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[I thought the membership would enjoy this short summary of my initial introduction to Furtwängler’s music and subsequently his wife and family from the late 1960's and early 1970's.]
My First Encounter with the Art of Wilhelm Furtwängler
I first encountered the art of Wilhelm Furtwängler during my junior year of high school in 1968. However, I must freely admit that my first serious exposure to classical music was the Beethoven symphonies under Toscanini and those terribly constricted sounding NBC Symphony Studio 8-H mono recordings on the secondary RCA label, Victrola. As a young student with very limited spending money at my disposal, one had to settle for the half-priced monoral recordings of the 1940's and early 1950's as opposed to the far better sounding stereo recordings that were twice the price and rapidly replacing the older material on the market. Thus was I able to initially familiarize myself with the music of Beethoven, but when I heard a performance about a year or so later of the 5th Symphony under Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic from a live concert in May 1947, I was astonished by the huge difference! That performance was so hair-raising and entirely overwhelming that it left me dumbfounded and incredulous for days afterwards. Then, a few months later, I stumbled upon a recording of the Beethoven 3rd Symphony recorded in December 1944 with the Vienna Philharmonic which made Furtwängler’s own 1952 EMI studio recording seem listless by comparison. Once again, the sheer power and sweep of the performance blew me away and left me speechless while at the same time wondering if this man could, to a certain degree, be the reincarnation of Beethoven himself! I definitely felt that of all the many versions of the nine symphonies that I had heard, Furtwängler’s must be the closest in spirituality and intensity to what the composer’s vision must have been. No other conductor that I had heard either before or afterwards had such an incredible ability to build a crescendo to the music’s absolute limitations like Furtwängler (yet he was also the master of the “Luftpause”).
Then a year or so later, in the summer of 1972, I travelled to Europe with my high school mate, John Kongsgaard, who was responsible for initially playing a Furtwängler recording for me (Beethoven 7th with the Vienna Philharmonic – EMI Studio – 1950). It was a 2½ month sort of musical odyssey and we attended as many concerts and recitals at as many music festivals as we could manage. The journey began in England and between concerts in London we managed to get up to Leicestershire (about two hours north of London by train) to meet the then UK Furtwängler Society chairman, Paul Minchin. During lunch at a local pub, he suggested that we pay a visit to Elisabeth Furtwängler while travelling on the European continent, while emphasizing that at the age of 61 she was not only very vibrant but loved to receive young people like ourselves who were huge fans of the conductor. So it was that we made the long pilgrimage to Montreux, Switzerland on Lake Geneva in July and spontaneously called Frau Elisabeth. She could not have been more receptive and enthusiastic when she fetched us the following afternoon at the train station as one of us held up a photograph of Furtwängler (on the cover of a small book we’d received from Mr. Minchin in England) while the other proudly embraced a quite magnificent bouquet of long-stem red roses. It was a day I will never forget!
Before we knew it, she was racing us up the hills in her little two door BMW 2002 sedan towards Le Basset-Coulon in nearby Clarens as we both held onto the door handles for dear life. This was far from any visions of a little old lady that we might have had! It was mid afternoon as we sat down to a delicious setting of tea and cake, marvelling all the while at the mere fact that we were actually sitting in Furtwängler’s living room. I was so excited that I couldn’t think about eating as I gazed upon W.F.’s im-posing bronze bust on the mantle and his Bösendorfer piano situated directly beneath one of two Kokoschka Sphinx mural tapestries (the other is in the Kleines Festspielhaus in Salzburg!). To a pair of young boys ages 21 and 22 it was all absolutely surreal. Just as we were settling down to our first cup of tea, who should come bursting into the room but the former soprano, Dagmar Schmedes, who was visiting for awhile from Vienna. She had sung Waltraute from Wagner’s “Die Walküre” under Furtwängler at La Scala in 1950 and later at Rome in 1953. Her father, Erik, had sung under Mahler in Vienna. After that we half expected “Willi” himself to come strolling through the doors. Elisabeth was amazingly kind, sweet and generous to us; even giving us each a pocket score of W.F.’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor which she signed and dated! We could not believe how wonderful this woman was to two individuals who only the day before were really nothing more than a couple of strangers. Instead we felt as though we were some sort of long, lost nephews!
Needless to say, this was the catalyst for a great relationship that has endured and grown over the past 32 years and included the acquaintances of numerous family members who I’ve had the great pleasure to subsequently visit in Europe and they me in California. It has certainly been a wonderful feeling of mutual warmth and a great privilege that goes beyond the musical notes thanks to the everlasting artistry and musicianship of Wilhelm Furtwängler.
-Dade Theiriot
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