Music
Turn of the screw
Robin Holloway
With some famous exceptions the superstar conductors of recent times have not also composed. Sir Georg Solti's mythological tetralogy, Carlo-Maria Giuli- ni's Requiem Mass, the nine symphonies of Herbert von Karajan — the mind boggles: and though the world doesn't miss such absent masterpieces, there is little doubt that the conducting of these and other favourite maestri shows that they don't know what it means to manipulate, at whatever level, the raw stuff of music.
It used to be different. The rise of the conductor as an indispensable came about more from the demands of the new than from the growing accumulation of classics. Weber, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner and Strauss spring instantly to mind. Mahler, as usual, stands between two worlds, widely regarded during his life as a supreme inter- preter, with composition an embarrassingly ambitious sideline. Many of the great con- ductors of the succeeding generation com- posed; none more ardently than the Greatest of all, Wilhelm Furtwangler. His output makes brief reading — three sym- phonies, a symphonic piano concerto, a few chamber-pieces — but heavy listening. Even the violin sonatas clock in at 50 min- utes, the symphonies are more like 80 and the first movement alone of the concerto is longer than any entire classical concerto before Beethoven's Emperor.
It would be easy if these monsterpieces could be dismissed as vain and inglorious. They certainly do their best! The contents- page of the concerto — I schwer (heavy) 32": 11 adagio solemne (a mere 11") are daunting enough.— while the headings for the movements of the Third Symphony: Fate; Life's Coercion: Beyond; The Strug- gle Continues — if not more absurd than the norms of Teutonic music some half-a- century before its completion in 1954, irre- sistibly recall the young Stravinsky's account of a reluctantly attended perfor- mance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thou- sand; 'and all this, you understand, to prove that 2 + 2 = 4'.
But the truth is more ambiguous and interesting. The gargantuan violin sonatas and piano quintet (70"!) show a surprising affinity with Faure of all people. To be sure, there is little hedonism or elegance (and nothing compact); yet a similar cast of melody, of on-going texture, even, some- times, of delicacy, makes this comparison less implausible than it first seems. The crucial difference is that Furtwangler's themes are invariably mediocre: Franz Schmidt remains the only francophile Teu- ton who managed this time-scale in this medium with ease and distinction.
Furtwangler's problematic stature as composer is only fully revealed, however, by the symphonies. So diffident was he that the First, though completed in 1941 at the age of 54, is in effect prentice-work (and in fact its first movement is based on sketches made some 30 years earlier). The other two are fully mature. Their sources are unmis- takable — a close fusion of Wagner and Brahms at the core, with subsidiary ballast from Bruckner, Strauss, Tchaikovslcy, and Sibelius. Yet the mixture is not like anyone else and the result, if ultimately unsatisfac- tory, is far from negligible.
No. 2 seems to me to be most nearly right. The first movement can be compared to that of Elgar's First Symphony in the masterly welding together of a variety of heterogeneous material in a complex archi- tectural span. The next is like a lovely com- posite of several Brahms middle- movements laid over the andante from his Third; and the scherzo is Furtwangler's best. As in his other works, the finale is the stumbling-block. It raves away in a perfec- tion of counter-productivity. Such baleful ponderousness was given its coup de grace in the two-minute introduction to Doh- nanyi's Variations on a Nursery Tune, (not a part of Furtwangler's repertoire). There are no themes; all is introduction, transi- tion, more introduction, leading through many a turn of the sequential screw to a final stretch of bombastic optimism that makes the errors of Strauss and Mahler in this vein seem positively convincing.
The finale-problem remained acute. At the time of his sudden death in 1954, with the Third Symphony completed but still unheard, he was wavering over its inclu- sion. The Second Symphony makes a strong whole even with its weak link. If the actual material were more individuated and memorable it would be a masterpiece, warts and all. Thank goodness that Radio 3 can still, in spite of mounting populist pres- sure, commit itself to the quixotic folly of a studio recording!
Wilhelm Furtwangler's 2nd Symphony will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 15 August at 11.40 a. m. in a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alfred Walter, which will later be issued on CD.
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