Springtime for furtw?ngler
Theater Springtime for furtwangler By Paul Cantor When the two con men in Mel Brooks's classic film comedy The Producers decide to mount a sure-fire flop on Broadway, they hit on a musical comedy...
...These recordings suggest what a price he paid in personal terms for his efforts to keep alive the great tradition of German music in his country's darkest hour...
...The bewildered and tormented Furtwangler, a man who feels comfortable expressing himself only in music before a sympathetic concert audience, is faced instead with the unfamiliar task of articulating his thoughts in words before a hostile philistine who has the power to silence him...
...If I had to name the single greatest conductor of this century, it would be Furtwangler...
...At the hearing, the number of Jews who came forward to testify to Furtwangler's efforts on their behalf persuaded even a heavily biased tribunal to rule in his favor...
...And many people, including Jewish musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, have wondered publicly why Furtwangler was singled out for harsh treatment by the American authorities when other conductors with more tainted records—like Herbert von Karajan, who did join the Nazi party—were allowed to return to their musical careers with comparative ease...
...He suddenly becomes ill and must be helped offstage, leaving unresolved whether his outburst constitutes a confession of guilt or merely the acknowledgment of an error in judgment...
...And yet, in their achingly beautiful moments of musical repose, one catches glimpses of the higher world of German culture Furtwan-gler was desperately reaching for and clinging to throughout the Nazi years...
...It is worth listening above all to Furtwangler's 1942 performance (with the Berlin Philharmonic) of the Beethoven Ninth...
...Ultimately, though, Harwood takes an easy way out by having Furtwangler break down in an admission that he was wrong to stay in Germany...
...And now that we have far greater access to the recordings Furtwan-gler made during World War II, we can better understand why the conductor chose to stay in Germany throughout the ordeal of the Hitler years...
...In Harwood's portrayal, Arnold is something of an anti-Semite himself and thus is morally compromised in his crusade against Furtwangler...
...I would be the last person to compare Ronald Harwood to Shakespeare, but there are moments in Taking Sides when the intensity of the exchanges between the two men almost reaches the fever pitch of the battles between Othello and Iago...
...Characters in Beckett plays have an easier time taking a seat...
...as one character puts it, "a conductor is also a dictator...
...Given the horrors of the Nazi regime, so unprecedented and so fresh in 1946, even the slightest suggestion that Furtwangler might have been implicated in Hitler's atrocities had to be investigated...
...The play opens with Arnold preparing his assistant for the interrogation, predicting exactly what the next witness will say on Furtwangler's behalf...
...Harwood captures Furtwangler's strength and conviction, both necessary for someone whose calling it was to impose his will on hundreds of musicians...
...the character of Arnold is entirely his creation...
...Nowhere was Furtwangler more vilified than in New York, and so, despite the critical and box-office success of the original London production, it took courage to bring Ronald Harwood's fascinating but flawed play to Broadway...
...At one point he has a crazed woman charge onto the stage, ostensibly to attack Furtwangler but really to defend him because he once saved the life of her Jewish husband...
...life producers Alexander Cohen and Max Cooper might have brooded a bit about the possibility that the British play they brought to Broadway in October would prove to be Springtime for Hitler 1996— only without the inadvertent success Springtime for Hitler enjoys in The Producers...
...Above all, Furtwangler struggled his way to the inner meaning of the music he conducted, and more often than not he used his flexibility of tempo and his exquisitely molded phrasing to reveal and highlight musical form...
...At the play's end, Arnold admits the case against the conductor is weak, but still advises the denazification tribunal to go ahead with the hearing because he has a pliant journalist named Del-bert Clark who will report the story any way he wants...
...In the last movement, with its great choral outbursts affirming the joy of freedom, the music becomes almost hysterical...
...He could draw sounds out of an orchestra that have to be heard to be believed, particularly the warmth and tonal richness of the strings...
...In point of fact, Furtwangler was acquitted by the denazification tribunal (an event that takes place after the play comes to a close...
