Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954)
Symphony no. 2 in E minor (1945-1946)
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra/Neeme Järvi
rec. live, 2024, Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn, Estonia
Chandos CHAN20373 [74]

My first reaction upon seeing a copy of this new Chandos release was to wonder whether the team responsible for its design was perpetrating some sort of ironic joke.  After all, the starting point for virtually all discussion of compositions by Wilhelm Furtwängler has been the observation that, while he himself may have regarded himself a composer-who-also-conducted, posterity has strongly disagreed and instead regards him as a conductor-who-also-composed.  By the end of his life, the man himself had conceded that “the world has long since decided that I am a conductor and…  I have yet to prove that I am primarily a composer” (quoted in the CD booklet note for Eugen Jochum’s recording of the second symphony, details below).  Nevertheless, when a new CD is promoting Furtwängler the composer it does seems an odd decision to put a photograph of Furtwängler the conductor on its front cover.  Was there really not one available showing him deep in thought at his desk, furiously chewing at the end of his pen as he scribbles down some significant musical motif?  Or – perish the thought! – are Chandos providing the slyest of hints that, while it no doubt considers this to be an artistically worthwhile and commercially viable release, it too puts Furtwängler into the conductor-who-also-composed category?

The conductor and musicologist Hans-Hubert Schönzeler’s affinity for the music of Bruckner ought, one might have assumed, to have made him naturally sympathetic to Furtwängler’s musical idiom.  However, he expresses posterity’s negative view of its undoubted prolixity rather neatly.  “To contrive works of [more than an hour in length] requires the genius of a Bruckner”, he writes, “and Furtwängler did not have that ultimate genius as a composer. His music is perfectly constructed, perfectly knowledgeable and craftsmanlike in every respect; but to me, and I am being honest, he is unable to sustain the tension of the enormous spans he is trying to encompass…” (Hans-Hubert Schönzeler Furtwängler [London, 1990], p. 142).  The pianist Edwin Fischer made a similar point, attributing the failure of Furtwängler’s music to be widely accepted as resulting from “the difficulties confronting great works lasting more than an hour, especially when the scores are not yet published” (quoted in John Ardoin The Furtwängler record [Portland, 1994], p. 279).

Even though he has conducted and recorded a well-regarded performance of Furtwängler’s second symphony, Daniel Barenboim has also expressed significant reservations: “As a composer, Furtwängler was primarily good at generating fantastic dramatic escalations. If his works had not been written in the first half of the twentieth century, but around 1870, the world would have been amazed by these masterworks. In terms of craftsmanship, his music is absolutely perfect: but aesthetically the seams are visible” (online journal, entry for 1 Nov. 2004).  Elsewhere, he had even previously suggested that Furtwängler’s compositions were perhaps less significant in their own right than as the means by which he improved his understanding as a conductor of other people’s music (Daniel Barenboim A life in music [London, 1991], p.131).

Other commentators have expressed similar reservations.  While recognising the second symphony’s undoubted ambition, they have tended to consider it deficient in momentum, blowsily diffuse and fatally flawed by its lack of incision and musical focus – superficially impressive but, on closer inspection, a musical instance of the emperor’s new clothes.  Even putting the best possible construction on it, John Ardoin hints at the problems when, having already expressed concerns about the second symphony’s sheer length, he goes on to describe Furtwängler’s later compositions as simultaneously becoming “more chromatic, dense, and challenging” (Ardoin op. cit., p. 278) – which is, I guess, a kinder way of expressing my colleague Jonathan Woolf’s blunter description of the second symphony as “unrelievedly opaque”.  It is surely of some significance that most top-flight conductors, even those specialising in Late Romantic repertoire, have steered clear of performing them. 

While there have, of course, been some high-profile advocates of the opposing view, Schönzeler perceptively observes that their judgments have sometimes been influenced by essentially subjective considerations.  “On the whole”, he writes, “[the second symphony] was always well received by the public and favourably reviewed by the press, but whether it was really the music which counted or the great love and respect in which Furtwängler was held as a personality and a conductor is difficult to estimate after the event” (my own emphasis, op. cit., p. 147). 

