CD-793: Furtwängler's Beethoven - Concert Performances

WILHELM FURTWANGER - A TRIBUTE
by Neville Cardus

Furtwängler was a conductor fairly to be called creative. He himself said of his early experimental years that he had to rethink his view of the masterpieces: "I repudiated every schematic pattern of interpretation, every so-called tradition which enables many conductors to evade personal interpretation."

He was a conductor at the extreme of the "objective" school that believes music "should be left to speak for itself." His frequent underlining, his sometimes excessive overstatements (and understatements) were the consequence of a vision searching always.

He had no use for the "objective" score - the truth is not as easily demonstrated as all that. The score for Furtwängler was the ground-plan, the blue-print, from which imagination, guided by great knowledge, got to work. "I cannot," he said, "adjust myself and transform myself as easily as a man who is only a conductor." He would have agreed with Mahler's saying - "Not all the music is in the printed notes."

He wasn't a music-maker for all tastes. He made fanatical followers and also repelled the tastes of many others. Critics in London, notably Ernest Newman, fell foul of Furtwängler's personal reactions; these critics were propagandists of the theory that a score is an object plainly to be seen and heard as in itself it really is. Furtwängler, being a German, could readily, had he thought it worthwhile, have produced metaphysical arguments to show how difficult it is to chase "objective truth," except by means of the variable senses of the subjective self. To the critic who protested that a Furtwängler pianissimo was "exaggerated" he might have retorted, "Are you sure that your ears were objectively positioned?; was your seat in the hall the throne of demonstrable truth?"

Music for Furtwängler was the main way of his life. To describe him as a "romantic" is superficial. He mingled feeling and a large comprehensive view of structure. He was serious in mind and, in the presence of music, austere at times. Not often did he give a smile to music. Yet nobody has excelled the gigantic stride, swing, and bucolic humours of Furtwängler's treatment of the Seventh and Eighth symphonies of Beethoven. But it was a humour above lifesize, laughter of the belly of the universe.

His unfolding of the Ninth symphony of Beethoven was, in my opinion, the biggest scaled, most inward thinking in the slow movement, and cosmic in the first, that I have ever heard. The adagio began with the tone descent of the dove, so to say. His conducting of Tristan und Isolde was matchless in intensity and control of encompassing outlines.

The pauses he risked in the beginning of the Prelude caused me once, when attending a rehearsal, to think that something had gone wrong in the submerged orchestral pit. But, as soon as the orchestra was heard again at the end of bar 5 we could all realise that in the silences, and all subsequent silences, the heart of the music continued to beat. A silence by Furtwängler wasn't just a cessation of sound; it was a living pulse beating....

Excerpt from the sleevenotes, ©1964, Neville Cardus

Find out more:   Symphony No. 7 : 4. Allegro con brio About Beethoven: BBC Artist Profile The Classical Music Pages Beethoven Bibliography Database CD covers to print:   CD-writing cuesheet: [What's that?]

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