...Harwood also allows Arnold to use all his professional skill—he was an insurance investigator in peacetime—to turn the most powerful exculpatory evidence against Furtwangler...
...The man conducting these performances, with all their hectic drama and febrile energy, is suffering...
...Harwood mixes fact and fiction throughout...
...Why, we wonder, is he so determined "to nail the bandleader" despite the fact that his inquiry is turning up little or nothing that suggests the "bandleader" was doing the bidding of the Nazi party...
...Arnold is basically a one-dimensional character in the script, although Harwood makes him puzzling in one respect...
...Their grim power, coupled with the anguish that suffuses them, belies Arnold's theory in the play that Furtwangler stayed in Germany to lead a hedonistic life as the pampered darling of the Nazi elite...
...Unlike Springtime for Hitler, Taking Sides is certainly not pro-Nazi, though it may be somewhat anti-American...
...Each in his own way is used to commanding others—Furtwangler as a conductor and Arnold as an army officer— and so the stage is set for a powerful confrontation pitting an inner spiritual authority against the brute force of the military...
...In 1945, a contemporary of Furtwangler's described an occasion nine years earlier when the Nazis tried to badger him into accepting an official position: Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler cornered [Furtwangler] and tried everything to make him accept, climaxing in Hitler's shrill threat that he would send him to a concentration camp—and Furtwan-gler's calm answer: "Herr Reichskanzler, I will find myself there only in the very best company...
...The two halves of Furtwangler blend together seamlessly in Daniel Massey's brilliant performance...
...Massey's Furtwangler finds an ordinary object like a chair something to be wondered at and dealt with as if for the first time...
...The legitimate outrage all decent people feel at Nazis and Nazi sympathizers means that, to this day, Furtwan-gler's case remains controversial, arousing passions for and against him that give Taking Sides whatever dramatic complexity it possesses...
...To convey to Arnold how important Furtwangler is in Germany, his superiors tell him the conductor is "Bob Hope and Betty Grable rolled into one...
...Arnold holds all the cards...
...His adversary, Major Arnold, has been chosen by the American authorities to build the case against Furtwangler precisely because he has never heard of him and has no idea how great an artist he is...
...That kind of agreement among witnesses, Arnold says, is the first sign of fraud...
...The play is primarily concerned with the question of whether in fact Furtwangler was a Nazi, and, if not, whether he was unjustly maligned...
...This is always a problem when someone tries to portray art either in drama or film, but just because it is difficult does not mean it can't be done...
...The central situation in Taking Sides is so inherently dramatic that there was no need to gussy it up with false melodrama...
...Maybe it is springtime for Furtwangler after all...
...An audience unfamiliar with Furtwangler's work must take his genius on faith...
...Harwood uses the trappings of stock courtroom melodrama— surprise witnesses, the announcement of newly discovered evidence, traps set for the unwary defen-dant—to lead the audience and Arnold to think Furtwangler is indeed about to be nailed at any moment...
...For Ronald Har-wood's Taking Sides is a sympathetic account of what happened when the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler found himself accused of being a Nazi after World War II...
...But Harwood offers an alternative, sinister, and very troubling interpretation of Arnold's role in the interrogation...
...But in these circumstances, he is close to helpless...
...In the second act, Arnold reveals he has been traumatized by the sight of concentration camps and is taking out his rage on the most convenient object at hand— even though he is repeatedly confronted by evidence that Furtwan-gler personally saved many Jews from those camps...
...Ed Harris can't help but imbue Arnold with some of the ail-American character he embodied in both The Right Stuff and Apollo 13...
...If he did, in Arnold's eyes that provides the surest proof that he really did have friends in high places...
...Does everyone tell the same story of Furtwangler's goodness and cite his unceasing efforts on behalf of Jews in the music world...
...There was a reporter named Del-bert Clark who did, in fact, cover the story for the New York Times and did slant his reporting against Furtwangler in a way that poisoned the conductor's reputation in the United States...
