Furtwängler wasn’t a Nazi – it’s time to give this great conductor his due

Wilhelm Furtwängler was perhaps the greatest classical conductor of the 20th century, but since his prime coincided with Nazi rule, he was also one of the more controversial.

Yet history shows two other German musical titans – Richard Strauss and Herbert von Karajan – had far more explaining to do about collaboration than Furtwängler did. After the Anschluss, when the Vienna Philharmonic’s Jewish players suddenly missed rehearsals, Strauss famously did not bat an eyelid – either because, or in spite of the fact that his own daughter-in-law was Jewish. Karajan, whose public relations and reputation management abilities were years ahead of their time, could not do enough to please his Nazi masters, yet he slipped through postwar de-Nazification to enjoy international fame.

Furtwängler, by contrast, endured a stressful de-Nazification trial in 1946 to 1947 that ruined his health. It became the subject of Ronald Harwood’s excellent play, Taking Sides, which was made into a film 20 years ago. Harwood was Jewish and studied the case closely: he found that evidence had piled up in favour of Furtwängler to such an extent that it was mystifying why he was ever accused (in fact, it was so that the Americans could show the Soviets how tough they were).

There were countless instances of Furtwängler protecting Jewish musicians and indeed protesting against the treatment of all Jews. He refused to give the Nazi salute, even at concerts where Hitler was present. In his letters of protest addressed to Hitler and other Nazis about what he considered their anti-cultural activities, he omitted the salutation “Heil, Hitler!”

Either offence could have led, at best, to a roughing-up by the Gestapo. Himmler wanted to send him to a concentration camp. Goebbels, on the other hand, seeing him as a beacon of German culture, granted him special privileges. Under Furtwängler, the Berlin Philharmonic was allowed to retain Jewish musicians after they had been banned elsewhere. The Nazis certainly strove to manipulate him – there is a video on YouTube of Goebbels jumping out of the front row to shake the surprised Furtwängler’s hand after he had conducted the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – but he was never remotely a Nazi.

Furtwängler has been much on my mind lately as I work my way through a stunning 55 CD boxed set – The Complete Wilhelm Furtwängler on Record, from Warner Classics. We start in 1926-27 with a recording of the overture to Der Freischütz and of Beethoven’s 5th, and continue through to recordings made right up to the months before the conductor’s death in November 1954 (including another 5th). The last discs are complete recordings of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Wagner’s Die Walküre and Tristan. 

The early transfers remove much of the hiss and the later ones sound crystal clear. Furtwängler died on the cusp of the stereo age, but the glory of this boxed set is that the sound reproduction is so superb you cannot tell the difference. The late recordings have also just been issued on vinyl: sadly I have not heard them yet, but if they have the increased depth and colour of vinyl, they will be awesome.

His genius for Beethoven and Wagner is evident, and of course Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. But there are also fine interpretations of works one would not normally associate with him – two of my favourites, from 1953, are Bartók’s Violin Concerto No 2 and an uplifting account of César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor. Furtwängler considered himself primarily a composer who conducted to earn a living and the set includes his recording of his own much-praised 2nd Symphony – probably his masterpiece and one of the finest German works of the last century.

You won’t find two of my most prized Furtwängler recordings – his 1950 La Scala Ring Cycle, a live and not a studio recording and presumably outside Warner’s rights deal; and, doubtless for the same reason, the almost self-flagellatory and chilling account of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem, given in Stockholm in 1948, when Germany was very much in purgatory. A set of such live recordings, re-mastered to the same standard, now seems indispensable.