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.

"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.

Review: Regieoper Vs. Mozart/Schikaneder at LA Opera

Five hundred years ago, artists and thinkers of the Renaissance revived and examined the works of the distant Greco-Roman past with a respect that bespoke not only of their sensitivity to its beauty and wealth of feeling, but also of their gratitude that these things had somehow managed to survive centuries of neglect and intellectual ruin. Naturally, we in 2019 know better than all that now. Because if the inexplicable and seemingly unstoppable triumph of regieoper—illustrated hereabouts last Saturday by the revival of Barrie Kosky’s and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute for Los Angeles Opera—has taught us anything, it’s that the accumulation of toils, struggles, labors, joys, and sorrows that comprise our past exists today only for us enlightened moderns to laugh and sneer at. 

Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel—like a lot of products of the German late 18th century; those twilight hours of the Enlightenment, before the night of Napoleon and Metternich cast the whole of it in darkness—is simultaneously silly and profound: A dashing prince and a girl-crazy guy in a bird suit are commanded by the king of some vaguely Egyptian land to submit themselves to a host of trials in order to gain the wisdom to love. Thus from these unlikely roots does one of Mozart’s most human creations spring forth. But instead of allowing this Rasselas-meets-Soupy Sales spectacle to stand on its own strange feet, Kosky and Andrade straightjacketed it into an ill-fitting vision of confused F. W. Murnau and Tim Burton tropes which latched parasitically off the score, feeding off of it zombie-like.

Masking their evident embarrassment and chagrin at the sincerity, loveliness, and even weirdness of Mozart and Schikaneder’s original vision, Kosky’s and Andrade’s hypercapitalist irony also drew with sheepish self-consciousness a veil over the comparative emptiness of their own. Los Angeles Opera’s previous production by Gerald Scarfe, a vivid technicolor riot which rendered The Magic Flute into an enchanting, living children’s storybook was sorely missed.

The musical performance itself was better, if not without its own significant problems. 

Music Director James Conlon lead a performance of admirable moderation and proportion, even if the score’s earthy bounciness came off a little flat-footed at times. Bogdan Volkov, as the sweet-toned and expressive Tamino, and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, the imposing and fatherly Sarastro whose voice radiated like a column of pure light that cut through the production’s ironic fog were by far the best of a mixed singing cast. Zuzana Marková’s Pamina was good, if a tad matronly and wooly; while the unidiomatic grit in Theo Hoffman’s Papageno was more suggestive of Baron Scarpia than bumbling bird-wrangler. Miscast altogether as Queen of the Night was So Young Park, whose vocal resources were audibly strained to its limits by her challenging role. Unable to cope with the crystalline etching of Mozart’s coloratura writing, she settled for blurring through it, and only managed to punctuate its top Fs by sheer dint of screaming. 

In her prefatory notes for the production, Andrade tellingly described the device she contrived to replace the score’s dialogues—silent film-style intertitles accompanied by stylistically anachronistic music by Mozart, along with an inexplicable bit of the infamous “Oriental riff” for another dash of (bad) taste—as a “gimmick.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word as: “Something invented especially for the purpose of attracting attention and that has no other purpose or value.” I couldn’t have described this production of The Magic Flute better myself.