In a 1997 diary entry in his Untold Stories that fun and bittersweet playwright Alan Bennett writes of hearing the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony on the wireless and being put in mind of “some huge submerged mass coming to the surface” and wondering what this meant. England? . . . Destiny? . . . And from that magnificent conundrum he shades to his lower middleclass boyhood in Leeds, a geeky music lover living in the provinces to which came now and then “fabled creatures from the world of the wireless: Sargent [that’s Sir Malcolm], Barbirolli [the great Sir John] and even Beecham.” And of course there was Sir Adrian Boult. “So famished was I for fame I must be one of the few boys who could have seen [him] as in any sense an exotic and even a glamorous figure.” He looked, says Bennett, Edwardian, with an Elgar moustache; he could have been one of those inflexible generals conducting the First World War. And Bennett writes of Boult’s eschewing any emotion on the podium, thus gaining him entrance into his “pantheon of non-histrionics” including the poet A.E. Housman, the novelist E.M. Forster, “and in the manner of crossing deserts Wilfred Thesiger.” But Sir Adrian was not unduly burdened by the “puritan impediment” charming Neville Cardus saw ever hovering over the English musical scene.

Cross cut now to Bernard Shore’s The Orchestra Speaks – Shore, you recall, was the first viola sitting under Sir Adrian’s prominent nose in the BBC Symphony in the Thirties – and we’re in Sir Adrian’s mind. “[It] seems,” wrote Shore, “to brood over the score from a height, surveying all its essential features like the peaks of a mountain range seen from a certain distance. The proportions are thus truly discerned, with the greatest peaks duly towering above the rest.” And if you turn from Shore’s book and place on the turntable Boult’s 78s of Brahms’ Tragic Overture, a performance I grew up on with constant satisfaction and in which Shore of course participated, your reward will be a perfect confirmation of what the violist speaks: this urgent and wistful performance is notable for its dynamic range and care, its artful projection of everything you want and need to hear, when you want and need to hear it (until, that is, the next fascinating and effective performance). Every button is immaculately in place so to speak, as on the uniforms of those brush moustached Great War generals. But this is not a pompous or cold performance. The BBC sounds, in fact, rather like a grand and friendly organ, lovingly tended.

Boult, Shore adds, stood very still on the podium, “quite comfortable with about six inches of room on either side of him . . . by restraint and complete control over his emotions [which, we must underline, he had aplenty] he doubles his power when all is wanted.” And that’s how you get those crescendos like a Flying Scotsman out of King’s Cross steaming round the bend.The elegance, the lack of windmilling on the podium, does this point to our previous chapter’s Fritz Reiner? Well yes, somewhat, there is an overlap in grace and good planning. But in Boult I don’t think you find that combination which could lead the innocent onlooker to believe the Great Fritz shared somewhat the sensibilities of both a genius Think Tanker at Princeton or Cambridge and a Hell’s Angel jamming his motorcycle’s nose into the air on a crowded street. If Reiner’s intensity can at times be as positively terrifying as it is effective the architectural plans of his careful long-range, moment-studded interpretive structures hover regularly above us like subliminal super-titles on an Opera House proscenium.

Sir Adrian’s repertoire was extensive, his discography large. Picking at random, I’ve come up with a Rachmaninoff Third Symphony with the London Philharmonic, to which Boult fled when he was unceremoniously sacked from the BBC upon turning 60, a bureaucrat’s end-point. Lovely ensemble, neat articulation, these are joys here — even to the point of exposing in the finale a shaky transitional moment where, on the road to subject 2, this glorious composer who could concoct a masterful five minutes of teasingly unresolved harmony settled in a less challenging setting for second best. But most stunning of all is the tone of the strings early in the slow movement, not a glamorous sound so much as a beautiful sound, violins doing what they were born to do in tenderly rapturous music climbing to the heights. I hear less erotic (yes, erotic!) liftoff in the recording wherein the composer himself pilots this passage on the golden-honeyed and resultingly heavy wings of a distinctly glamorous Philadelphia Orchestra – not nearly as bad as being hit by birds, of course.

Now Sir Adrian had a reputation as a pure conductor, Bernard Shore felt that he preferred being an “almost impersonal medium” between composer, musicians and audience. But look to his enchanting Beethoven Eroica with a pick-up London orchestra of the Fifties and you’ll see that this performance could not have happened without the happy intrusion of a pronounced personality, that of a very genial fellow whose sense of humor as well as compassion could not be washed away by a spit-and-polish worthy of some orchestral sergeant major or model major general. Call him a kindly god sitting as Shore would confirm on his puffy cloud, thinking up from that vantage point an Eroica that surely confounded this chronicler as he set it on his Garrard without much enthusiasm for yet another (they appear almost weekly!) Beethoven Third.

