[Dixielandjazz] Art and Ideology - Wilhelm Furtwangler

[Stephen Barbone]

WARNING, NOT OKOM. You may wish to delete now. This is, however, a
provocative look at Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of the Berlin
Philharmonic during Adolph Hitler's reign in Germany. It is an
interesting read for those on the list whose musical tastes are not
narrowly defined, and/or who are interested in the relationship between
musical art and political ideology. And there are example of this clash
in Jazz.

DELETE or READ, the choice is yours.

Cheers,
Steve



August 31, 2003 - New York Times

The Man Who Kept the Music Playing (for Hitler)

By JEREMY EICHLER

On the evening of Oct. 3, 1940, after a long afternoon of work, Joseph
Goebbels slipped off to a Berlin Philharmonic concert, where he was
refreshed by the music of Bach, Beethoven and Strauss. "Ravishing!" he
wrote in his diary. "What a joy for me after such a long time without
music. I feel reborn."

This moment of spiritual replenishment for the Nazi propaganda minister
came courtesy of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the extraordinary conductor of
the Berlin Philharmonic, who, unlike scores of other German artists at
the time, chose not to emigrate when Hitler took power in 1933.
Furtwängler
never joined the Nazi party, and at times he courageously opposed its
policies. But by conducting in Germany and Austria throughout Hitler's
reign,
he lent the Third Reich his considerable prestige and allowed himself to
become fodder for its finely tuned propaganda machine.

Was Furtwängler ultimately guilty of collaborating with the Nazis? Can
art ever be fully separated from politics, as he so vehemently argued?
Was
remaining in Germany and protesting from inside the system a legitimate
moral response to Hitler? These questions are at the heart of "Taking
Sides," a new film by the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, which opens
on Friday at three theaters in the metropolitan area.

Based on a play by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote the screenplay,
"Taking Sides" is set in postwar Berlin, as the American military
government
prepares to subject Furtwängler to elaborate denazification proceedings.
The plot centers on the pretrial investigation and interrogation of
Furtwängler (Stellan Skarsgard) by a brash American officer, Maj. Steve
Arnold (Harvey Keitel).

Mr. Harwood, who wrote the screenplay for "The Pianist," too, draws
heavily on the actual details of the conductor's notorious case. But the
film is
concerned not so much with documentary accuracy as with recapturing the
spirit of a potent historical moment, à la Michael Frayn's play
"Copenhagen," in which questions of conscience and culpability are
refracted through the prism of personality and individual choice.

As its title implies, "Taking Sides" seeks to force viewers to grapple
with this still hugely controversial case, and to do so, it must present
both
arguments in potentially compelling ways. The task is complicated by the
fact that viewers with any prior knowledge of Furtwängler's story may
enter with their minds made up, one way or the other. What's more, Mr.
Harwood's focus on the clash of personalities makes the moral questions
even harder to get at.

On one side is the hotheaded Major Arnold, a caricature of American
philistinism and moral triumphalism who never tires of declaring that he
used
to work in insurance, that he has no sympathy for the conductor's airy
philosophical musings and that Furtwängler's musical accomplishments, no

matter how great, will earn him no special respect. Rather, he treats
the eminent conductor like vile scum; he might as well be interrogating
Goebbels
himself.

Arnold makes clear that he is there to "nail" Furtwängler as a de facto
Nazi, Hitler's "bandleader," who, he claims, made only token efforts at
resistance while advancing his career. He points to egregious occasions,
as when Furtwängler performed for Hitler's birthday, or when he led the
Berlin Philharmonic on the eve of a large Nazi rally in Nuremberg.

On the opposing side is the Furtwängler character, a soft-spoken, easily
bullied aesthete, who presents himself as a man who made a principled
decision to stay in Germany rather than flee and thus cede his beloved
country and culture to the Nazis. He rebelled in the ways he could while
still
retaining influence: by not giving the Nazi salute, for example, and by
publicly questioning Nazi artistic policy while using his clout to try
to save
Jews in his orchestra and elsewhere.

Both characterizations have elements of truth, but they do not tell the
whole story, nor does their straightforward presentation bring any extra
levels
of nuance. When the play opened on Broadway in 1996, the New York Times
critic Ben Brantley called it "a carefully mapped out debate that often
feels like the senior project of a smart but not terribly imaginative
college student." Certainly, the real Furtwängler was neither a complete
toady nor
a heroic secret dissident. He was, first and foremost, a conductor, and
it is there that one must begin, to understand his case properly.

Furtwängler was born in 1886, and his earliest ambitions were toward
composition. But his undeniable interpretive talents quickly came to the
fore.
He found his greatest inspiration in music of the German masters,
especially Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner. His recordings of
this
canonical repertory have been adored and even fetishized by generations
of musicians and music lovers.

Understandably so. Furtwängler had an unparalleled ability to see into
the formal structure of a work and convey that insight as part of a
sweeping
emotional vision that could be overwhelming in its communicative power.
As the violinist Yehudi Menuhin said, "More than any other he could
make a Beethoven or a Brahms symphony live and breathe, expand and even
address us as if with words; as it were, tearing off yet another cloak
of
the many we wear to hide ourselves from ourselves."

This sort of rhapsodic admiration was not uncommon, and it was in part a
reflection of Furtwängler's own deeply philosophical method. For him,
music was at once the evidence of a higher spiritual realm and also the
medium through which humans could reach that sublimity, however briefly.

His inspired, quasi-mystical approach to scores famously contrasted with
Arturo Toscanini's more literal or "objective" methods, and helped him
produce passionate, otherworldly performances. His readings could be
soulful, profound and entirely iconoclastic.

But evidently they could also be dangerous: a bridge to the sublime that
departed too quickly from the here and now. Indeed, his artistic
brilliance
was inextricably linked with his political blindness. By assigning music
such a noble and privileged sphere, he could escape to that disconnected

reality, permitting himself the illusion of refuge at a time and place
where the possibility of true refuge had ceased to exist.

As history has shown, there was no valid neutrality in Hitler's
presence. In retrospect, the lofty distinction Furtwängler made between
art and politics
in the Third Reich seems at best naïve; at worst, deeply suspect.

Others have gone even further, to argue for fundamental links between
the 19th-century German culture that Furtwängler cherished and National
Socialism. "This monstrous German attempt at world domination is nothing
but a distorted and unfortunate expression of that universalism innate
in the German character, which formerly had a much higher, purer and
nobler form," wrote Thomas Mann, who also poured this thesis into his
deeply political wartime novel, "Doctor Faustus."

Mann's own self-imposed exile from Germany, coupled with his ceaseless
moral and political engagement during the war, made him a sort of
anti-Furtwängler, a model of the other route a German artist might have
taken.

In the end, Furtwängler was officially denazified in 1946, and he
returned to conducting until his death in 1954. Yet he was far from
forgiven by
many high-profile American and immigrant musicians, who united in 1949
to block his appointment to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The
opposing cults of Furtwängler adoration and vilification have persisted
to this day, but there is undoubtedly also a third stream of younger
listeners
for whom he is simply another forgotten German musician with a difficult
last name.

It is probably to this group that "Taking Sides" will have the most to
say. A sort of Furtwängler 101, a case study in the messy meeting of art
and
ideology, the film may inspire some viewers toward a first-time
reckoning with those freighted moral questions; or at the very least, a
first encounter
with a musician whose interpretive genius, however problematic, burns
brightly to this day.