{"id":1685,"date":"2020-03-15T22:07:07","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T02:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1685"},"modified":"2020-03-17T11:50:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T15:50:04","slug":"furtwangler-and-shostakovich-bearing-witness-in-wartime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/03\/furtwangler-and-shostakovich-bearing-witness-in-wartime.html","title":{"rendered":"Furtwangler and Shostakovich: Bearing Witness in Wartime"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today’s on-line “The American Interest” carries a greatly expanded version of my blog of Feb. 25 (scroll down for Shostakovich and Ives):<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should \u2013 and also ponder a kindred question: the function of culture in the life of a nation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The online products of the Berlin Philharmonic include a $230 box set containing 22 CDs and a 180-page booklet. The contents comprise the orchestra\u2019s complete surviving wartime broadcasts (1939-1945), in the best possible sound, as conducted by a performing artist as controversial as he is legendary. Though other eminent German musicians chose (or were compelled) to emigrate, Furtw\u00e4ngler stayed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A specimen<\/a><\/strong>: the finale of Brahms\u2019 Symphony No. 1 \u2013 the last work on Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s last wartime broadcast (January 1945). This astounding document opens an audio window on life in Berlin when the city lay in rubbles. Since the orchestra\u2019s historic home had been destroyed one year before, the venue was a faded operetta theater making do as a concert hall. The program had begun with Mozart\u2019s Symphony No. 40 \u2014 interrupted midway through when the lights went out. The audience remained. An hour later, the concert resumed. Rather than returning to Mozart, Furtw\u00e4ngler skipped to the concert\u2019s final scheduled work: the Brahms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was it like performing and hearing Brahms\u2019 First under such dire circumstances? It becomes quite possible to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brahms would not have recognized Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s1945 reading as Brahmsian. With its radical extremes of tempo and mood, it is not \u201ctrue to the score.\u201d Rather, it is true to the moment. What I glean is something I could not have predicted: not terror, but pride and defiance. The music itself references the finale of Beethoven\u2019s Ninth, with its epochal call to humanity. Brahms, in turn, fashions a clarion C major horn call, banishing the dark \u2013 which on this singular occasion becomes an iteration of \u201cthe real Germany,\u201d stalwart in the face of barbarism and insanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So potent is Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019senduring mystique that the debate over his legacy rages unabated. Certainly his presence in Nazi Germany lent prestige to Hitler\u2019s regime. And yet he insisted that he was preserving a precious inheritance. To my ears, his 1945 Brahms broadcast makes these best intentions wholly tangible and intelligible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richard Taruskin, in one of three valuable essays in the Berlin Philharmonic booklet, considers \u201cExpressivo in Tempore Belli<\/em>: Considering the Conductor Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u201d \u2013 the most empathetic writing I can recall from this prolific music historian. Taruskin writes of Furtw\u00e4ngler: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“His definition of Deutschtum<\/em> (Germanness) was elastic enough to encompass his Jewish countrymen. In an address commemorating Mendelssohn\u2019s centenary in 1947, which was coincidentally the year of his denazification, Furtw\u00e4nglerended with the explicit declaration that ‘Mendelssohn, Joachim, Schenker, Mahler \u2013 they are both Jews and German,’ and then added heartbreakingly: ‘They testify that we German have every reason to see ourselves as a great and noble people. How tragic that this has to be emphasized today.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Taruskin stresses, Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s notion of Werktreue<\/em> \u2013 textual fidelity \u2013 was not that of Arturo Toscanini or Igor Stravinsky. Rather, it was Richard Wagner\u2019s: not literal adherence to the composer\u2019s notated instructions, but an act of extrapolation discovering the \u201cidea\u201d of the piece. And, I would add, that idea could prove malleable accordingly to time and place: conditions Furtw\u00e4ngler channeled with uncanny sensitivity and communicative force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schubert\u2019s \u201cGreat\u201d C major Symphony was a Furtw\u00e4ngler specialty. The work itself is polyvalent, both demonic and — as the Viennese term their notion of charmed wellbeing —gem\u00fctlich.<\/em> Its second movement, marked \u201cAndante con moto,\u201d is and is not a \u201cslow movement.\u201d Rather, it is a march with trumpet tattoos in alternation with intimations of the sublime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s December 1942 broadcast performance is never gem\u00fctlich<\/em>. When I had occasion to audition this wartime reading on the radio, my studio colleague Bill McGlaughlin memorably characterized its massive climax as \u201ca firestorm.