Sir Adrian’s first decision in movement 1 is to elect a rather leisurely base tempo of 48 as opposed to the composer’s crazy 60 to the minute. An Early Late Klemperer tempo you might say, vintage 1955, and other Gods have taken it too. This speed, along with clearly perceptible and absolutely organic retardations, facilitates a certain serenity and radiance as well as giving a juicy breadth and dramatic penetration to counterpoints in the development. Also, it bathes our ears in the Authority of One Who Does Not Protest Too Much. This, you must have guessed, is not one of those delightfully neurotic Eroica openers in the Mengelberg mold, but it is fascinating enough that no neurosis is necessary. And positively therapeutic into the bargain, so mellow it is. If the tempo primo chosen for movement 1 is considerably below the number-of-the-page, well, the scherzo, which sounds a bit slow, is spot on the composer’s marking. And perhaps Beethoven knew exactly what he was hearing here because Boult/Beethoven’s 116 to the measure allows the movement to come on playfully secretive and balletic. It’s all very precise, and very amusing.

Then best of all perhaps is a finale in which foot nicely on brake and tongue generously in cheek combine to produce 1) a theme suggesting a peacock of a cuckoo clock doing its hourly thing, 2) a suspenseful first variation enjoying immensely the comedy of piano-forte-crescendo-fermata at close quarters, 3) in the next variation a maximally chattery path for triplet staccato mid-strings, 4) a child’s prideful swing in the rocking dolce of the next after that. And so on! The poco andante is not especially slow, it’s almost as if Boult were blending it in with the relatively broad allegro (Beethoven’s allegro molto) that precedes it. But a consuming lilt keeps the great oboe solo from skimping on the needed Poetic . . . as, we might add,  it interrupts an allegro no more rollicking here than its composer may well have intended!

Now before going on stop the press a moment, I have to be fair and square with Mr. Rachmaninoff and tell you, since I’ve just listened to the finale of his Third Symphony again, that he was obviously aware of the slight recalcitrance of that marginally dumpy transition, so he’s very careful in his Philadelphia recording to dance through it with an elfin scintillation. So we may have caught Sir Adrian in a rare moment of not being echt hip. Or perhaps it’s the author’s face that’s red. But onward. I can’t wait to tell you about Sir Adrian’s handsome recordings of Wagnerian opera excerpts. Actually let’s start with A Faust Overture dating from 1974 when Boult was half way through his ninth and not quite last decade. When I was in sixth or seventh grade my grammar master at San Francisco’s Town School for Boys, the punctilious Ed Rich, proposed we little brats pretend we were one or another inanimate object of choice, pencil, hairbrush, whatever, and write a little essay on life as seen from the vantage point of said probably homely object. Quite fun, this, for a chubby lad with hidden literary aspirations. Well, I can’t think of anything better than to be the tip of Sir Adrian’s baton tracing the elegant rustlings, transcendent glows and luminous tiptoeings of this Schumannesque score and producing with its flight, in Abbey Road Studio Number One!, a plummy performance more sane perhaps than feverish as is sometimes this overture’s reward but smooth, powerful, a joy to hear.

But if Sir Adrian’s Faust is very good indeed, his Rienzi overture, another octogenarial outing with the LPO, is a revelation. Previous favorites of mine, the undulant Weingartner and a startlingly intense NBC broadcast by Guido Cantelli, will have to make room for this one on my Rienzi hit parade. Obviously Boult took from his observation post a very, very good look at this extravagant warhorse, seeing for instance pianissimi standing clearly on the page but not always read by conductors bitten by the addictive Big Legato. The mellifluous grovelings of cellos and basses from the twelfth bar have rarely struck me as so despairing – I think Sir Adrian finds the key to this state of affairs in the succession of crescendi trapped inside Abuian <’s and >’s and unable to get out. Except they do shade after a bit into that lovely savior of a Tune, the tune with a turn, molto legato ed espressivo, at measure 19. And now, because Boult takes this supression-resistant confection of low-lying massed strings at a serious suggestion of the score’s pianissimo – at least you can almost see him like a traffic bobbie coaxing the orchestra to shun more than a mezzo piano – well, given this care, Wagner’s trophy tune in its understated while indubitably handsome Boultian guise takes on a fascinating aura of femininity — femininity in the classic and perhaps somewhat sexist sense of evoking the fragile, willowy Maiden of many a composer’s, and conductor’s, dreams.

If this tune were an item of food surely it would be an heirloom tomato, at the height of its season. Well, whatever . . . let’s go a bit further on and the crescendo to the fortissimo statement of our wonderful Tune has Boult pulling out all available stops. Melody galore here, and if this were a Wedding March as it vaguely suggests, the bride and groom would skip the reception and head for their room, on the wings of post-Mendelssohnian SOUND. Also to like are the jauntiness of the heel-kicking music cum triangle beginning bar 155, near the six minute mark, and no one should argue with the fact that the overture’s final mile is very active, very melodioso-percussioso, while eschewing 12-out-of-10 intensity.

