A labour of loathing

The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been well served by their biographers, with Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times as the ideal. Wilhelm Furtwängler, by far the greatest of them all in my and many other people’s opinion, has not been nearly so fortunate. Partly that may be due to the nature of his genius, in that in most of his performances, as can still be heard on innumerable recordings, he seems to have a larger part in the creative process than almost any other performer (only Callas and Sviatoslav Richter, both passionate admirers of his, share that feature), and that is considered at least a dubious quality in this time of textual fidelity. Partly too, and perhaps making people now more uneasy still, his recordings — most of them of live performances — are so overwhelming in their intensity and depth as to be unsettling, in a way that makes many listeners suspicious of their effect.

Unfortunately, that is not the level on which most biographers of Furtwängler have operated. What has obsessively concerned them, whether they have been admirers or uneasily hostile, has been his staying in Germany throughout the Third Reich and, after a two-year enforced silence from 1945, making a triumphant comeback. With his immense prestige, as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic — so the indictment runs — he could have found a job anywhere, and been a bastion of the free anti-fascist world.

That claim, which has been stated and reiterated now for 85 years, has been debated even on the stage, in Ronald Harwood’s fine play Taking Sides, and any attempt to discuss Furtwängler’s art tends quickly to get sidetracked into an argument about his conduct rather than his conducting, in a way strikingly parallel to that in which Wagner’s anti-Semitism takes over most attempts to discuss his art.