The Germans are rather messy when they play their own music,” Thomson wrote in another review earlier in the 1940s. “Some are excellent with French music; Furtwängler, for instance.” Listening to this Debussy broadcast, one can only agree—and deeply regret the typecasting that the conductor was subjected to by EMI and Deutsche Grammophon. 

(*: When Thomson wrote this review in 1947, a number of Germany’s most famous conductors had still not been able to resume their public careers pending the outcomes of their respective de-Nazification tribunals.)

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.