More vintage Wagner from Boult: excerpts from Parsifal with the LSO claiming a seamless golden elegance, strings and brass alike flowing as smoothly as melted butter. At least one literary vagabond who’s spent the night sleeping on a bed of straw in a cow byre has written of the pleasantly enveloping effect of reclining near the warm breath of animals. This recording surely doesn’t have drowsiness as its intended effect, but it certainy exudes a warm breath no less grand for having something in common with a rather haunting pastoral sensation recorded by that Bloomsbury figure Mr. Gerald Brenan . . . And with the New Philharmonia Orchestra the numerically if not artistically elderly Sir Adrian made a recording of the Tannhaeuser Overture in which an attractively lugubrious introduction shades into a quick and quivering allegro. I suspect that Boult’s mentor the great Nikisch may have given him the idea, where the cellos come in at the end of bar 16, of phrasing their upbeat with a tiny pause between the initial dotted note and its smaller follower, allowing that second note thereby to seem to give the following half note a tiny kick. And speaking of Nikisch . . . “it was said,” Boult has written, “that the first bar of Tristan was enough to enable anyone to recognize blindfold the warmth and beauty of the tone which unmistakeably showed that Nikisch was conducting.” Proof positive here that Sir Adrian knew a good thing to emulate. No, repeat no conductor in the modern gramophonic age has charmed us with more attractive sounds from the arms and mouths of orchestral players.

Rewind forty years now, we’re back at the BBC, and a choice Mozart Jupiter at that time was Sir Adrian’s recording for HMV/Victor. Sprightly and transparent is the opening movement, its second subject gliding in with a light pathos. The atmosphere is borderline buffo and the cavortings of the ensemble in The Marriage of Figaro don’t seem very far away — any savvy conductor of course could make this connection. Beautiful sound in the andante cantabile takes the form of a gauzy romantical string tone: we’re in wistful/hopeful territory emotionally speaking and Boult enjoys the trip. Part of the package is an exquisite retard into the recapitulation, a rare Boult moment. Then the minuet, gentle and luminous, expressive of Boult’s upbeat personality. But professional that he was he could do bleakness to a turn when required. The Fifties recording of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony is case in point, Sir Adrian spares us nothing of the wasteland poetry, not to mention the epic element, of the long and devastating opening movement. No surprise, he maintains momentum in this music that steps into outer space where the footing is chancy. Then deadpan as a Swiss banker he presides idiomatically over the doodly-noodly scherzo with its not entirely innocent aura, and the finale’s giddyup Marx Bros. close is elegantly delivered.

Another important LPO recording from the Fifties is Sir Adrian’s Mahler First. Bright and swinging, immaculately articulated, a thing of handsome song and dance as much or more than drama, an essay in sonority more, say, than suspense, this is perhaps the most refreshing Mahler 1 in the annals, a Bernini fountain of bella musica. The same, by the way, could be said for a recording by Sir Adrian of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. And his Sibelius! — capital stuff, a sonic National Geographic for your CD player.

But back to Brahms: I’ve made friends with a late period Brahms Third with the LSO which doesn’t claim a wide range of dramatic evocation, its pinstriped pilot preferring to take the role of good symphonic knight in shining orchestral garb, focusing on relatively abstract joys. So perhaps it’s not a performance that would have won over Tchaikovsky who met “the very charming” Brahms for lunch in Hamburg the day after a performance of Tchai 5 and got quite happily drunk with him but upon reflection felt his German colleague’s music lacked “poetry” and “never expresses anything.” But those joys of form and tone and shape can be quite remarkable. I can’t remember when in the second subject of movement 1 the clarinet’s p grazioso has so clearly & neatly dropped to the composer’s pianissimo after those first long bars of 9/4 – this at bar 38 – a bonus being the sweet distance-ness, and I mean sweet in the sense of charming or ethereal rather than sugary, of the supporting and space-separated notes in the flute played at a true pp. Boult inhabits the enchantment of that flute no less than Flaubert the sun, wind and leaves of the romantic scene in Madame Bovary which he boasted to Louise Colet were absolutely in his bloodstream. This London flute’s ethereality is in fact poetic, a musical illustration of Middleton Murry’s notion that if a writer tries to be precise he or she is bound to be metaphorical.

And no less enchanting is Boult’s unhurried swing through the second subject theme of the finale, as handsomely curved as one could imagine, the key being a highlighting, logically enough, of its pervasively triplety nature: hearing two legato triplets in succession as rolled out of the LSO by Sir Adrian constitutes for me sheer bliss. Lucky I saw this CD staring me in the face at an Edinburgh record shop a couple of years ago. Actually at the time I’d forgotten I owned an earlier Boult Third, with the so-called Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra. Well, the more the merrier. But how curious that the piano-to-pianissimo I’ve just crowed about in the opening movement simply doesn’t happen in this performance. Curiosity has just magnetized me to at least one Toscanini recording of Brahms 3 and I don’t find it there either: this should be enough to make poor Brahms’ head ache with frustration.

Early in 1946 Sir Adrian sailed to America to honor a long extended invitation to conduct the Boston Symphony, with Brahms’ First included. In New York, so his diary reports, he had one lunch with Bruno Walter (“grand to see him . . he seems no older . . is working very hard and loves it”), another with George Szell (“nice creature”), saw the musical Oklahoma! (“a staggering ballet . . pretty good music”), heard Koussevitzky conduct Prokofieff’s new Fifth Symphony (“rather exciting, I think”) and heard Artur Rodzinski conduct the Philharmonic (“afraid I didn’t care for Brahms No. 1 very much”). And looked for golf balls for some of his BBC musicians. This we know from Michael Kennedy’s excellent Boult biography.

