<i>Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler in the Third Reich</i> (review)
1995; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/bio.2010.0219
ISSN1529-1456
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumo376 biography Vol. 18, No. 4 FRED K. PRIEBERG, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler in the Third Reich. Translated by Christopher Dolan. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1994. 394 pp. $32.50. Of all the provocative and exceptionally impressive conductors in the history of that flamboyant, unique, colorful, egocentric profession—and there are quite a few "tyrants," like Toscanini, Klemperer, and Karajan—the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) was certainly one of the most extreme cases, both in his personal, as well as in his professional, artistic life. There are many anecdotes to substantiate this: one need only look at the fourth chapter in Norman Lebrecht's fascinating The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power (New York: Citadel, 1993) for a succinct and poignant characterization ; moreover, notwithstanding some questionable license he exercised in the area of general moral and ethical acceptance then and today, there is kind of a "sacred" mystique associated with Furtwängler's very presence. A recent video release on laser disc (The Art of Conducting: Great Conductors of the Past,Teldec Classics International, 1994) has dramatically documented this phenomenon: an orchestra member recounts how the very entrance of Furtwängler into the room of a rehearsal actually changed the overall quality of the ongoing playing, while most of the orchestra did not even visibly realize that their director was in the room! The stupendous visual and aural impact of the selection on the same disc from Brahm's Fourth Symphony in E Minor with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1948 also dramatically demonstrates beyond any words what it was about Furtwängler that made magic happen! Much has been written about Furtwängler—some two hundred bibliographical items, including articles—and it was not Fred Prieberg's intention "to restate what had been said elsewhere, a practical and undemanding method of selling the reader short which unfortunately is widespread in the musical literature ." Prieberg was "not satisfied with presenting information gleaned at second, third or even fourth hand." Prieberg's primary goal was to tell "the story of a musician under the Nazi regime," and he accomplishes this by meticulously investigating untampered file collections which survived the war, as well as numerous earlier unknown documents and Furtwängler's own unpublished diaries , notes, and letters. This abundant assembly of researched facts presented in an impressive scholarly fashion, often with photocopies of the original documents , is a most convincing demonstration of Prieberg's main objective, stated in his Introduction, namely, to "counter tendencies both to hero-worship and to demonisation" of Furtwängler, and "demonstrate the importance of verifying the facts and their interconnections, without which opinions can be nothing more than unfounded expressions of emotion." There is no denying the fact that although Furtwängler was vindicated of any crime by an Allied de-nazification court after the war, he continued to suffer immeasurably from accusations that he was a Nazi sympathizer for the twelve-year "trial of strength" he endured between 1933 to 1945, including his forced resignation from the Berlin State Opera by the Nazi culture-machine. Hence, this very important translation of the original German edition, Kraftprobe : Wilhelm Furtwängler im Dritten Reich, 1986, finally offers the Englishspeaking world, especially America (the first English edition was published in REVIEWS 377 London in 1991) a definitive, credible, and careful presentation of the harrowing risks involved in being an artistic genius within the political restraints of an irrational dictatorship. Furtwängler was one of Germany's artists who—like Gottfried Benn, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and others—decided to stay in Germany under the domination of the Third Reich. Though in his case, this was not a political decision (as naive as this is in retrospect), but rather a deep-rooted fidelity to his own "fiction"—as Prieberg calls it—interwoven with a mythological "other Germany" of unmatched artistic accomplishment, the decision cost him an enormous amount of severe, sometimes cruel, international criticism, including sharp criticism from Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann, Erika Mann, Bruno Walter, Toscanini, and others. Prieberg states "There is certainly no other German musician who faced such a storm of moral indignation as Furtwängler." The conductor faced great humiliation abroad...
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