Opera Chic

Celebrating Richard Wagner's Bicentennial Bash with [...] Furtwängler

Admit it: You thought we were gonna say Solti or von Karajan, right? Girls, girls, tuck your brass knuckles back into your Prada -- you're all pretty.

To celebrate Richard Wagner's May 22 bicentennial, Corriere della Sera ran two pieces tied into the current La Scala Ring Cycle, conducted (naturally) by MD Barenboim through June.

The ten conductors of the Scala Ring Cycle Clubhouse are a Mötley Crüe: Barenboim, Ettore Panizza, Riccardo Muti, Arturo Toscanini, Siegfried Wagner, Clemens Krauss, Franz von Hoesslin, Andre Cluytens, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Wilhelm 'Fuffi' Furtwängler, whose 1950 live appointment is available on a special Corriere 2-CD set to honor Wagner's 200th birthday.

Barenboim, the Giorgio Armani of classical music, (read: influential, independent, opinionated and not one to stand down from controversy) has a small interview on the CD's liner notes about Furtwängler's great capacity for Wagner's colossal Ring, which he admires. He believes that Furtwängler harmoniously brings together an impulsive enthusiasm, fluidity and he takes a unique, executive liberty where naturalism and symbolism exist together. Barenboim continues that Furtwängler put in all the right notes and especially everything that occurs between the notes, because he understood better than other conductors that the piece is about the principle of transition and of "becoming":

"He understood that in the Wagner Ring Cycle, the music 'isn't' but rather, it 'becomes'".

The second piece delves into Furtwängler's myth. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gawd and the Word was Gawd, if only here, Furtwängler's gawds were his father's august dinner guests, the great icons of German Idealism. 

A life mired in controversy over his ambiguous relationship with Nazism, the choice to remain in Germany after 1933 while his colleagues fled and his crafty subversion of the Third Reich, his protection of Jewish musicians and later, the icons who defended his reputation: Menuhin and Schoenberg, Barneboim and Gergiev.

So Wagner and Furtwängler, both polarizing, share common ties. But this week, we'll think of the music, the beauty, the perfection found in pull-quotes -- like Furtwängler on the love of his great love:

"The question of interpretation is, at the same time, complex and simple, just like in all cases where love plays a fundamental role. Making music -- as a composer, an interpreter or a performer -- is above all an act of love."

To spread the love, here's our favorite Richard Wagner tributes from the webs: Sinfini Music, Alex Ross for The New Yorker and BBC Radio 3.

Beethoven's Ninth & a La Verdi Champagne Magnum, Always

Last night, OC Götterfunken on with la Verdi at its annual Concerto di Capodanno to pre-ring in the New Year, Oppan Beethoven style. <-- topical humor -- don't shoot the messenger (unless the message said to shoot the messenger then kindly give us a five-second gentlemen's agreement head start.)

Since 1999, Milan's young, roguish la Verdi orchestra, based in bohemian neighborhood Navigli's Auditorium di Milano, has been singing its bloated-from-Xmas a$$ off with Beethoven's fetish-inducing Ninth symphony.

What better message to megaphone into the New Year than Schiller's Ode An Die Freude poem of unity and brotherhood? Really, a perfectly-formed narrative before the final O Freunde kiss of death.

To bow 2013, la Verdi's MD Zhang Xian gave us a-buck-twenty-five of sterling tempi, grave tension and four great soloists, including another American girl living in Milan, soprano Laura Aikin, and Austrian bass Thomas Tatzl who probably declines invitations from Abercrombie's street team recruiters every time he treads the pavement. Yeah, we crushing. Haters fly away. Read more next week when OC reviews the performance officially for her Grazia.it column -- and in case you missed it, here's her La prima della Scala Wagner Lohengrin.

OC's rhapsodizes endlessly on Wilhelm Furtwängler's ethereal August 22, 1954 Lucerne Beethoven's Ninth with the Philharmonia and Schwarzkopf, Cavelti, Häfliger and Edelmann for good reason -- it's a chillingly sober reconciliation of a man who understood he was living on borrowed time and was grappling with his own mortality ("This time I had one foot in the other world," he had told his wife) -- so we've cued it up on the 'tubes -- all Gioia-scintilla-divina-e-bella-nata-nell'aura-elisia of it. Enjoy Brothers!

Daniel Barenboim's Playlist

If you ever wanted to know what was on Daniel Barenboim's iPod, here you go! The Argentinian/Israeli maestro, like us, has a thing for Big Willy Furtwängler. Däniel Bärenboim's Furtwängler fetish!

Happy Easter!

Herr Doktor "Big Willy" Furtwaengler and Opera Chic wish the readers a happy Easter bunny day.