Boult the diarist says the Boston Brahms 1 was taken on a short tour and “became more and more Koussevitzkyish and I couldn’t stop it” (the BSO had few guest conductors in those days, they made its music director Koussevitzky nervous, he was of course one of those “European monsters” as Ned Rorem half jokingly calls them in his diary), but presumably the broadcast of 1-19-46 represents the product as originally designed. I remember tuning in this Saturday night broadcast, 5:30 p.m. Pacific time, as a young teenager. I don’t recall being blown away, but then I was probably awaiting my “Mengelberg moment” with Brahms No. 1 three decades up the road. Or perhaps my mother’s coq au vin! What I hear now as an ancient aficionado of the turntable and other vehicles of gramophonic reproduction is that Sir Adrian was essentially on form, producing a characteristically buoyant and precise first movement and an affecting second, but it was only in the final two movements that he finally freed himself from a certain stage fright in the face of this eminent orchestra, Dr. Koussevitzky’s legendary Hot Hundred, darling of RCA Victor, New York critics and so on.  When have those string syncopations under woodwind solos at Letter B in the third movement panted so? The great Koussy in a broadcast eleven months earlier had not seemed so fixed on this passage. And how about the very grand retard Sir Adrian invents for our delectation going into the clarinet tune’s recapitulation at Letter E! Yes, it was doubtless part of his original plan, but even so . . .

In the finale Georges Laurent’s flute slowly pipes its solo in delightfully piercing tones, like a Little Hero after the trauma of the introduction, then the chorale, very broad, shades into an earth-moving crescendo, with the allegro tune taking off rosy as a Sunday joint, trumpets and drums very festive at the animato. Sir Adrian is in his element, his reward a Symphony Hall ovation from many tweedy Harvardians and friends. And we can presume he found a proper sort of golf balls for the BBC’ers back home.

* * * *

You have reached the end of the first full posting of these Adventures in Musical Interpretation. The chances are that as you read this paragraph their author with polished diving bell and well-cleaned fishing net is exploring the interpretorial depths of the conductors born in the 1890s; conductors such as breezy Fritz Busch, Carlos Kleiber’s great father Erich (whose crisp rhythm can fool commentators into not hearing his generous rubati), Clemens Krauss who holds the patent on insouciance, Issay Dobrowen that forgotten master of sighs and trances, Dimitri Mitropoulos with his kit bag full of sforzandi, John Barbirolli with his unique and gentle amble in Mahler’s Fourth, Jascha Horenstein whose performances sometimes seem to dwell in a concentration camp of the mind, Artur Rodzinski with his delirium-in-excelsis Wagner . . .

What, forever asks the commentator, does a conductor really do?

Well, he does the sort of thing Fritz Reiner is doing in the full page portrait decorating his French RCA recording of the Bach orchestral suites. His baton-holding hand raised crisply above his head, a handsome show of starched white shirt-cuff next thereto, he’s fixing the left side of an invisible orchestra with a look that might terrify a Martian, a call to action flamed in part by an instant invocation of stage despair, or maybe it’s the sullen dignity of a challenged monarch (here, now, this instant, the most important thing in the world is your entrance!) while his left hand waits in reserve at waist level, ready to italicize a point. He is, in other words, mesmerizing his musicians into sharing with him one hundred and one percent, as if by instantaneous transfusion, an emotional moment, some superb phraseological felicity transferable by a magnificent glance. Ordered yet passionate, this optical sting is emblem of a style almost stark in its beauty yet rich in nuance of the subtlest and warmest sort.

Chief assets as follows: the remarkably discriminating tone of Reiner’s performances, handsome yet never narcissistic as they purr along like so many Rolls or Mercedes; his ever-graceful phrasing, neat as the work of a Beaux Arts craftsman; then the instrumental balances as revealing as they’re exquisite. And this is not to mention the trademark vitality I as a teenage listener to those Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera came to expect when Milton Cross announced that “Fritz Reiner is making his way into the pit.” Vitality, this, that came from the eye and the stick, because Reiner was not one to use the podium as a trampoline. Although his puffing cheeks and creeping brow and even an occasional little kick of the foot were as useful as Pierre Monteux’ mustache.

Another asset was Reiner’s extraordinary astuteness in balancing peaks along the mountain range of a long symphonic, or operatic, thought. One’s tempted to say he moved through his Wagner operas/Brahms symphonies/Rachmaninoff concertos as Henry James said Oliver Wendell Holmes made his way through life, “like a full glass carried without spilling a drop.” The refreshingly brilliant critic Virgil Thomson who had a habit of hitting on the head nails he had shifted slightly from their proper place, used to say that Reiner was “as calculable as the stars and about as distant.” This sounds just right until one remembers the frequent warmth of Reiner performances, and the soulful little Moments, surrounded to be sure in some cases by relatively “cold” patches designed to set them in relief. Reiner’s moments can put one in mind of what Robert Louis Stevenson extolled in fine writing as the “unobtrusive pregnant implication.”