\u201d Here Schubert\u2019s march is a juggernaut hurtling toward an abyss. The abyss is a silence of three beats. In Furtwangler\u2019s account, the silence lasts eight seconds: an eternity. Reacting in the moment, Bill\u2019s voice quavered when he said: \u201cThis time we really broke it; we really broke civilization.\u201d And he characterized the music finally lifting the silence \u2013 the tenuous pizzicatos, the tender cello song \u2013 as an act of dazed consolation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something awful is conveyed in Furtwangler\u2019s wartime reading of Schubert\u2019s climax. It is, I suppose, something Schubert \u2013 a seer \u2014 may have distantly or subliminally glimpsed. But it is Furtw\u00e4ngler, channeling the moment, who has uncovered it. This terrifying interpretation no more conforms to our notions of \u201cSchubert\u201d than Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s 1945 Brahms First supports received wisdom. It instead affirms that music has no fixed meaning, that great works of art are so profoundly imagined that their intent and expression forever mold to changing human circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 *  *  *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his potent little book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind<\/em>, Stephen Johnson tells a relevant story. He travelled to St. Petersburg in 2006 to meet an elderly clarinetist named Viktor Kozlov. Kozlov was a rare survivor of a famous symphonic performance: the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich\u2019s Seventh Symphony on August 18, 1942. The city was in the grips of a murderous Nazi siege. Only fifteen members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained alive. Rations were procured. Additional instrumentalists arrived in armed convoys. The 75-minute symphony, newly composed, was somehow performed. During the last movement, members of the audience began to stand. Shostakovich had born witness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne woman even gave the conductor flowers \u2013 imagine, there was nothing<\/em>in the city!,\u201d Kozlov recalled. \u201cAnd yet this one woman found flowers somewhere. It was wonderful<\/em>! The music touched people because it reflected the Siege. . . . People were thrilled and astounded that such music was played, even during the Siege of Leningrad!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johnson next writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2019When you hear this music today,\u2019 I asked hesitantly, \u2019does it still have the same effect?\u2019 Despite all I had heard, nothing prepared me for what happened next. It was as though a huge wave of emotion struck that apartment, and instantly both Kozlov and his wife were sobbing convulsively. He grasped my forearm tightly \u2013 I can feel it again as I\u2019m writing \u2013 and just about managed to speak: \u2018It\u2019s not possible to say. It\u2019s not possible to say.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shostakovich the composer, Furtw\u00e4ngler the conductor, possessed a genius for channeling the moment. On opposite sides of a devastating conflict, both served a great city facing extinction. A sincerely Soviet artist, Shostakovich practiced attunement to a mass of listeners: spurning art for art\u2019s sake, he prioritized his audience. Furtw\u00e4ngler pertinently insisted that he could only make music in the presence of sympathetic listeners. Equally significant was his baton technique: he notoriously eschewed clear downbeats. Rather than imposing a detailed interpretive blueprint, he bonded with his players in a transporting communal rite. Shostakovich\u2019s symphonies say \u201cwe,\u201d not \u201cI.\u201d It is the same with Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s performances. This is what makes them feel empowering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course there is a problem with such galvanizing strategies of shared expression. They are susceptible to evil intent. It is a problem inherent to culture itself, and to the protean adaptability of enduring artworks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another wartime Furtw\u00e4ngler performance I would call \u201cterrifying\u201d is of the closing moments of Wagner\u2019s opera Die Meistersinger<\/em>, as given September 5, 1938, in Nuremberg. Rudolf Bockelmann sings Wagner\u2019s apotheosis to German art \u2013 in which Hans Sachs warns of \u201cevil tricks\u201d should Germany one day \u201cdecay under false, foreign rule.\u201d Bockelmann\u2019s blood-curdling delivery of \u201cHabt acht!\u201d (\u201cBeware!\u201d) is plainly a product of 1938, when Germany was already a nation apart — not 1862, when the opera was premiered. One can argue about Wagner\u2019s intentions here \u2013 many have \u2013 but, indisputably, he has created a moment dynamically susceptible to changing times. In fact, I cannot think of a creative artist who so revealingly holds up a mirror to any given time or place. Wagnerism in the United States, peaking around 1890, was fundamentally meliorist, not remotely racist or anti-Semitic. At Wagner\u2019s Bayreuth Theater in Hitler\u2019s time, the Festspielhaus was festooned with swastikas and Die Meistersinger<\/em> excited Nazi salutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Mann, who could never wholly escape his infatuation with Wagner, was a peerless authority on the Germany of Wagner and Furtw\u00e4ngler. He once wrote: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Art will never be moral or virtuous in any political sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental tendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the ‘barbarism’\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 danger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is from Mann\u2019s Reflections of a Non-Political Man<\/em> (1919). With the coming of Hitler, Mann became a \u201cpolitical man\u201d: he wrenched himself apart from the Germany he endorsed and embodied, and moved to California. \u201cEverything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence,\u201d he told a 1945 audience at the Library of Congress. \u201cAs an American I am a citizen of the world.\u201d Seven years later, having witnessed the onset of 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\n\n\n

