Today, Wilhelm Furtwängler is remembered – and revered – as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. During the Nazi reign of terror, however, Furtwängler assumed a role of enormous controversy: He remained in Germany – so he claimed – to keep Beethoven alive amid the barbarity, to instill hope through music, to compel a frame of mind and spirit for Germans marinated in absolute evil. “One cannot play Mozart and Beethoven,” said Furtwängler, “and turn away from those who live and die for them.” Targeted by the Nazis for disloyalty, living at the razor’s edge of death, he escaped to Switzerland. He died in 1954, having lived to see the Thousand Year Reich crumble 988 years short.
Did Furtwängler’s performances, and his public acts of defiance, enable hope to thrive as Germany's criminal government worked to quash it? Or did he lend his prestige to an evil regime by continuing to conduct in Germany, giving aid and comfort to tyrants? These are the inescapable questions NPR asks here.
One thing is certain: Furtwängler’s performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in March, 1942, in war-worn Berlin, remains one of the most sublime of all Beethoven recordings, perhaps even surpassing Carlos Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic’s miraculous performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (a recording which prompted one critic to compare Kleiber’s distilling of Beethoven’s intentions to Homer returning to recite the Iliad).
If architecture is frozen music, Furtwängler’s Ninth is a monument erected in response to moral perversity. Furtwängler conjures an apocalyptic cauldron of sound in which ferocity and fury take center stage, every mesmeric bar seething with visionary intensity. Its thundering timpani, wringing every ounce of terror from the score, mirror the explosions of Allied bombs. (Within
two years, the concert hall would be destroyed by the Allies.) Moments of piercing beauty overtake Furtwängler’s rage; the Adagio is easily the most moltenly beautiful Beethoven adagio ever recorded. The pianissimo beginning with which Beethoven begins his symphony – compared often to the sound of order arising from chaos, of the earth unformed and void as the spirit of God moves over the face of the deep – may have granted some measure of solace to resistant Berliners, foreshadowing Germany’s rise from ruins of its own making. One can scarcely imagine the atmosphere. The land of Goethe and Rilke – the most highly-educated nation in Europe – was peering into the abyss. Furtwängler’s professed mission was to prevent Germany’s soul from drifting entirely Letheward. “People never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans,” Furtwängler said, “who had to live under Himmler’s terror.”
Furtwängler may seem, to contemporary minds, astonishingly naïve: Political and military solutions, enforced by the Allies with the turret of a gun, were the only possible solutions. Yet what may we say to those who absorbed Furtwängler’s resistance as their very own, and who were animated by the desire to right offenses against humanity, including the offense of forgetting the unforgettable?
Stephen Ambrose called D-Day “a love song to democracy.” Just so, listening to Furtwängler's 1942 performance – an assaultive outpouring of song which bears the weight of inconsolable tragedy – is one small way of bearing witness to atrocity. Those in the resistance who heard it live, and subsequently on record, must have recalled vividly the memories that tied them irrevocably to terror – recollections which gave birth to the vow first uttered when the smoke of Dachau’s crematoria still lingered over Germany: “Never again.”
Nearly fifty years later, Leonard Bernstein conducted the same symphony near the pockmarked remains of the Berlin Wall, memorializing the demise of another regime of infinite evil. Bernstein substituted the word “joy” (freude) in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” in the fourth movement, for “freedom” (freiheit). A document of spiritual resistance, it puts beauty to the service of truth, enabling poetry and power to become one. It is musical ambrosia for those who still yearn to breathe free.
Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, says that to forget an act of genocide is to kill twice. For contemporary ears, Bernstein and Furtwängler 's performances advance the work of remembrance, quickening our moral awareness while aiming to make good the democratic promise of “eternal vigilance.” By bequeathing documents of terrible beauty, they impart Beethoven's vision of the universal brotherhood of man, and help us never to forget.