Watching a 1954 video of Reiner conducting his new band, the Chicago Symphony, in Beethoven’s Egmont overture, is not only instructive but downright exciting. Yes, you can see the vitality crossing the room in shafts of shock-and-awe and adhering like some magic glue to the players. Standing absolutely erect, using his left hand sparingly (although sometimes to mop his brow), frequently beating with his long is-it-Nikischy? baton one-to-the-bar, no excess movement being necessary, and slicing the air quite frequently as if with a machete, and zigging to the players subsidiary rhythmic accents on the fly, rigorous Reiner, subtly benign, leaves no proferred nuance unseen. The old saw about his “vest pocket” beat is not always borne out, he carried a big stick. But sometimes it did seem to hang like what Nabokov might call a limp something, with a lot of “outer vest pocket” activity going on at its quivering furthest inches. I knew the fabled bass player in the Pittsburgh Symphony, Reiner’s estimable orchestra before his Chicago tenure, who, heaven help him, trained a pair of binoculars on Reiner as a prank – of course I knew Jerry when he was in another orchestra: Josef Krips was happy to have him some years later in San Francisco.

Now to my desert-islandest Reiner performance, the March 1960 broadcast of Brahms’ Second with the New York Philharmonic, a feisty bunch playing their souls out for this whip-cracking seducer on their Carnegie Hall podium: notice especially that Tabuteau-trained oboist Harold Gomberg, playing with a haunting beauty as if his life depended on it. Behold then a Tiffany window of a performance, a necklace of perfectly set gems. Gentle as can be is the arboreal theme at Letter A, the second theme at D seems to swim like a time-taking sylph, and the great legato sequences overlapping in upper and lower strings later in the exposition, poco f espressivo says their composer, are no less delightfully aquatic. Mellifluous as well, but not too much so, are the violins in tempo ma piu tranquillo after the great horn solo in the recapitulation, vibrant, confident, patient.

It’s in the second movement, though, that Reiner’s textbook balances and palpable but subtle rubati with their solemn-saucy little lilts are at their richest. See how in the second full bar the sometimes steamrolling cellos marked poco f are not allowed to compromise the curling crescendo of the bassoons who’ve come to the party with something to say as well. And as the cellos go enchantingly on and on and on (“this reminds me of another story,” it could almost be, and I’m not complaining!) Reiner within a framework of rhythmic crispness lets the tempo drift just a little with an enriching virus of asymmetry, pausing slightly, for instance, before the upbeat final eighth in bar 4 (here he’s entering the magnetic field of a soon-to-be-established piano for the cellos, they’re confiding in the corner, so to speak) and there are more exquisite mini-shadings of this sort a little further on. Which, by the way, rather remind me of the piano playing of the much-extolled Richard Goode.

Well, as Reiner used to tell his incoming pupils at Curtis Institute in the Thirties, “Conducting is basically a simple business as long as the tempo doesn’t change, any fool can beat time evenly.” So he went ahead, his biographer Philip Hart reports, and set his students conducting operatic recitatives! And, in a perfect matchup with that Egmont video, Reiner would tell them — Lukas Foss, Boris Goldovsky, young Lennie Bernstein — that the only general rule in conducting is “to infuse all gestures with precision, clarity, and vitality.” Very interesting, meanwhile, to read that a look into Reiner’s personal score of Brahms’ Second after his death found, in German and English, “fanciful programmatic comments.” So of course, it wasn’t all style.

Time now for an alphabet of Reiner performances on disc, starting with J.S. BACH. This was a composer for whom he obviously had fond feelings even if there wasn’t much in the way of repertoire for a full Chicago or Pittsburgh Symphony. The solution was chamber sessions in New York with favorite free lance musicians that netted us all the orchestral suites and Brandenburg concertos. Yes, the cover photo on one of Reiner’s Bach albums reveals what his Met assistant Tibor Kozma called an “almost menacing elemental temperament” (blended, to be sure, with “an immensely disciplined intellect”) but these Bach performances out of a mid-century Manhattan studio are so full of charm they suggest a kind of drawing room comedy of sound. A different charm, say, from Sir Thomas Beecham’s rather coy variety, but charm nonetheless. My ever-expanding hi-fi ark headed for that tropic island will certainly have to include Reiner’s FIRST BRANDENBURG (10-28-49) which slips in out of some baroque nowhere with light short steps. To shift our metaphor outdoors you could call the opening allegro a road trip, notes tramping, phrases soaring. Was Kerouac ever like this? For Reiner-watchers ever concerned about a possibly too cool reading on his temperature chart — which reminds of the gag about George Szell: “when he had a fever it reached 89 degrees” – they needn’t worry because the adagio movement, with Reiner’s partner-in-warmth Robert Bloom serenading us on his elegant oboe, is heartfelt and then some. Another snappy allegro and then like happy cats swiveling on our furry backs we can snuggle in a minuet taken here at a reverential adagio, with the second trio a cradle song predicting Brahms!

BARTOK CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA, Chicago Symphony 10-22-55 – Reiner was Hungarian and that helps, I imagine, but it’s mainly because Reiner is Reiner that this performance is the most engaging in my memory, supple, organic, maximally melodic, absolutely swinging when appropriate, and somehow more human and funnier than some of its more solemn brethren.

