{"id":1078,"date":"2018-08-04T17:34:58","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T21:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1078"},"modified":"2018-08-04T17:34:58","modified_gmt":"2018-08-04T21:34:58","slug":"furtwangler-and-the-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/08\/furtwangler-and-the-nazis.html","title":{"rendered":"Furtwangler and the Nazis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This weekend\u2019s Wall Street Journal includes my review of\u00a0<\/em>Roger Allen\u2019s \u201cWilhelm Furtwangler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.\u201d As some readers of this blog may remember, my most controversial and notorious book \u2013 \u201cUnderstanding Toscanini<\/a>\u201d (1987) \u2013 deals rather extensively with the American career of Furtwangler. I also use Wagner\u2019s “Lohengrin” Prelude to illustrate fundamental differences between Furtwangler and Toscanini, showing how Furtwangler uses harmonic structure to shape an \u201cinward\u201d interpretation. Here\u2019s my review:<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the\u00a0most thrilling documents of symphonic music in performance\u2014readily accessible on YouTube\u2014is a clip<\/a> of\u00a0Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u00a0leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the closing five minutes of Brahms\u2019s Symphony No. 4. Furtw\u00e4ngler is not commanding a performing army. Rather he is channeling a trembling state of heightened emotional awareness so irresistible as to obliterate, in the moment, all previous encounters with the music at hand. This experience is both empowering and\u2014upon reflection\u2014a little scary. And it occurred some three years after the implosion of\u00a0Hitler\u2019s Third Reich\u2014a regime for which Furtw\u00e4ngler, though not exactly an advocate, was a potent cultural symbol.<\/p>\n

In 20th-century classical music, the iconic embodiment of the fight for democratic freedoms was the Italian conductor\u00a0Arturo Toscanini, who fled Europe and galvanized opposition to Hitler and\u00a0Mussolini. Furtw\u00e4ngler (1886-1954), who remained behind, was\u00a0Toscanini\u2019s iconic antipode, eschewing the objective clarity of Toscanini\u2019s literalism in favor of Teutonic ideals of lofty subjective spirituality.<\/p>\n

Furtw\u00e4ngler was inaccurately denounced in America as a Nazi. His de-Nazification proceedings were misreported in the New York Times. Afterward, he was prevented by a blacklist from conducting the Chicago Symphony or the Metropolitan Opera, both of which wanted him.<\/p>\n

Furtw\u00e4ngler was no Nazi. Behind the scenes, he helped Jewish musicians. Before the war ended, he fled Germany for Switzerland. Even so, his \u00adinsistence on being \u201cnonpolitical\u201d was naive and self-deluded. As a tool of Hitler and\u00a0Goebbels, he potently abetted the German war effort. In effect, he lent his prestige to the Third Reich whenever he performed, whether in Berlin or abroad. He was also famously photographed shaking hands with Goebbels from the stage.<\/p>\n

In \u201cWilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical,\u201d\u00a0Roger Allen, a fellow at St. Peter\u2019s College, Oxford, doesn\u2019t dwell on any of this. Rather he undertakes a deeper inquiry and asks: Did Furtw\u00e4ngler espouse a characteristically German cultural-philosophical mind-set that in effect embedded Hitler? He answers yes. But the answer is glib.<\/p>\n

Mr. Allen\u2019s method is to cull a mountain of Furtw\u00e4ngler writings. That Furtw\u00e4ngler at all times embodied what\u00a0Thomas Mann\u00a0in 1945 called \u201cthe German-Romantic counter-revolution in intellectual history\u201d is documented beyond question. He was an apostle of Germanic inwardness. He endorsed the philosophical precepts of\u00a0Hegel\u00a0and the musical analyses of\u00a0Heinrich Schenker, for whom German composers mattered most. All this, Mr. Allen shows, propagated notions of \u201corganic\u201d authenticity recapitulated by Nazi ideologues.<\/p>\n

Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s writings as sampled here (others are better) are repetitious\u2014and so, alas, is Mr. Allen\u2019s commentary. The tensions and paradoxes complicating Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s devil\u2019s pact, his surrender to communal ecstasies ennobling or perilous, are reduced to simplistic presumption. Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s murky Germanic thinking remains murky and uncontextualized. One would never know, from Mr. Allen\u2019s exegesis, that Hegel formulated a sophisticated \u201cholistic\u201d alternative to the Enlightenment philosophies undergirding Anglo-American understandings of free will. One would never suspect that Schenkerian analysis, extrapolating the fundamental harmonic subcurrents upon which Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s art feasted, is today alive and well.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an example. Furtw\u00e4ngler writes: \u201cBruckner\u00a0is one of the few geniuses . . . whose appointed task was to express the transcendental in human terms, to weave the power of God into the fabric of human life. Be it in struggles against demonic forces, or in music of blissful transfiguration, his whole mind and spirit were infused with thoughts of the divine.\u201d Mr. Allen comments: \u201cIt is this idea, with its anti-intellectual subtext, which \u00adassociates Furtw\u00e4ngler so strongly with aspects of Nazi ideology. . . . That Bruckner\u2019s music represents the power of God at work in the fabric of human existence, can be seen as an extension of the Nazi . . . belief in God as a mystical creative power.\u201d But many who \u00adrevere Brucknerian \u201cdivine bliss\u201d are neither anti-intellectual nor religiously inclined.<\/p>\n

A much more compelling section of Mr. \u00adAllen\u2019s narrative comes at the end, when he observes that Furtw\u00e4ngler blithely maintained his musical ideology after World War II, with no evident pause for reflection. One can agree that this says something unpleasant about the Furtw\u00e4ngler persona, suggesting a nearly atavistic truculence. But it is reductionist to analogize Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s unrelenting postwar hostility to nontonal music to \u201cthe non-rational censure of \u2018degenerate\u2019 art by the Nazis.\u201d Far more interesting is Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s own argument that the nontonal music of\u00a0Arnold Schoenberg\u00a0and his followers lacks an \u201coverview.\u201d A calibrated long-range trajectory of musical thought was an essential ingredient of Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s interpretive art. Absent the \u00adtension-and-release dynamic of tonal harmony, he had little to work with.<\/p>\n

The political dangers inherent in German Romantic music are a familiar concern, beginning with\u00a0Nietzsche\u2019s skewerings of\u00a0Wagner. The best writer on this topic remains Thomas Mann, who lived it. Here he is in \u00ad\u201cReflections of a Non-Political Man\u201d (1918): \u201cArt will never be moral or virtuous in any \u00adpolitical sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental \u00adtendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the \u2018barbarism\u2019 that begets beauty [is] indestructible; and although some may call this predilection . . . immoral to the point of endangering the world, yet it is an imperishable fact of life, and if one wanted to eradicate this aspect of art . . . then one might well have freed the world from a serious \u00addanger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the coming of Hitler, Mann changed his tune and moved to California. The most \u00adimpressive pages of Mr. Allen\u2019s book come in an appendix: Mann\u2019s lecture \u201cGermany and the Germans,\u201d delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945. Mann here becomes a proud American: \u201cEverything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence. As an American I am a citizen of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is pertinent to remember that seven years later, having witnessed the Cold War and the Red Scare, Mann deserted the U.S. for Switzerland; as early as 1951 he wrote to a friend: \u201cI have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil to which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s refusal to emigrate, however else construed, is not irrelevant here. He processed much differently the stresses that drove Thomas Mann into permanent exile.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend\u2019s Wall Street Journal includes my review of\u00a0Roger Allen\u2019s \u201cWilhelm Furtwangler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.\u201d As some readers of this blog may remember, my most controversial and notorious book \u2013 \u201cUnderstanding Toscanini\u201d (1987) \u2013 deals rather extensively with the American career of Furtwangler. I also use Wagner\u2019s “Lohengrin” Prelude to illustrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-ho","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}