To be a musician is to live life to the full

These days if reader numbers are down all you need do is write an article which uses a photo of Wilhelm Furtwängler with Hitler. Stereotyping and prejudices satisfied, readership up, more work from the BBC; job done. But there is a different perspective which looks beyond cheap click bait. In my archive material seen above there is a 1964 BBC Third Programme listing. In that year Christopher Nupen compiled and introduced a tribute on the tenth anniversary of Furtwängler's death. This included recordings made during his performances and contributions from Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Szymon Goldberg, Leon Goosens, Eugen Jochum, Paul Kletzki, Rafael Kubelik, Walter Legge, Frida Leider, Yehudi Menuhin, Gareth Morris, Gregor Piatigorsky, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and Friedlind Wagner. 

In those glorious pre-click bait days the listing explains how "Both in music and politics Furtwängler was the subject of controversy and the programme will attempt to tell more about him and illustrate some of the qualities that made his effect on audiences such a legend and his performances in the concert hall so memorable".  How times and attitudes have changed....

Furtwängler's final Berlin concert with the Berlin Philarmonic before the Nazi surrender was on January 23rd 1945 in the Admiralpalast. Was Brahms' First Symphony that ended the concert any less transcendent because of the time and place of its performance? As I write I listen to Furtwängler conducting the same orchestra and work in Berlin in 1954. Is the extraordinary emotional power of that interpretation negated, as would argue, because of the CV of the conductor? 

Furtwängler's biographer Curt Reiss takes a more objective view than today's cultural commentators. He quotes Furtwängler explaining how great music can transport us , at least temporarily, away from the horrors around us to a better place: 

The world of music is a more real, a more genuine world than the outer world of appearances, or, to quote Schopenhauer, of "perception". The world of music is more than a world. It is an entity, a boundless sea in which one can sink or drown. It is a universe including, many, indeed innumerable worlds - the worlds of great composers. Regardless of whether their works are operas or masses, symphonies or piano sonatas, songs or organ preludes - each work is an image of his inner world, and when the work is made audible and tangible it becomes a part of the outer world. "To be a musician is to live life to the full," Furtwängler was later to say. "With music we enter a new world...and have been delivered from the other...!"
 

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