160th anniversary year

From the Winter 2004 Musical Times,
available now

The 50 years since the death of Wilhelm Furtwängler, on 30 November 1954, have done nothing to diminish his fame. On the contrary: every newly-discovered radio recording of his appears on CD, the list of books and articles on him grows apace, his major compositions have all been recorded, his writings translated into several languages, and Furtwängler societies are active across the world in furthering their master’s interests (they exist to date in Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan and the USA). His art of interpretation is revered in many circles as a symbol of a lost golden age – one of the books that appeared on the centenary of his birth in 1986 even included a chapter with the title: ‘Why is there no Furtwängler today?’. It is not impossible that Furtwängler’s grainy, rubato style of conducting does indeed fill an emotional gap in a recording world ostensibly dominated by smooth, hi-tech ‘authenticity’. However, we owe the Furtwängler boom of the past two decades arguably just as much to the marketing strategies of the CD industry. Publishing old radio recordings by Furtwängler (and others) provided record companies with the opportunity to bring out a whole ‘new’ repertoire on the medium of CD at a time when the market was arguably already saturated. But any such hint of cynicism is out of place in most discussions of Furtwängler the conductor today, where adulation is very much the norm.

One topic, however, has continued to overshadow his reputation: his decision to remain in Germany after the Nazi accession to power in 1933, coupled with his popularity amongst leading figures of the Third Reich. Furtwängler’s refusal to follow his colleagues Klemperer, Busch and others into exile remains a surprisingly emotive issue. It has even inspired a successful play, Taking sides by Ronald Harwood, which was recently filmed by the acclaimed director István Szabó. While the arguments between the conductor’s supporters and critics have in the past two decades become decidedly acrimonious, both parties have in fact consistently overlooked or ignored what one might suppose to be the most obvious sources in any effort to achieve clarity in the matter – namely, Furtwängler’s own writings and compositions. It is these that we shall examine in greater detail below.

Chris Walton re-assesses the life and legacy of the controversial German conductor who died 50 years ago this November.

What exactly the eight-bar fragment preserved on fol.15r of the autograph of K.65 represents – part of an unfinished attempt at either a sacred or a secular aria, or possibly a fragment of a copy of another composer’s (sacred or secular) aria? – remains to be determined. What I hope is beyond doubt, however, is that to the great collection of musical autographs in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek we may now add one further manuscript source, albeit fragmentary and tantalising, in the hand of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

John Arthur discusses an unsuspected Mozart autograph in Berlin

plus

Nigel Simeone chronicles Olivier Messiaen’s appointment at the Trinité

Robin Hollway surveys the delicious and diversified oeuvre of György Ligeti

David Jones enters the twilit world of composer Jeffrey Lewis

Irving Godt glimpses the pre-history of the concert repertory

Also in the Winter MT probing reviews of

John Spitzer & Neal Zaslaw, edd. : The birth of the orchestra: history of an institution, 1650–1815
Richard Maunder: The scoring of baroque concertos
Colin Lawson, ed.: The Cambridge companion to the orchestra
Hugh Benham: John Taverner: his life and music
Wendy Heller: Emblems of eloquence: opera and women’s voices in 17th-century Venice
Jonathan Glixon: Honoring God and the city: music at the Venetian confraternities, 1260–1807
Michael Spitzer: Metaphor and musical thought
Michael P. Steinberg: Listening to reason: culture, subjectivity, and nineteenth-century music
Robert Philip: Performing music in the age of recording
Samuel Hsu, Sidney Grolnic & Mark Peters, edd.: Claude Debussy As I Knew Him and other writings by Arthur Hartmann
Peter Dickinson, ed.: Copland connotations: studies and interviews
Joseph Auner: A Schoenberg reader; documents of a life

and

a comprehensive listing of UK postgraduate music courses

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