BEETHOVEN EROICA SYMPHONY, Chicago Symphony, 12-4-54 – Luminous, sonorous, squeaky clean, amply heroic, Beethoven’s crucial horns given their full buzzy due, this is the perfect performance for days when you’re not in the mood for a gloriously “neurotic” Eroica a la Mengelberg or Fried. Connoisseurs of tempo should be advised that Reiner takes the scherzo about sixteen charming beats to the minute faster than its timid author prescribed. The most interesting passage is the finale’s great poco andante where Reiner in setting up a characteristic “control” tempo against which rubati and ritenuti may be placed proposes a brisker oboe solo than we encounter in some of the most emotionally charged Eroicas in the annals, only to slow palpably for the dusky response of low-placed strings eight measures on. And a dozen bars after that the leaning sequences of we-must-get-on-with-it violins are remarkably plaintive.

BEETHOVEN PASTORAL SYMPHONY, Chicago Symphony, April 1961 – I’ve long had a soft spot for this recording especially thanks to the low-stress grazioso of a first movement pitched at about 54/53 rather than Beethoven’s thrill-ride 66 beats to the arriving-in-the-countryside minute. Thanks perhaps to Reiner’s revealing immaculateness of rhythm, the veiled oom-pah-pah of a pair of adenoidal muted cellos engaging at the outset of the Scene by the Brook in an asymmetrical legato suggests nothing so much as the slightly compromised breathing of a brookside swain. Tempos, tempos: well, the picnic scene works at 92 rather than the composer’s 108, similarly the storm at 88 vs. 80, and the finale at 66/69 vs. 60! But enough of numbers.

BRAHMS ACADEMIC FESTIVAL OVERTURE, Curtis Institute Orchestra at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 11-28-37 – We interrupt for a few biographical notes . . . A precocious leading conductor at the Dresden Opera during the Great War, Reiner landed a solid post as musical director of the Cincinnati Symphony in 1922 and had an excellent run in this very musical and Germanic city,  until a rather hasty jump from second to third wife propelled the powers-that-be in this also very conservative town into tizzy mode — and out went Reiner with no other big symphonic post in prospect. So, until he took over the virgin Pittsburgh Symphony in ’38 his base position, kingly but obscure, was professor of conducting and head of the student orchestra at the top drawer Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, with passing opera gigs at not very exalted fees in London and San Francisco along with one creative season of well-remembered but budget-sinking opera in conjunction with the Philadelphia Orchestra, musical directorship of which Reiner was unable to achieve when Leopold Stokowski relinquished it . . .  And here at the Met in Thanksgiving season 1937 is the Curtis orchestra, loaded with first-chairs-to-be, doing the bidding of a near-demonic piper who sees the Academic Festival Overture as virtual symphonic poem, brooding tragically one minute in (well, it was written as a kind of companion piece to the Tragic overture), constructing a very mighty iambic fortress several measures after that, and fairly throttling us with Jubilation at the eight minute mark. When I first heard this live recording some years ago I focused on its startling crispness and exhilaration, enough it seemed to reach the Astor Hotel down the street. And when I returned to it recently I wondered if I was over-listening to hear in it a thread of serious anger, for here is this conductor who knows he’s great and lives at 815 Park Avenue in Manhattan but has to commute to Philly to teach and conduct, well yes, wonderful students, but students nevertheless. Reiner’s career like the maverick writer Nabokov’s might have advanced more quickly if he hadn’t had a reputation of being more amazing than the next fellow, and therefore a magnificent threat.

BRAHMS FOURTH SYMPHONY, Royal Philharmonic, October 1962 – Not as immediately fetching as his live Brahms Second with the New York Philharmonic, this recording does contain much interpretive magic. The opening movement, propulsive, a bit restless, not without intimacy but a tad dry, is more a Chablis than a California Chardonnay. But with Reiner there are always pocket phraseological Shangri-La’s, enchanting moments of pure Beauty one remembers like an outrageously pretty girl glimpsed across a too-wide street. Zoom to measure 242 where Reiner, having injected one bar previous his own Moment-preparing diminuendo in the first clarinet’s mooning eighths, treats us to an instant Sieglindan pathos in the violas descending to the murky triple piano of the next bars, bars in a lyrical halfway house poised one step closer to the mysterious measures paving the way to Brahms’ tidal recapitulation. Then in the second movement, Reiner seeming to warm more and more to his task (he was not, by the way, in the best of health) produces in the second subject the most fetching blend of legato cellos with first violins whose rest-interrupted line suggests in this recording more than ever a tip-toeing from garden stone to stone.