As Yehudi Menuhin points out in a brief forward to Schönzeler’s book (op. cit., p. vi), Furtwängler has inspired an almost cultish loyalty among his supporters.  Indeed, it is actually quite striking to see how some of the second symphony’s partisans may have been influenced by largely subjective considerations and how their apparent regard for Furtwängler’s music turns out, on a little investigation, to be more accurately regarded as an expression of admiration, respect or even affection for Furtwängler the man.  Many of his more prominent advovates and/or apologists turn out, in fact, to have had significant personal ties with him.  Take the case of Arthur Honneger, for instance.  He has been widely quoted in his opinion that “the man who wrote a score as rich as [the] second symphony cannot be discussed.  He is of the race of great musicians” (op. cit., p. 143).  However, in the immortal – if slightly misquoted – words of the late Mandy Rice-Davies, “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”  Honegger and Furtwängler were, after all, friends.  The former had dedicated both his Chant de joie (1926) and his Mouvement symphonique no. 3 (1933) to the conductor.  Meanwhile, Furtwängler had reciprocated the goodwill by programming both Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1938) and his second symphony (1942), as well as recording a well-regarded account of that same Mouvement symphonique with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1952.  Not only a cynic might suspect that there’s a little mutual backscratching under way here. 

In spite of his reservations quoted above, Daniel Barenboim has also been an advocate of Furtwängler’s second symphony.  It was he and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in fact, who gave the work its belated American premiere on 13 December 2001 (a recording was subsequently released on the Teldec label).  Once again, however, it is worth pointing out a significant personal link.  In 1954, as an 11 years old aspiring pianist, Barenboim had played for Furtwängler, who subsequently wrote that he was a musical phenomenon.  As Barenboim later recalled, “[that] letter… opened many doors for me… [and] was to be my letter of introduction for the next twenty years!” (Barenboim op. cit., p.29).  It’s surely reasonable to speculate than an impressionable youngster’s subjectively-formed appreciative memories and, indeed, sheer gratitude might have influenced the way in which he subsequently regarded the man, both as a conductor (op. cit., pp. 29-32) and a composer (which A life in music mentions only occasionally and in passing).

At this point, someone may point out that I have overlooked another very great musician who took Furtwängler’s second symphony into the concert hall.  With his 1954 live performance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra unavailable for many years, Eugen Jochum’s apparent advocacy has sometimes been overlooked.  The eventual release of that account in 2009 (BR Klassik 900702) as part of the commemorations of the orchestra’s 60^th anniversary was therefore welcome.  Yet again, however, it is worth pointing out that Jochum and Furtwängler had been friends as far back as 1929 when the latter had supported his younger colleague’s application for his first important conducting position.  Renate Ulm’s useful CD booklet actually suggests that Jochum’s 1954 performance of the second symphony was less an indicator of any particular regard for the work than the result of a combination of that personal link with orchestra politics and sheer happenstance.  Attempting to lure Furtwängler to Munich to promote the fledgling Bavarian orchestra, Jochum had offered him the opportunity to conduct two performances of his own work.  Only when Furtwängler, under pressure from the rival Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, had refused to take up the offer – and had then suddenly died – did Jochum decide, faute de mieux and with little if any indication of any particular enthusiasm for the task, to take up the baton himself.  Apart from those two “memorial” performances on 9 and 10 December 1954, less than two weeks after Furtwängler’s death, I have been unable to find any evidence that Jochum ever showed any particular enthusiasm for the second symphony or performed it again.