Wilhelm Would Be Proud: Maria Furtwängler @ Oktoberfest

Earlier today, Maria Furtwängler, the dirndl'd step-granddaughter of Wilhelm, chugged beer and munched on wurstel beneath the Hippodrom at Munich's 175th Oktoberfest. Go guuurl get yo' kartoffelknödel on!

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(below: Maria Furtwängler with Regine Sixt & Uschi Glas.)

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Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Wilhelm Furtwängler!

Today would have been the 121st birthday of Wilhelm Furtwängler (if he had been born a superman or robot that lived forever). The German conductor, born January 25, 1886, was memorable for his spastic puppet-like idiosyncrasies on the podium, but even more memorable for his sublime symphony recordings along with a rare smattering of opera.

Favorite Furtwängler recordings in the Opera Chic household? The 1954 Vienna Don Giovanni with Schwarzkopf, and all of his Beethoven Ninth recordings, especially his ethereal Ninth of the Philharmonia Lucerne Festival recording from August 22, 1954.

Fun fact: In some circles of Milanese music critics, Furtwängler (in the party hat) affectionately goes by the sobriquet "Foofie".

Furtwängler's Last and Most Favorite Beethoven’s Ninth

I’m going to pimp one of the best recordings of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s conducting of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ev4r.

Get ready for it...it's...it's...it's a hard-to-find Furtwängler recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ("Choral", Opus 125), played by the Philharmonia Orchestra, and taped live during the Lucerne Festival on August 22, 1954, only available from Tahra Records, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano; Elsa Cavelti, contralto; Ernst Häfliger, tenor; and Otto Edelmann, bass. If you aren't familiar with the recording, it is worthwhile for various reasons. Aside from the historical significance, it is one of the most beautiful, poignant, and transcendent Ninths that I have ever heard.

But first we must know the context of this Ninth, which was just one version of the ninety-six (!omfg wtf!) that Furtwängler conducted during his career. Of those ninety-six, there are only nine complete, live recordings that have survived, and the best sound quality resides in the Lucerne 1954 version.

What makes this Ninth so significant is that it managed to polarize a significant moment of meditation and acceptance during the long span of Furtwängler's life. He told his wife, Elisabeth, that of this particular session: "This time I had one foot in the other world." (To read the excerpt, you'll have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page under the description of, "Beethoven: Symphony # 9 Choral)". We also know that Furtwängler was in fragile health, nearing death, and that he passed away just three months later on November 30, 1954.

René Trémine (co-founder of Tahra Records) commented that, “The Lucerne concert is moving on more than one count; it can be considered to be Furtwängler’s legacy, his swan song…in fact he was to die three months later.” Furtwängler appeared in a concert hall five additional times before his death: the 25th of August in Lucerne for Bruckner’s Seventh, the 30th of August at the Salzburg Festival, the 6th of September in Besançon for Beethoven concerts (also the location of Dini Lipatti's last recital on September 16, 1950), and the 19th and 20th of September in Berlin for his Second Symphony and Beethoven’s First.

So it is in this recording that we find a man stripped bare and left to examine his own life of regret, indecision, and guilt. There is a sense of the ethereal, the superlative, and a chilling premonition about something much more sublime that flows throughout this recording; a reckoning of his own mortality.

“Dear Myriam Scherchen, Dear René Trémine,”

“I am very happy to give you my authorization ot publish Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with my husband Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. It is his last performance of this work at Lucerne on 21st August, 1954. Furtwängler was in excellent condition since that same evening, after the concert, he took the night train to Salzburg where he was expected for the filming of Don Giovanni. Furtwängler dedicated all his life to the exploration and interpretation of the Ninth Symphony.”

By contrast, when you listen to the handful of Furtwänglers' 1942 Ninths (April 19, 1942, and the March 22-24, 1942, which are similar in force and interpretation), you can’t believe that something so deep, layered, and sweet as the Lucerne Ninth was drawn from the same mind that produced such a terrible, thundering, crystalline version like his 1942 Ninths, and that a conductor is capable of such diverse readings of the same composition.

You can watch an excerpt of Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at the AEG factory in 1942, and witness his characteristic "spastic puppet on crack", as Furtwängler had the ugliest conducting idiosyncrasies like for ev4r. The film excerpt comes from the Bel Canto Society's cult DVD, "Great Conductors of the Third Reich", which includes newsreels and archived footage of conductors such as Böhm, Furtwängler, and Karajan amid lots of disgusting Nazi propaganda...as well as a performance during Hitler's birthday party! yay! clowns and cotton-candy and ponies and moon-walks!

Okay, for all you Furtwängler fetishists, I uploaded a few hi-res, rare pictures to the Opera Chic flickr photostream, which you can find here.