DEBUSSY, AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, NUAGES, FETES, members of the New York Philharmonic, playing anonymously for a record club release, 11-22-38 – No surprise that a conductor of such finesse, and dramatic sensibility, as Reiner should be a capital Debussyan. His full-blooded Faun is indolently expectant, erotically enflamed, and the balance between flute and harp is perfect too. Nuages begins in an atmosphere of doubt, the pathétique element seeping into it from Debussy’s famous opera about wispy star-crossed lovers soon apparent. Then in the festive six minutes that follow Reiner seems always to have adopted an ultra-snappy tempo — Debussy simply asks at the start for animation and precise rhythm. The ‘38 version verges on textbooky without an audience but a “live” replay from Chicago 3-13-57 is absolutely possessed, all throbbing glands and debonair percussion out of some midnight St-Tropez of the conductorial mind . . . and GERSHWIN/ROBERT RUSSELL BENNETT, A SYMPHONIC PICTURE OF PORGY AND BESS, Pittsburgh Symphony, 3-27-45 – In one word, Wow! Reiner could easily be mistaken for Lennie Bernstein or Michael Tilson Thomas in this expansive-hilarious-utterly idiomatic recording out of smoky old Pittsburgh. At the risk of sounding analytical this commentator must enumerate for your attention the sweetness and ample languor of Reiner’s albeit tasteful Summertime, the rum-tum twang of his banjo-ist in I’ve Got Plenty of Nuttin’, and best of all perhaps, the deep fried vibrato of the strings in Bess You Is My Woman Now.

LISZT, MEPHISTO WALTZ, Chicago Symphony, 12-10-55 – We were crowing about the Weingartner version of this dazzling bit of Faustiana some pages back, and it does remain rather a gem, but with Reiner of Mephistophelean brow on the podium this is a performance of much more fizz, buzz, intensity. Proper Weingartner for all his delicacy and perfume manages to skimp on eroticism, while out of Chicago pours an undisguised voluptuousness. In the central section the curves and coyness of Lenau’s “shy and black-haired maiden” are clearly discernible.

MAHLER FOURTH SYMPHONY, Chicago Symphony, December 1958 – Here it is, the essential Reiner, equal parts structural engineer and unashamed poet, the diagrammarian with a taste for the Dionysian. Yes, there generally was in his style that element of calculation noted by good Mr. Thomson in the Herald Tribune – Reiner was the sort of fellow all we sweaty-palmed flyers need to drive an Airbus 320 right through an invasive flock of birds and on up to the desired 39,000 feet. But the emotional range was wide, and the two worked together: providing a neat cushion (or well greased rails?) for poetry could make the poetry all the clearer. The same with terror! The opening movement is very light, sleek as aluminum, and playful to be sure, moving delicate threads of melody to the ticky rhythm, it seems, of toy clocks. The great slow movement begins in autumnal/reverential mode and duly achieves a silvery Elysian airiness. Tears ensue. Then Reiner the calculator brings maximum drama to the cataclysmic whacks of the timpani near the end of this movement because the percussion is so FOCUSED – a Bruno Walter live performance picked at random, 1-4-53 in New York, is at this parlous moment haphazard in comparison, although a performance of many subtleties and charms.

MOZART, THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, Metropolitan Opera (with Cesare Siepi, etc.), 3-1-52 – Crisp and sparkling. Notice how Figaro’s measuring stick dances in the opening duet, then the pinpoint chords in Se Vuol Ballare, the echt-sonorous marching-out-the-door of Cherubino at the end of Act 1, the seemingly growling strings as the Count in the second act commands Susanna to emerge from that closet. Etc, etc. Between his Pittsburgh and Chicago posts Reiner had found a spotlight at the Met: we ancients all remember his Salome, Fliegende Hollander, Falstaff – more on that in a moment . . . and RACHMANINOFF, RHAPSODY ON A THEME OF PAGANINI, with William Kapell and the Robin Hood Dell (Philadelphia) Orchestra, 6-27-51 – No problem, of course with the inspired Kapell, but what I especially treasure in this performance is that in variation 3 you can really hear the fluttering — like the rustling of party skirts — in the flute department . . . and RAVEL, DAPHNIS AND CHLOE SUITE NO. 2, Columbia Broadcasting Symphony, 9-2-45 – From the great days when there was either the New York Philharmonic or this broadcast orchestra on the radio Sunday daytime the full year around  — “Good afternoon!” Gene Hamilton would intone on the dot, and especially in the summer excellent maestri from the “provinces” would be in Manhattan to do their stuff. A fabulous if not Chicago-plush performance, rippling, iridescent and indolent in the Daybreak scene, and startlingly, spellbindingly slow in the Pantomine section wherein Reiner drops anchor at a yawning, shrugging, mate-nibbling 60 eighths-to-the-minute, more or less, rather than the 104 (!) of his old friend the composer himself. A post-coital larghissimo to shut out the world. Do Not Disturb!

RIMSKY KORSAKOFF, SCHEHERAZADE, Chicago Symphony, 2-8-60 – Couturier Rimsky this, silken and sexy, like chamber music in the relatively private innings of this concerto for orchestra . . . next I must point you to a newsy bit in a STRAUSS, DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION with the RCA Victor Symphony 9-27-50, an extremely guarded tempo for the post-introduction allegro molto agitato, Reiner taking the view that the five pages of miniature score leading to the big alla breve at Letter F constitute an uphill swim, requiring what you might call an “approach tempo” . . . and  STRAVINSKY, DIVERTIMENTO FROM THE FAIRY’S KISS, Chicago Symphony, 4-28-58 – “Stravinsky made a god of the eighth note, but I don’t.” So commented Fritz Reiner who liked some of Stravinsky’s music a lot but knew it sounded better with more line so to speak than just the choo-chooish  movement its composer cued from many a podium onto which he used to leap with such alacrity. So I would go with this lilting, glowing Stravinsky from Michigan Avenue.