By this stage, I imagine that you are thinking that matters can hardly get worse.  With the critical consensus about the piece so generally negative and with the occasional piece of special pleading on its behalf to some extent explained away, you may be wondering whether Furtwängler’s second actually has anything positive going for it at all.  Well, the answer is that it does.  Quite simply – and for reasons that I find almost impossible to explain in any rational way – I do love it.  It is not a piece to be taken lightly, with a CD popped into the player to provide background music for household chores.  Instead, it demands concentration.  If you are prepared to abandon preconceived expectations of pace and direction, to acquiesce in its unique disposition, its atmospherics, its densely complex texture and its emotional depth and to immerse yourself in it for 70 or 80 minutes on its own terms, you might well come to love it too.  Over the years I have snapped up every recording I have come across, as well as any of the even more frequently dismissed first and third symphonies.  I now have eight versions of the second on my shelves – three recordings of performances conducted by Furtwängler himself, and single accounts from Eugen Jochum, Alfred Walter, Daniel Barenboim, George Alexander Albrecht and now Neeme Järvi.  There may well be a few more that I have not heard.  In reviewing the Barenboim disc, my colleague Marc Bridle refers, for example, to a rumoured recording by Joseph Keilberth – who was to lead the premiere, albeit abbreviated, performance of Furtwängler’s third symphony in 1956.  If it exists, that might well offer a new perspective on the work and would be fascinating to hear. 

Meanwhile, John Ardoin’s exhaustive research has uncovered a number of other performances by the composer himself.  While only hard-core completists may be interested in hearing part of a rehearsal of just the second movement that apparently exists in a private archive, there are, it seems a few more complete traversals – one with the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra dating from October 1948, another with the Hessian Radio Orchestra from December 1952, and a January 1953 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic (Ardoin op. cit., p. 326).  While the first two of those seem to have had some limited circulation in the past, the third exists, it seems, only in a private archive (perhaps its owner may one day choose to share it with the world, just as the previously privately-held 1953 Vienna Philharmonic recording was released on the Orfeo label in 1994). 

The significance of the various recordings directed by the composer is that, as Ardoin has pointed out, listening to the available ones in their chronological order gives a real sense that Furtwängler was constantly growing into the music with each performance and slowly solving the very real practical problems of its presentation in a way that made it increasingly accessible to listeners (Ardoin op. cit., p. 279).  Thus, the timings above suggest that the Vienna Philharmonic performance may have seen him experimenting with somewhat brisker tempi, before reverting in the following year to ones that he had originally adopted.  Such experimentation seems to have been pretty constant.  Indeed, when the symphony was programmed in his very last concert with the Berlin Philharmonic in September 1954, Furtwängler was still making some radical changes to it.  That is presumably why he himself regarded his earliest available recording – the DG studio one – as the least convincing performance of all.  Most critics have agreed with that appraisal and have been fairly even split between regarding either the Vienna Philharmonic recording or the one from the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra as the best conducted by the composer.  My personal preference is Stuttgart.

By the final phase of his life, then, Furtwängler the composer seems to have been something of an old man in a hurry.  Having (almost) completed three large, complex symphonies in relatively quick succession between 1943 and 1954, he was on something of a personal mission.  Identifying the second as his best, he gave getting on for 20 performances of it in his final years, not only, as already mentioned, refining his own understanding of the score and his approach to it, but hoping, too, to gain popular recognition for it.  Furtwängler’s status as one of Germany’s pre-eminent post-war musicians accounts for the fact that several of those performances were preserved for posterity.  However, in the seven decades since his death a small number of other conductors have also interpreted the work on record.  In order to fully appreciate the significance of this latest release from Neeme Järvi, it is worth spending a few moments considering how a recorded-performance tradition of this work has developed over time and how the newcomer does or doesn’t fit into it.  My points will be made a little clearer by the following table, showing the timings of the symphony’s four movements in the eight performances currently on my shelves:

