Furtwängler Faces the Music: Erik Levi welcomes a forensic and balanced account of the conductor’s career, writings and compositions

Review of Roger Allen, Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical (The Boydell Press, 2018).

March 2020, Volume 14, Number 1, 78–81.

Few 20th-century musicians continue to arouse as much controversy as Wilhelm Furtwängler. Although the great conductor’s recorded legacy remains the hallowed benchmark by which pretty well all other interpreters of the Austro-German orchestral and operatic canon are measured (an almost unique situation for an interpreter who died well over sixty years ago!), nagging doubts about his aesthetic and political orientation still blight his reputation. In particular, Furtwängler’s equivocal relationship with the Nazi regime, not least his apparent willingness to serve the German propaganda machine through his extensive music-making, both before and during World War II, raises questions about his moral and ethical position that cannot so easily be brushed under the carpet. Indeed, these issues resurfaced relatively recently in response to the release on the Berliner Philharmoniker label of all the surviving broadcast concerts he made with the orchestra between 1941 and 1945, a programme of performances which secured the imprimatur of Adolf Hitler.