[Reprinted from The New York Times, August 25, 2002.]
Since mere mention of the name Wilhelm Furtwängler still pushes people’s buttons, perhaps the fairest way to encounter his Symphony No. 2 in E minor is to listen to the new Teldec recording by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony blindfolded. One will hear a superbly wrought large-scale late Romantic symphony that, if it lacks the immediate allure of, say, Rachmaninoff’s Second or Franz Schmidt’s Fourth, holds its own against those works in sweep, seriousness and orchestral splendor.
Now take off the blindfold, and process the facts that this symphony was written in Germany and Switzerland between 1944 and 1946 by the most politically controversial conductor of the century and that it is, according to booklet notes by Phillip Huscher, his spiritual testament. Should that change the way we listen?
Before turning this spiritual testament into political testimony, we might note the peculiarities that set it apart from the generic late Romantic style. First there are the obvious echoes of Bruckner. As the notes report, Furtwängler made his debut in Munich at 20, conducting Bruckner’s Ninth and his own Adagio for orchestra. His special identification with Bruckner persisted throughout a career now perhaps more associated with the music of Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, whose stylistic influences are not as apparent here.
The outer movements of the Second Symphony, 23 and 30 minutes long, make no effort to hide their debt to Bruckner in both their epic scale and their stylistic -mannerisms. Lofty in tone, full of brooding urgency, these movements develop lyrical ideas through sequences rising in pitch and building in huge crescendos, which break off either into silence or into sudden, mysterious pianissimos. As in Bruckner, though with greater fluency, the choirs of the orchestra — woodwinds, brasses and strings — -contribute in contrasting ways to a full organlike sound, and surprisingly banal melodic motifs are pushed to -scaling-the-heights climaxes of affirmation.
But on closer inspection, the symphony is not merely a Bruckner pastiche. Particularly striking on first hearing is a violently dissonant episode in the first movement’s -development section: a dirgelike chorale theme suddenly erupts in the brasses against whirling, frantic lines in the strings — like a ring of flames. The episode breaks off at the height of its fury.
The brass theme recurs in the finale, stripped of its string accompaniment, now more mournful than menacing. After a few more hearings, the listener may notice that the brass theme also appears in the third movement, in -disguised form. But the two inner movements further -complicate the story by replacing Bruckner with -surprisingly Slavic models.
The second movement is a mellow andante with a tune that sounds like Rachmaninoff. The third is a similarly Russian-sounding scherzo, which at several points sounds like Shostakovich, not a composer often associated with Furtwängler. The Russian mood continues in the opening of the finale, written in an un-Teutonic 5/4 time. But the movement’s manic-depressive mood swings are most -reminiscent of the tragic and similarly vast finale of Mahler’s Sixth, even though Furtwängler eventually steers the -music away from disaster to a Brucknerian blaze of E major glory.
Furtwängler’s Second — one of three symphonies he composed in his maturity, though the only one completed to his satisfaction — is thus not easily pigeonholed into -convenient categories like “conservative” or “Germanic,” not even as belated Bruckner. If, blindfold removed, we now feel obliged to re-read it as his spiritual testament, or to judge its obvious ambitions for the grand statement in terms of historical irony, or to view it as a large and quirky footnote to a great conductor’s career, we should proceed cautiously.
Chronology offers all sorts of provocative juxtapositions, which perhaps demonstrate only that musical history is a complicated thing. The symphony is contemporary with Schoenberg’s “Survivor From Warsaw,” Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony and, to round out the picture a bit, “Carousel.” Has that clarified anything?
Objectively speaking, the Second Symphony seems less conservative than determinedly reactionary, but in a way that makes it typical of its era. Furtwängler here -rejected the modernist idioms of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Hindemith, contemporaries whose music he had -conducted before the Nazi era, and also the styles of Strauss, Mahler and Debussy, his seniors by a generation.
While some might link this apparent rejection of -“decadence” to Nazi ideology, the symphony can be heard as an aesthetic manifesto, a call for a return to lost musical values. This mission places it in an intriguing relationship to Stravinsky’s similarly doctrinal back-to-Haydn Symphony in C of 1940 or Hindemith’s back-to-Bach “Ludus Tonalis” of 1946. Furtwängler was not the only reactionary on the block; his lost ideal was not Apollonian classicism or Baroque craftsmanship but what we might term the -“symphonic sublime.”
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony served Bruckner (as it did Wagner and Brahms) as the model for musical sublimity. But where Wagner saw Beethoven’s choral -finale as marking the limits to purely instrumental expression, Bruckner aimed for the infinite using merely instrumental resources. His last three symphonies raised Beethoven’s model upward toward the heavens, and they remain the most powerful monuments to eternity in the orchestral repertory.
The first generation of modernists did not shun -sublime subject matter, as “An Alpine Symphony” by Strauss, the “Resurrection” Symphony of Mahler and “La Mer” by Debussy prove. But compared with Bruckner’s -symphonies, these works are nervous and carnal, full of -incidents and ironies and titillation: cheap thrills from a sublime perspective. (Furtwängler criticized this music for its “effervescent surface.”) And after World War I, young revolutionaries like Hindemith and Weill viewed all musical pretense as suspect. Music aspired toward silliness or sobriety, not the sublime. Sibelius alone continued to pursue the high symphonic style, and he was seen by most modernists as a provincial throwback.
But the sublime has a way of coming back into -fashion, as witness John Adams’s recent neo-Sibelian “Naïve and Sentimental Music,” just released in a Nonesuch recording. Listeners today seem more willing to trust composers who want to take them on a spiritual journey, so they may be more open to Furtwängler’s epic high-mindedness than listeners were when his own recordings of the work appeared in the 1950’s.
While Mr. Barenboim’s interpretation (Teldec 0927 43495 2; two CD’s) should -inspire new interest in this symphony, it should also draw attention to Furtwängler’s two recordings, especially the live one of 1954 with the Vienna Philharmonic, now available from Orfeo. Despite a constant background of coughing — flu season in old Vienna? — a -comparison does not favor the new recording, and it raises questions about Mr. Barenboim’s understanding of the Furtwängler legacy.
The Chicago performance is flawless and -majestic and curiously uninvolving; it makes the symphony feel like a monument that everyone should visit once, but only once, in a lifetime. Mr. Barenboim replicates Furtwängler’s most famous interpretive mannerisms, particularly the constant fluctuations of tempo. But he does not capture the qualities most apparent in the composer’s recording.
Furtwängler, as he does when conducting Beethoven or Brahms or Wagner, animates every phrase, imbuing the music with a passionate intensity and soulfulness that -connect its vast scale and lofty ambitions to intimate human feelings. He gives his music a sense of emotional vulnerability and heartache that brings its cosmic scale painfully within our grasp.
The high style has its perils for both composers and performers. Empty bombast is a grave artistic sin; self--serving bombast is even worse. A skeptic might wonder whether the triumphant brasses at the end signal an -arrival at spiritual awareness; or might they instead represent a lazy habit of Bruckner worship or, still worse, a bid for a standing ovation?
More generally, Furtwängler’s pursuit of the sublime might be seen as a smoke screen, a deceptive rationale for his oft-stated belief that music and musicians could soar above political conditions — any political conditions. (He accused fellow musicians who criticized his remaining in Germany of being overpolitical.)
But skepticism, too, has its perils. Furtwängler’s faith that music most powerfully expressed spiritual aspirations was not unique to him, or even, though he might have -disagreed, to German culture. Charles Ives, for one, believed just as firmly that music was more than mere sound in -agreeable arrangements. Most listeners share this belief -whenever they listen to great music, and they should not rule Furtwängler’s Second out of that category.
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