Given the fact that, from the beginning, such a “difficult” piece as Furtwängler’s second symphony was seen as never likely to become widely popular, it is unsurprising that for decades there existed only a single version that had been recorded under professional studio conditions – the 1952 Berlin Philharmonic performance.  As it turned out, however, few critics have had a good word to say about the sonics on that particular disc which, even for the early 1950s, seem to have been poorly engineered, a fact that the composer/conductor, increasingly afflicted with hearing problems, may not have fully appreciated before approving its release.  Until the end of the 20^th century, all other performances on disc, with one possible exception,  derived from recordings made at live concerts, often leading to such issues as ill-judged microphone placement in unfamiliar venues, little if any opportunity to re-record unsatisfactory passages and varying degrees of noises-off from the audiences (Furtwängler’s live performances were given in the bronchial months of February [1953] and March [1954], while heavy seasonal colds were no doubt equally well represented among Jochum’s December [1954] audience).

What comes out from all those recordings made live in concert halls is that poor, muddy sound puts a real dampener on this particular symphony.  Thankfully, however, the use of more modern technology under professional studio conditions has meant that performances recorded since the 1990s have at last begun to allow us to appreciate its full musical and sonic complexity.  The first such recording, from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Alfred Walter, was made at the Corporation’s Maida Vale Studio in January 1991.  Performances there were often given in front of invited audiences but, if that was the case on this occasion, they are a remarkably quiet bunch (especially as this was yet another winter recording!)  Walter’s account has sometimes been dismissed pretty much out of hand.  My MusicWeb colleague Marc Bridle, for example, considered its overall approach “so inhibited” that it “does the symphony a disservice… and I recommend avoiding it at all costs”.  I’m afraid that I cannot agree.  In fact, my reaction is quite the opposite for, having listened to Walter’s account alongside its heavily reverential, well-nigh mystically conceived, predecessors, I find it anything but inhibited.  On the contrary, he brings a newly-forged and very welcome sense of impetus, drive and drama to the piece, together with increased orchestral colour.  More crisply articulated than its predecessors and with a greater appreciation of the score’s need for revelatory light as well as mysterious shade, here at last is a performance that more obviously exhibits a sense of purposeful direction.  In Walter’s expert hands – and it really sounds as if the BBC players are raptly attentive to his smallest gesture – the symphony emerges as a less immediately intimidating structure.  No longer a weirdly perplexing monolithic painted in various shades of grey, it becomes instead a piece of music that, while retaining much of its quirkiness, is far easier to take in, even at first hearing.  Far removed from both Furtwängler’s own personal evolutionary path and Jochum’s approach (which, in the particular circumstances of December 1954, is surely best regarded as a one-off memorial in musical form), I like Alfred Walter’s take on the symphony very much indeed.

It is, however, a mark of the second symphony’s complexity that it is capable of very different interpretations.  Barenboim’s 2001 recording was something of a landmark, not least because he employed the services of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in outstanding form.  If I disagree with Marc about the Walter performance, I can only concur completely with his assessment of the Chicagoans on this occasion: “the intensity and passion of their playing is awe-inspiring. They sound spontaneous… [and yet] the performance is staggeringly precise orchestrally”.  As Marc also rightly notes, the superb Teldec recording also flatters the potentially opaque score by bringing to light plenty of its fine detail that’s often otherwise obscured.  With Alfred Walter’s interpretation fresh in my mind, I do, however, find Barenboim’s reversion to less varied and generally steadier tempi something of a retrograde step that, while arguably restoring to the symphony a degree of profundity, makes it less immediately gripping. 

Profundity is yet again in the air in George Alexander Albrecht’s 2003 recording with the Staatskapelle Weimar.  Very much of its type and clearly recorded, this is another good performance – a fact that suggests, perhaps, that only very confident and competent conductors will even think of taking the symphony on.  Walter’s earlier disc, however, had effectively demonstrated that the more traditional way of approaching and presenting this symphony is not necessarily the most effective one.  Moreover, inherent weaknesses that may have been concealed by the superb surface gloss and glamour of the Chicago’s virtuoso orchestra undeniably become more apparent in an account played by forces that Jonathan Woolf thought “no match for the Chicagoans… [and] not up to the standard of the best”. 