...Still, despite Harwood's dark hints about a conspiracy against Furtwangler, his play succeeds in conveying the atmosphere in which it seemed perfectly plausible to subject the conductor's wartime activities to intense scrutiny...
...Arnold is perfectly capable of feigning emotions to accomplish his purposes as an interrogator, and thus his outburst about the concentration camps may simply be a calculated stab at breaking the conductor down after all else has failed...
...indeed, he holds the future of Furtwangler's musical career and life in his hands...
...Taking Sides does feature a few recordings of Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies conducted by Furtwangler, but hardly enough to convince a novice listener of his preeminence...
...At his best, he achieved revelatory results beyond the capacity of any other conductor...
...Arnold seizes on any anti-Semitic remark Furt-wangler is ever reported to have made, and yet he himself refers to arson as "Jewish lightning" and pointedly calls a subordinate "Weil" instead of "Wills," thus contemptuously restoring the Jewish name the subordinate changed when he emigrated to the United States...
...Massey does a superb job of conveying the artist's otherworldli-ness—the way Furtwangler is simply at a loss when it comes to fitting into everyday human surroundings...
...Trying to put oneself in the place of the 1942 audience listening to this performance in Berlin, one begins to understand what so many people meant when they said that Furtwangler was their only beacon of hope within Nazi Germany...
...Furtwangler has the self-confidence of genius and an imperious manner born of years of adulation from an adoring public...
...In his effort to keep his material dramatic, Har-wood is repeatedly tempted into making it melodramatic...
...To put oneself in the place of Furtwangler during this performance is next to impossible, but one can at least empathize with his desperate effort to salvage the grandeur and beauty of Beethoven's vision in the midst of Hitler's betrayal of the German cultural heritage...
...Taking Sides is no substitute for that, but it is a valuable and lively piece of theater...
...Harwood even suggests that Arnold may be the front man for an American conspiracy against Furtwangler...
...His prescience makes the initial pro-Furtwangler testimony we hear seem like a predictable party line...
...The worst one can say against Furtwangler is that he was politically unskilled and naive enough to allow himself at times to be manipulated by Hitler, but the same could be said of Neville Chamberlain and many others who had more reason than Furtwangler to know better...
...Real-Pawl Cantor is professor of English at the University of Virginia...
...Did Furtwangler really succeed in saving Jews from the camps or helping them to escape from Germany...
...Harwood demonstrates considerable dramaturgical skill in shaping the plot to keep the audience from simply siding with the great artist against the crude soldier...
...Taking Sides is a contest of wills between Furtwangler and Major Arnold, an American army officer assigned to prepare a case against the conductor for a German denazification tribunal...
...The evidence of his Nazi activities or sympathies proved so flimsy that it dissolved upon examination, while there was overwhelming proof of his willingness to stand up to the Nazi authorities and even to insult Hitler personally...
...But his Furtwangler also has human, all-too-human, qualities, which allowed Goebbels and Goer-ing to manipulate him for the benefit of the Third Reich...
...The abrupt and overwrought ending is symptomatic of a problem throughout...
...Furtwangler's wartime recordings give us a chance to hear the conductor truly speak for himself in the only way he really could...
...It is by no means his best recording of the symphony, but may nonetheless be the most remarkable Ninth we have...
...This strengthens and balances the play, perhaps in spite of Harwood's own intentions...
...Theater Springtime for furtwangler By Paul Cantor When the two con men in Mel Brooks's classic film comedy The Producers decide to mount a sure-fire flop on Broadway, they hit on a musical comedy called Springtime for Hitler—a nostalgic romp through the life and loves of the Fiihrer guaranteed to outrage and disgust the New York theater crowd...
...This so surprised Hitler that he couldn't answer, but vanished from the Furtwangler's prosecutors tried to make the case that he helped only famous Jewish musicians, but in truth, his aid was widespread and undis-criminating in the good sense of the term...
...Harwood fails to measure up to another challenge: the need to convey a sense of Furtwangler's genuine greatness as an artist...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 11