Like Furtw\u00e4ngler, Shostakovich was urged to emigrate and escape a monstrous master. Like Furtw\u00e4ngler,he would not. Custodians of a nation\u2019s culture, oppressed by Hitler and by Stalin, Furtw\u00e4ngler and Shostakovich both were denounced for serving the devil \u2013 or derogated as mere stooges. Furtw\u00e4ngler did not join the Party. Shostakovich did. But Shostakovich was no Stalinist. As for Furtw\u00e4ngler, Arnold Schoenberg credibly attested:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I am sure he was never a Nazi. He was one of those old-fashioned Deutschnationale from the time of Turnvater Jahn, when you were national because of those Western states who went with Napoleon This is more an affair of Studentennationalismus, and it differs very much from that of Bismarck\u2019s time and later on, when Germany was not a defender, but a conqueror. Also I am sure that he was no anti-Semite \u2013 or at least no more than any non-Jew. And he is certainly a better musician than all those Toscaninis, Ormandys, Kussevitskis, and the whole rest.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furtw\u00e4ngler died in 1954, Shostakovich in 1975. Both outlived the tyrants who oppressed yet paradoxically empowered them.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Processing that Berlin Philharmonic Pandora box, I am finally directed to my own nation and its cultural possessions — and led to ponder a poverty of opportunity and risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When 9\/11 happened \u2013 when, again, a great city was assaulted and wounded —  America\u2019s orchestras responded with the requiems of Mozart and Brahms, or with Samuel Barber\u2019s Adagio for Strings. We had and have no Brahms, Schubert, or Shostakovich symphony. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What comes closest, I would say, is the Second Symphony of Charles Ives, completed around 1909. It is redolent of Connecticut porches and bandstands, of New England holidays and Transcendental climes. Every one of the symphony\u2019s melodies \u2013 a dense potpourri \u2013 is an American tune, secular or religious. It is also a Civil War symphony surging to a patriotic peroration combining \u201cReveille\u201d and the Civil War song \u201cWake Nicodemus\u201d with \u201cColumbia, the Gem of the Ocean.\u201d In a letter to the conductor Artur Rodzinski, Ives added that he had expressed \u201csadness for the slaves\u201d by citing the Stephen Foster song \u201cOld Black Joe.\u201d And Ives\u2019s appropriation of this tune, assigned to a solo cello or horn, is in truth his symphony\u2019s most eloquent refrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is: a song once sung in blackface, adapting a dialect caricaturing African-American speech, becomes the symphony\u2019s lyric high point. So it is with America, a nation unfinished and unresolved, whose most popular entertainment for half a century featured white performers masquerading as blacks. The attendant complexities are manifold. Without blackface minstrelsy, there would be no American popular music as we know it. Before the Civil War, blackface was not necessarily racist. And Foster, once America\u2019s most popular composer, was an empathetic observer of the enslaved Americans whose talents and energies he absorbed. As for Ives, he came from Abolitionist stock; his grandmother raised a black boy befriended by Ives\u2019s father during the Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Ives conceived the tapestry of his Symphony No. 2 as a knit fabric, if the symphony equally betrays American tears and schisms, it remains a work resilient enough to tell us truths about ourselves. Leonard Bernstein, whose knack for channeling the moment may have been his highest calling as a musical artist, belatedly premiered Ives\u2019s Second in 1951. He also broadcast it and recorded it and proudly took it abroad, where in 1987 he recorded it again in Munich with a German orchestra. It all should have become a lesson and an inspiration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But like Furtw\u00e4ngler and Shostakovich, Bernstein is unreplaced. American orchestras play Brahms and Schubert and Shostakovich. So far as American music goes, an opportunity to bear witness lies fallow. Or has the American experience simply not inspired concert music that binds a nation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To access a “PostClassical” webcast featuring the Furtwangler performances mentioned in this article, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s on-line “The American Interest” carries a greatly expanded version of my blog of Feb. 25 (scroll down for Shostakovich and Ives): Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They […]<\/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-1685","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-rb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685","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=1685"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1696,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1685\/revisions\/1696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}