To pause for a moment and take stock, the current – pre-Järvi – state of play is that Furtwängler himself, through his many recordings that clearly represented an unfinished process of development, established the broad lines of a performing tradition.  Thereafter – and putting to one side the unique and special circumstances that influenced Jochum’s idiosyncratic account – recorded performances have either followed the composer’s interpretative model (Barenboim, Albrecht) or tried a new approach (Walter).  Now Neeme Järvi enters the lists.

Järvi, it’s fair to say, has never been considered a conductor in the Furtwängler mould.  If he has a characteristic overarching philosophy of music and music-making, I am unaware of what it is.  His recordings have rarely been garlanded with adjectives such as spiritual, profound or penetrating.  He has never, to my knowledge been closely associated with – or celebrated for his performances of – the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.  On the contrary, he has been, over a very long career in the recording studio, very wide-ranging in his musical sympathies.   Although he has recently passed his 87^th birthday, a series of interesting recent releases (review ~ review ~ review ~ review) demonstrates few if any signs that he may be slowing down or ceasing to explore interesting musical paths. 

The recorded performance on this new disc gives the impression that Järvi has looked at Furtwängler’s problematic score with a very open mind.  While simple timings should be used with some caution in assessing a performance, they can still be useful in suggesting a few broad-brush conclusions – and those in the table above certainly do so.  After an openingmovement that sits comfortably in the middle of rival recordings, its three successors see Järvi adopting a more distinctively personal approach, consistently introducing a degree of propulsive energy that significantly transforms the symphony’s very nature. While only Alfred Walter adopts a faster tempo in the third movement, Järvi is the briskest of all other conductors in both the second and the last.  When he shaves seven minutes – or almost ¼ of its duration – from Barenboim’s account of the finale, you cannot ignore the fact that he is approaching the music very differently indeed.  If Walter had previously been a lonely outlier in his scraping-off-the-barnacles-of-tradition reinterpretation of Furtwängler’s second, he seems now to have been joined by the veteran Estonian.

Differences from the “Furtwänglerian” interpretation(s) are, in fact, apparent from the very opening of the first movement, though they derive as much from sonic concerns as from interpretative ones.  Anyone familiar with the composer’s own recordings – and especially the most widely available one from DG – will know that, as heard there, the symphony emerges from a sort of stygian swamp of gloomy opacity.  That’s caused not only by that particular recording’s aforementioned deficient sound, but by Furtwängler’s notoriously imprecise downbeat, a characteristic lauded by admirers as producing some sort of mystical, even transcendental effect but hammered by harder-headed critics as just inexcusably sloppy.  Järvi will have none of it and hearing the passage that opens the symphony delineated with crisp precision in modern sound now allows listeners to appreciate the score as music, pure and simple (!), rather than as an expression of some sort of cultist, quasi-religious rite. 

Such directness of expression is, in fact, a hallmark of Järvi’s whole performance.  So too is consistent elucidation of the symphony’s densely congested orchestration, even though some of the most thickly scored passages are, in truth, probably beyond salvation in that particular respect.  Meanwhile, though giving due regard to the ambition and complexity of the symphony’s architecture, he ensures that it never becomes a distraction in itself but remains subordinated to a strong and consistent sense of direction and musical purpose.  That does not, of course, mean that Järvi’s default position is necessarily to hurry through the music in every circumstance.  It does, however, mean that he doesn’t wallow in those meandering episodes that, in the composer’s own accounts, seem to lead nowhere in particular.  The performance is also enhanced by the conductor’s carefully controlled use of wide-ranging dynamics, a feature not notably apparent in Furtwängler’s own sonically-compromised recordings.

