Music
Conduct unbecoming
Norman Lebrecht
The morning after the first night of Ron-
ald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995,
I received a call from Otto Klemperer’s
daughter.
‘Tell me,’ said Lotte, ‘is it true that, in Mr
Harwood’s play, the denazification attorney
addressed Dr Furtwängler as “Wilhelm”, or
even “Willi”?’
I said something in reply about dramatic
licence and the interrogator being, erm, an
American.
‘No one,’ thundered Lotte Klemper-
er down the phone, ‘ever called my father
“Otto”.’
Appearances meant everything to the
generation of great conductors that sur-
vived the Nazi era, whether as anxious
refugees or, in the case of the Berlin Phil-
harmonic chief, as a cultural poster boy
for a criminal regime. After the defeat of
Hitler, Furtwängler argued that he had
given selfless service to his fellow Ger-
mans, keeping alive the Geist of Bach and
Beethoven. ‘People never needed more,
never yearned more to hear Beethoven
and his message of freedom and human
love than precisely these Germans, who
had to live under Himmler’s terror,’ he told
the tribunal. ‘I do not regret having stayed
with them.’
Furtwängler was not a member of the
Nazi party and there is evidence that he
helped a number of Jewish musicians to
escape the Gestapo, and the country. His
lofty self-exculpation was rubber-stamped
by the western allies who did not want this
central figure to go conducting for the Rus-
sians in East Berlin. It has since been swal-
lowed by a slew of biographers all the way
down to Harwood who, having raised a quiz-
zical eyebrow in his script, let old Willi off
with no more than a finger-wag.
Now, out of the blue, a letter has turned
up that shows Furtwängler in a less noble
light. The letter is written by the eminent
pianist Artur Schnabel to his secret Ameri-
can lover (which may be why it took so long
to turn up). Schnabel, who was forced to
leave Germany, recounts a summer’s even-
ing he spent with Furtwängler in Italy short-
ly after he was cleared to resume conducting
in 1947.
‘Last night Furtwängler and wife came
to see me,’ Schnabel reports to Mary Vir-
ginia Foreman. ‘It was partly pleasant, part-
ly opposite. So far it seems to me that these
Germans cannot be helped, nor can they
help themselves. He demonstrated the same
old blending of arrogance, cowardice, and
self-pity.’ Schnabel, the first to record the
32 Beethoven sonatas, was one of few liv-
ing musicians whom Furtwängler acknowl-
edged as an intellectual equal and whose
opinion he valued.
Schnabel continues: ‘After the first
“world war” the German leaders circulat-
ed as facts what obviously had been fake.
For instance: that they had lost the war
only because the home front had stabbed
the army in the back. The Germans had
no guilt whatsoever... Now Furtwängler
went as far last night (he got terribly excite
[sic], hysterical, shouted and roared), as
to say that he has never known any Nazi.
And that Germans and Nazis are not only
absolutely different beings but hostile to
each other.’
Imagine that. Furtwängler had been
made vice-president of the Reichsmusik-
kammer in 1933 by Joseph Goebbels and
had conducted often in Hitler’s presence.
I have a photograph of him extending a
hand to be shaken as Hitler approaches
him after a concert, and another of him
standing with the Führer at Bayreuth.
‘Never known any Nazi’? Take it from the
top, Willi.
Schnabel hears his guest complain that
‘millions of Germans are now murdered
daily, and that the whole world shows its
decadence by its total lack of charity’. Furt-
wängler goes on to admit ‘without havingbeen asked, that he has had quite a good
time during the “regime”.’
This letter, from an impeccable source
with no axe to grind, is a massive icono-
clasm. It shatters the long-held image of
Wilhelm Furtwängler as a man who did his
best for music in terrible times, and replac-
es it with a man in denial of his central role
in the Nazi cultural myth, a willing execu-
tioner of music for the greater glory of
the regime.
He had a good time in the Reich, he
admits. Any pity he feels is not for Hitler’s
victims but, first, for himself, and second for
Germans now living under Allied occupa-
tion. Furtwängler, seen through Schnabel’s
eyes, is a shoddy hypocrite who, like Ger-
mans as a whole, is unwilling to admit a scin-
tilla of guilt for his complicity with Hitler.
He is not a saviour of great art. He’s just a
very slippery character.
The fall of the Furtwängler myth is no
small crash. A conductor of spiritual mien
who conjured an aura of religious solem-
nity in his concerts, he is a role model for
the Abbado-Barenboim generation and
a persona of undying fascination. More
than anyone, he established the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra as the acme of
interpretative legitimacy. Topple Furtwän-
gler, and the German tradition loses its
authority. The emperor concerto may need
new clothes.The letter shatters the image of
Furtwängler as a man who did his
best for music in terrible timesTHE LISTENER
Cypress Hill: Elephants on AcidGrade: A+
Easily album title of the year, maybe
album of the year. A true bravura
offering from these supposedly
tired old men. Cypress Hill are
now in comfortable middle age,
almost as old as me, ffs. But they
were ever ludicrously inventive
and idiosyncratic, right back to that
first album in 1991, which wrote the
template for many lesser and even
more profane hip hop gods.
This one is mired in psychedelia,
as even Charles Moore might have
guessed from the title. There are
very knowing nods to, especially,
early Jefferson Airplane — although
the guitar sounds more like Barry
Melton than Jorma Kaukonen — and
Sly and the Dead and Moby Grape.
So it’s kinda like the Isley Bros great
1971 album Givin’ It Back, in which
a clever and undoubtedly woke
soul band covered cool left-wing
whitey rock of that rather loveable
age, which is no bad thing. But in its
clever reimagining of this dated stuff
it reminds me even more of Beck’s
debut Mellow Gold, for its wit, its
laudably perverse out-thereness, its
utter confidence in what it is doing.
It kicks off with sitars, synths and
a gong. Segues into the fabulous
muezzin wail of ‘Band of Gypsies’
(remember them, you Hendrix
stoners?), with an acid guitar cutting
through the mix. Then the electronic
nastiness of ‘Put Em In The Ground’
before the exquisite ‘Jesus Was A
Stoner’ lowers the tempo a little.
There’s even room for a little ur-Tom
Waits on ‘LSD Interval’, before the
magnificently inane and catchy ‘Oh
Na Na’ kicks in, followed by another
Airplane homage ‘Thru The Rabbit
Hole’. All wonderful. There’s life in
these gentlemen yet.
— Rod Liddle