Music Chat: Furtwängler's Second-Rate Philosophical Pretensions (Book Review)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ต.ค. 2021
- Review of: Roger Allen. Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical
To read the original review on ClassicsToday.com, use the link below:
www.classicstoday.com/book-re... - เพลง
Interesting review! I do enjoy a good "my learned colleague has failed to consider" take-down. And the extended analogy with Thomas Mann does seems bizarre. But my favorite part of the review is the line you quoted about "multiple levels of vacillation". I'll think of that whenever I listen to old Furty from now on.
Mr Hurwitz, very nice text. By the way ¿Could you share with the community your opinion about the Schenker´s theory? The work of art as an organic whole and its implications with germany
I could, but not right now. One heavy talk is enough for the moment!
I think I'll give it a miss. Am I alone in thinking that F. (and quite a few other conductors) must surely have known that his own compositions were bloody awful?
That is why he never completed them, they are awful, as a melomaniac i find them rather annoying.
I would love to hear you cover German intellectual/Art history (even outside the confines of music related topics)
I am 100% sure such a series would shed new light on the topics.
That's very kind of you, but I'm not the best qualified to do that.
@@DavesClassicalGuide oh I guess I misunderstood your comment around 1:20 about teaching German intellectual history. Was it only in relation to musical development ?
@@HeelPower200 No it had nothing to do with music, but it was not a career, ultimately.
@@DavesClassicalGuide But i like how do you answer to that professor that criticized american for not having an ideology , yes because german one was so good !
Fascinating review, and one I would probably agree with, if I had read the book in question. Those heady notions of Bildung in German culture were very powerful indeed, and lead to odd pretensions. Those notions were still going strong when I spent summers in Duesselfdorf with my grandparents in the seventies, who both had been born in 1900, and were highly educated. It was an all-encompassing worldview.
Salonen's not conducting any more??? That will be news to the San Francisco Symphony.
Yes, I guess so. Don't know where I got that from! Didn't he take some time off or something like that to compose?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Salonen did indeed take time away from conducting until he was lured to SF.
@@mmahpeel Phew...then I'm not crazy, or at least not for that reason! Thank you.
Wow Dave! What an insightful review of not only the book in question but also the whole milieu of the era. I now consider you my teacher! That is a high compliment! Btw I would hope that you do a series on the great conductors of the twentieth century.
Thank you!
I love a good book annihilation. This one was brilliant. (I'm joking, of course. It is much more than that)
Allen's seriously flawed book quotes Furtwangler as arguing that the future belongs to tonality rather than an atonal approach to composition. He then concludes that this is a sign of anti-Semitism because Arnold Schoenberg was Jewish. Honestly.
There is something about Furtwängler's fraction that reminds me of a contemporary political fraction ...
What an insightful review!
I have just a few remarks. In my opinion, in the case of a conductor-composer, one has to do with the other. Both depends of the temperament and the aesthetics. So to say, I could neither imagine that the composer of "Le marteau sans maitre" would conduct Tchaikovski like Svetlanov did, nor could I imagine that the conductor Boulez would compose "Candide". But I can imagine very well that the composer of "Candide" conducts the Dvorak-9th just like Bernstein did in his NYP-recording.
Well, now Furtwängler: He was the exponent of the german sickness that the artist is a demiurg, a god-like creator. And as such a being, he has the duty to write his own bible, i.e. he hasto scribble down his ideas. To be honest: Wagner was the first. You don't find such silly navel-gazing and stupid writings neither in Verdi nor in Bizet or Poulenc a.s.o., and what Koechlin wrote, has to do with craftsmanship (although he was a gifted photo-artist). The writings of Berlioz and Debussy are criticism or satires about musical matters, not philosophy. But in Germany and Austria, you'll find "philosophy" writing artists like Krenek, Henze, Pfitzner, Berg (responding to Pfitzner), Toch, Gal and many, many more. And there was Boulez, who, in my opinion, was in a way (let's call it: in his rigidity concerning a philosophy of ostensible progress) more german than french.
Furtwängler was convinced to be the most essential artist of his time, and in a way he was. I do not like to say it, because, in my opinion, he is grotesquely overrated, but he is nearly the only conductor of his and the following generation, who is widely known even today. I do not mean specialists like you and me and the followers of this channel. I mean the people, who know Beethoven's 5th and 9th and Smetana`s "Vltava". The others are Toscanini, Karajan and Bernstein. But even in Austria, Böhm gets lost. Klemperer, Walter, Kubelik, Giulini, van Beinum and the others are no longer present in the memory, not to speak about Markevitch, Munch, Fricsay... Furtwängler was carried by a hysteria concerning his person, and he felt the need to preserve himself to posterity in written thought, partly in words, partly in compositions.
The problem with this is that the man never was half so big as his nimbus - and so we have his writings and his music as the product of man, who wants to be great enough to fill in the outline, which was designed for him. And it's this outline, which is worshipped even today.
Yes, I think that is very true. Thanks.
"The man was never half so big as his nimbus"--you wonderfully condense a whole lot of commentary in that brief, deft phrase.
"The writings of Berlioz and Debussy are criticism or satires about musical matters, not philosophy." -- I have not read their writing, but surely satire can be a kind of philosophy, even if it is only a negative philosophy.
@@ThreadBomb You're right, but in these cases it's rather not so. Berlioz f.e. mocks about doublebassists, who play just every 2nd note, and he praises "La Vestale" as model for the modern opera.
Debussy as Monsieur Croche (Mister Quaver) writes about bored listeners and bad techniques of modern composers, and he praises french music, which is in his opinion in nearly all cases better than non-french music: f.e. Rameau is better than Gluck, Berlioz better than Wagner, and he hates the italian verismo.
Of course, in both cases, one can identify an aesthetic position, but I would not go so far to call these writings philosophy in the manner Wagner or Furtwängler or Pfitzner would have liked to have written philosophy. And that's the cause, why I like Debussy and Berlioz better: They are stylistically brilliant, but not so arrogant to believe that's a higher knowledge what they write.
Try to get the writings of Berlioz and Debussy, I assure you that they are as intelligent as funny!
What is it about Furtwängler that attracts so many fruitcakes? Even the Karajan cult isn't nearly as bad.
Good question.
If you think Furt's prose is awful, then you haven't read Ernest Ansermet's "Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine". It's even more ludicrously pretentious, suffused as it is with influences from Edmund Husserl, Oswald Spengler, Hermann von Keyserling and, yes, the protonazi "philosopher" Houston Stewart Chamberlain. And contrary to Furtwängler, Ansermet was also an anti-Semite of the worst kind, as proven by his collection of essays reprinted in 1989 by editor Robert Laffont (series "Bouquins"). However he was way more competent than Furt as a conductor, and that is the crux of the matter, isn't it?