Furtwängler's Bach
On August 31, 1950 Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic performed at the Salzburg Festival. The program included the Third and Fifth Brandenburg Concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach. To the gratitude of some and the chagrin of others, this live performance was captured on record.
THE RECORDING
This recording was once passed underground by connoisseurs, but it’s now widely available for the whole world to love or hate. And in Furtwängler’s Bach there’s plenty for a 21st century musician to hate! It’s like the French Ortolan, a tiny songbird that is captured alive, force-fed in complete darkness for a month, drowned in a liqueur, roasted and eaten whole by a diner who wraps a linen above his head to preserve the aroma and hide his shameful sin from God. Furtwängler’s Brandenburgs are similarly sinful: Bach’s 10 strings of the Third and the 4 of the Fifth are augmented to roughly 60, and these are modern instruments with steel strings and tight bows played in a Brucknerian manner; the solo flute is also modern, and Furtwängler himself plays the Fifth on a 9-foot concert grand piano, well over a thousand pounds heavier than the harpsichord for which it was intended; by conventional present-day tastes, the tempi are lugubrious: the running time of both concertos is a full 50% longer than one of my favorite period recordings (by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.) So like the criminal consumers of the Ortolan, why do so many music lovers return to Furtwängler?
In the 60 years since his death, Furtwängler has been either worshiped for deep profundity, or sneered at as an obsolete conductor whose musicianship was fundamentally flawed. Although he lived until 1954, Furtwängler was essentially a 19th century musician, and to some listeners, these Bach recordings demonstrate his era’s profound lack of stylistic understanding, not unlike Pierre Monteux, who claimed that the figured bass notation in the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto was not to be realized at the keyboard: “If Bach wanted chords he would have written chords. This is to be an authentic performance. We shall play only what Bach wrote!”[1] (Though other musicians of the time – like Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot – did indeed have a better sense of historical styles.) For us historically informed performers, it’s easy to dismiss Furtwängler as a relic of the overblown past, but the great pianist Andras Schiff reminds us that “it is still possible to be historically inauthentic yet musically valid.” So with Furtwängler it’s perhaps not so much a lack of understanding as a different set of interpretive values.
Furtwängler had no interest – and likely not even the vaguest awareness of – historical performing styles. He was part of a long line of “personal interpreters” extending back to Wagner via Arthur Nikisch, Hans von Bülow and Felix Mottl – and carried on to this day most notably through Daniel Barenboim, who calls Furtwängler "a subjectivist who philosophized." And though he bemoaned both “literal” and “creative” interpretation,[2] Furtwängler's recorded legacy belies a subjective, romantic approach, as if he’s asking, “How can I express myself and my times through the music of the past?” For Furtwängler, music was above all a spiritually transcending experience – spiritual as defined by Nietzsche, Wagner and the “Holy German Art,” and therefore weighty and lengthy; Bach’s was not music to which the gods danced, but rather music by which they prayed.
THE FIFTH CONCERTO
Just listen to the famous cadenza in the Fifth Brandenburg (nine minutes into the movement.) Furtwängler plays it even slower than the already-leisurely main body of the piece, and his tempo is about one quarter of my own. But the architecture of this extended solo is magnificent! Keyboardists often blaze through this cadenza without acknowledging or demarcating structurally important moments in the music – I could plead the (Brandenburg) Fifth to this crime. Furtwängler “stirs up the pot” in the blistering fantasia section toward the end, and his arrival on the subdominant (4 ½ bars before the final tutti) signals the home stretch of a fulfilling but exhausting journey. The grace with which he weaves the long line is a lesson to modern and historical performers.
With his tempo and multiple octave doublings, Furtwängler's second movement is likely the hardest to stomach for post-Harnoncourt musicians. (Incidentally, I find Harnoncourt’s Brandenburgs very “correct,” but rather stodgy, though the ideas he presents in conversation and print are phenomenally intriguing.) Most performers play it as a moderato processional in 4. Furtwängler plays in a languid 8, and just when I think he can’t go any slower, he takes extra time at a cadence. But if we judge this performance by Bach’s special character indication, Affettuoso, meaning with affect or loving or tender, Furtwängler surely captures the expressive elegance of that poignant adjective.
In the third movement there’s not a lot for a period performer to take issue with. The dotted eighth-sixteenth is appropriately “triplicized,” a choice no historically informed performer could quibble with. The tempo is lively, and if Furtwängler takes a slightly slower tempo for the middle section, I credit him with good Bachian taste.
THE THIRD CONCERTO
BRANDENBURG CONCERTO NO. 3 ADAGIO (MANUSCRIPT IN BACH'S HAND)
Predictably, the outer movements of Furtwängler’s Third Brandenburg are infused with a heavy dose of Wagnerian style. But what to do with the second movement (if it is in fact a separate movement) is always a vexing question. This Adagio consists of only two fully scored chords: a Phrygian half cadence in e-minor. I’ve performed it by inserting the Largo movement from the Violin Sonata in G-major BWV 1021, as well as playing the chords unembellished (“authentically” as Monteux would say.) Another solution is to have a member of the ensemble – usually the concertmaster – improvise a cadenza or embellishment above the two chords, as can be heard in this recording by Tafelmusik, which I find immoderate and excessive. I prefer the tasteful ornamentation of Harnoncourt’s performance. And the unadorned cadence in an alluring historical approach can be heard by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. This treatment is my personal preference: a calm amidst the storm of the outer movements, a serene inhalation, a musical semicolon. Furtwängler’s treatment on the other hand is a colossal exclamation point, a Kubrikian monolith, a girding of the loins in preparation for the last movement.
THE CIRCUMSTANCES
It’s hard for me to hear this recording without my imagination wandering back to its circumstances in 1950. It had been only 5 years since the defeat of Germany, and the tears of war still moistened many eyes. The Austrians and Germans in the audience (and most definitely in the orchestra) could not escape their collective guilt. But bitterness, defiance, humiliation, regret, grief, remorse, misery – all of those open wounds – yielded to the music. For us today, Bach’s music is for dancing, but that was not a time for dancing. Furtwängler prayed through Bach.
Levi Hammer - December 2014
Canarina, John. Pierre Monteux, Maître. Cambridge: Amadeus, 2003. 200.
Furtwängler, Wilhelm, and Ronald Taylor. Furtwängler on Music: Essays and Addresses. Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar, 1991. 8.