All, nevertheless, is not perfect.  As already noted, some orchestral textures remain, thanks to the composer’s deficiencies, quite impenetrably dense.  That, obviously, is not the conductor’s fault, though I do wonder whether a recording made in a professional studio, rather than at a live concert that inevitably brings with it various sonic compromises, might have enabled him to clarify the score even more effectively.  There are also one or two moments in both the opening and closing movements at which Järvi fails, I think, to give the music sufficient weight.  Quite simply, at times I missed an element of the grave solemnity that Furtwängler, in the appalling circumstances of 1945-1946, was without doubt attempting to convey.

The symphony’s two central movements are not only more concise but also more effectively constructed than the first.  Here Furtwängler seems to have disciplined himself to produce music that is less diffuse and has a clear end in view.  Järvi delivers both most effectively and you will be especially impressed if you know the symphony only through one of the composer’s own recorded accounts.  The second movement benefits from both crisp, incisive phrasing and the fact that the music is kept flowing along nicely.  Järvi emphasises to good effect the contrast between reflective passages and others that are more agitated, with the score rising to a powerfully passionate climax before a cello solo leads it back into calmer waters.  His skill at balancing the orchestra is particularly apparent in the third movement, where he uncovers a great deal of detail that is often simply inaudible in the composer’s own congested performances.  Everything is kept moving along and on its toes and Järvi ensures that, whenever a more lyrical passage temporarily introduces an alternative mood, there is no sense of anti-climax.

Given the frequently advanced proposition that Furtwängler’s second symphony is unconsciously derived from, or even consciously modelled on, those of Anton Bruckner, one might expect its finale to be its most problematic element.  In fact, however, the composer’s need to keep a fixed final point in view appears to have discouraged him from following those meandering digressive bypaths onto which he had been so often tempted in the opening movement.  As such, the finale is actually relatively well conceived (and, interestingly enough, on Furtwängler’s own recordings, the most successfully achieved movement of the four).   As such, while it can take and even benefit from Alfred Walter’s tightening up to just shy of 25 minutes, I am not convinced that it is improved by being brought in at a little over 23.  Järvi is just a little too prone to rush precipitously onwards when it would have been good, once in a while, to have him pause a little to offer us the opportunity to admire the musical view.  Indeed, he almost conveys the impression of being somewhat embarrassed by the music at this point and wanting to get through it as quickly as possible.  While the score is undeniably flawed, such an approach unjustly diminishes its overall impact and wider significance, while the listener is deprived of the final catharsis that even the composer’s own otherwise flawed accounts manage to deliver.  After nearly an hour and a quarter of concentrated listening, surely we deserve an appropriate emotional resolution?

With the highest standard of orchestral execution set by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Barenboim’s Teldec recording, it would be unrealistic to expect it to be matched by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.  Nevertheless, they do an admirable job in this undeniably challenging score, with the woodwinds, in particular, making a positive impression.  Indeed, were it not for the Chicagoans – and possibly the Vienna Philharmonic in Furtwängler’s 1953 recording – the Estonians would have little to fear from their competitors on disc in this repertoire.

Järvi gives us, then, perhaps not the performance and recording for which we have been long waiting, but nevertheless a worthwhile one.   With fully half of the available versions of Furtwängler’s second now more than 70 years old, any new recording in half decent sound – and Järvi’s is far better than that – is to be welcomed.  Moreover, when, as this one does, it takes a fresh look at the score and delivers some valuable new insights, it is especially valuable.  Anyone who, like me, admires this work in spite of its self-evident faults, will certainly welcome this new disc.

Incidentally, what a shame it was that, in 2022 the Berlin Philharmonic missed (as far as I am aware) the opportunity to mark the centenary of Furtwängler’s appointment as its chief conductor by recording at least the second symphony, which he himself regarded as his most successful orchestral work.  Let’s, however, keep in mind that the year 2027 will mark the 100^th anniversary of Furtwängler’s election as the Vienna Philharmonic’s subscription conductor and, even if that initial association was only to last three years, such an anniversary surely offers another world-class orchestra to chance to mark the occasion with a new recording.  Deutsche Grammophon, take note!

Rob Maynard

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