FURWÄNGLER by Herbert Haffner
Published by Parthas-Verlag. 494 Pages. Hardback.
ISBN 3-9322529-45-6. Euros 38.00.
Herbert Haffner, a prominent German theatre journalist whose previous books include an absorbing study of Franz Lehar, now adds to the considerable biographical literature surrounding a key figure in 20th-century musical life. Previous studies of Wilhelm Furtwängler, for English speakers at least, have included Berta Geissmar’s Baton and the Jackboot, a 1955 life by Curt Riess, another by Hans-Hubert Schonzeler (Duckworth, 1990), and the controversially titled Devil’s Music Master by Sam Shirakawa (OUP, 1992). A number of studies concentrate on the years 1933-45, the most serious of which must be Fred Prieberg’s Trial of Strength (Quartet, 1991). Although the volume under discussion was published last year, no English translation is yet announced. I shall therefore concentrate on factual aspects of Haffner’s writing which may be new (to English readers at least), although at the same time I can assure readers that any criticism of Furtwängler contained in the book is of a constructive nature and does not pander to the current taste for sensationalism so shamelessly milked by Shirakawa.
The first few chapters of Haffner’s book add little to what we already know of Furtwängler’s early years in Berlin and Munich, those formative visits to Italy and Greece, the teenage relationship with Bertel von Hildebrand and the first composing and conducting efforts in Breslau, Zurich and Munich. It was in the latter city that the young artist came into contact with an intellectual circle including writers Stefan George and Friedrich Huch and the later stage designer Emil Preetorius, a group whose concepts, we are told, made some small contribution to ideas later taken up by certain National Socialists.
It was with the daughter of Friedrich Huch that the young conductor had the first of those romantic liaisons, resulting in a male offspring named Wilhelm. There followed, over a lengthy period it must be said, attachments to the singer Auguste Bella (their daughter Dagmar became a concert pianist who much later was to play in Mozart’s double concerto under her father’s direction), another daughter (Friederike) from Elisabeth Huch and one Iva Hutcheson, who only years later heard from her English mother that she was a “pure German” and not English after all. The last of the five illegitimate offspring (not 13 as asserted by Shirakawa) was daughter Almut Schwab (her mother Irme Schwab, a well-known actress, was the only one of Furtwängler’s attachments to date to be younger than he). His 1923 marriage to Zitia Lund remained childless.
The years of apprenticeship as Kapellmeister in Strasburg appear to have been not entirely easy, as we see from reviews quoted for performances of the operas Rigoletto and Martha. Things got a lot better in Mannheim: “Furtwängler at last emerged as a conductor of impeccable technique, capable of great expressiveness and well versed in the operatic repertory.” Arriving in Berlin, we learn that he was a greater public favourite in the candidacy for the Berlin Philharmonic post than the other candidates Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch, and that his first residence in the city was in Matthaikirchstrasse, a street adjoining what was to be the site 40 years later of the Philharmonie building and now ironically renamed Herbert-von-Karajan-Strasse!
Interesting points are made about the conducting style to which Furtwängler was opposed: this was the literal tradition which led from Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn to Toscanini, Cantelli and Muti, whereas the subjective-romantic approach favoured by Richard Wagner found its culmination in Wilhelm Furtwängler (what about Christian Thielemann?). Haffner unearths positive assessments of WF from musicians who were not really attuned to his approach, such as Michael Gielen, who assisted at the 1950 St Matthew Passion performances in Buenos Aires: “While rejecting the style of his reading – the slow and old-fashioned tempos – I had to admire the gigantic and uninterrupted span which he imposed. His feeling for this music was so strong that he had no difficulty in conveying it to the 350-strong body of performers. There was almost a psychic power here akin to hypnosis.”
The great Furtwängler-Toscanini and Furtwängler-Karajan debates are fully laid out here, with the occasional interesting fact that may be new to some readers: Furtwängler visited a Busch-conducted performance at Glyndebourne in 1935 (recte 1937, while WF was here for Covent Garden performances of the Ring) which was also attended by Arturo Toscanini. Neither maestro attempted to acknowledge the other.
The overall value of Haffner’s study is hardly compromised by a few factual errors in his research. Furtwängler conducted the New York PhilharmonicFurtwänglers first performance of StravinskyFurtwänglers Sacre du printemps, but not the American premiere. And we are told – surely erroneously – that HMV’s January 1951 recording sessions for Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic were originally planned to include the Schumann Piano Concerto with Dinu Lipatti, a work which Lipatti (by then dead) had already set down for Columbia with Karajan some three years earlier.
One of the conclusions which Haffner reaches is that Furtwängler made the mistake of trying to separate art and politics within the totalitarian framework of 1933-45, a separation which might well have been feasible at other times in history but which brought him the disapproval of both friends and enemies, This disapproval proves to be unjustified when all the circumstances are fully investigated, as they are by Herbert Haffner.
John Hunt
[Reprinted with the kind permission of Classic Record Collector, Winter 2004]
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