TCHAIKOVSKY, PATHETIQUE SYMPHONY, Chicago Symphony, 4-17-57 – A revelation is the organic drama of this performance, the despair of the introduction for instance easing so logically into a cautious, reserved allegro non troppo which remains in that state until the famous second subject. And no less remarkable is its oceanic orchestral foundation, a thing of Roaring surge and Mighty whoosh, as in the largamente triple forte of tremolo basses in that great set piece for a near-convulsing but very mellow super-orchestra just before (we’re still in movement 1) the recapitulation of the proto-Hollywoodian second subject. I’m reminded of that remark by our old friend Nabokov: “The books [substitute music here] you like must also be read with shudders and gasps” . . . and VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, FANTASIA ON A THEME BY THOMAS TALLIS, Chicago Symphony “live,” 11-28-57 – Sadness here smooth as cream. We could be meditating by a sunlit window in an English country church.

VERDI, FALSTAFF, Metropolitan Opera (with Leonard Warren, Giuseppe di Stefano, et al), 2-26-49 – There is something of a history of conductors from north of the Brenner taking to this caviar opera, a contrapuntalist’s dream wherein at least one combination of 6/8 and alla breve must be taken in stride along with a final fugue of fugues. I have fond teenage memories of William Steinberg applying to Verdi’s score a forcefully shaking bald head and the hypnotic arabesques of his nimble wrists, down there in the San Francisco Opera pit with only a blank sheet of white paper on his lectern. Bruno Walter in the centennial year of 1913 took time out from stock in trade Mozart-Wagner-Strauss to treat his Munich audiences to numerous performances of Verdi’s masterwork. And you may remember from some pages back in these adventures the felicitous Leipzig Falstaff of Hans Weisbach in ’39 . . . Which brings us to this radiant Reiner matinee, exceedingly crisp, as vital as you’d expect, comedy-ready without a doubt in its concentrated shades of unctuousness, coquettishness, the amorous, the conspiratorial: it comes as no surprise no stone is left unturned on its road to total scintillation. Why, the scampering-in of the pageboy midway in scene 1 has in Reiner’s Manhattan fiddles the perfection of a Lully dance. The orchestra is an imp in dandy dress.

WAGNER, TRISTAN UND ISOLDE, Royal Opera Covent Garden, with Flagstad, Melchior, etc., “live” 5-18-36 (but prelude to act 1 is 6-2-36) – Craftsmanship with soul! Notice in act 1 the innocent, quietly persistent movement of the almost jolly Sea theme, Tristan’s care not to lag as he tells Isolde in their first and formal encounter “the journey will soon be over,” the attention to passing staccati like dancing reflections on water, and legati that warm the orchestra navigating a salty course. But most remarkable in the slightly more than hour-and-a-quarter of this opening act is the generalship of a conductor who balances calm and heat in exquisite proportions. And at a paltry fee of 66 pounds sterling for an evening’s work! Act 1 is of course a dance of veils with the TRUTH the naked thing to be duly revealed. Reiner knows he musn’t burn too many expressive bridges on the long route to a bull’s eye of dramatic climax, the point at which Tristan and Isolde drink the potion, embrace, and are released to the truth of their feelings. He has on the stage before him a heroine who shuttles from a core stateliness to near-hysteria, she is quelque chose and she musn’t drown in her own lava. At the risk of binge-ing on the epigrammatic let’s put it this way: Reiner creates a real time in which the act seems to heat up at a rate more or less precisely equaling the increase in risk, via a combination of will and fate, confronting Isolde and friend. But that, a famous and eccentric professor of Russian literature would say, is Tolstoyian!

The act 1 prelude from June 2, presumably similar to that of two weeks earlier, is an exceedingly clever piece of work. It begins in intimo-pathetico mode, slightly clouding with doubt as Reiner carefully lapses into his subtle retardation trick: the music is amorous enough but sober, dignified. Well, this is the negative space on Reiner’s canvas which before we know it will be invaded by what’s really on the music’s mind. Sex! Amazingly enough in hearing this prelude hundreds of time I never realized until Reiner’s clarity of purpose outlined it so vividly here that the road to the music’s climax – and I use the word climax innocently for the moment – is in point of fact the road to that other sort of climax, the one involving consciousness-raising Orgasm. As if some pre-ejaculatory fluid smartly making its way along the long corridor of arousal were driving the Royal Opera Orchestra in that oldtime Coronation (excuse me, Abdication) year, this lubricant captures for our amusement in deft crescendo the gradual but absolutely favorable approach to the great Moment of a heated male who will, with the help of appropriate music and an energizing maestro, achieve his goal. To anyone who has co-habited, the energy here suggests a quite satisfactory outcome.

ACT 2, TRISTAN, San Francisco Opera, with Flagstad and Melchior again, in Los Angeles, 11-15-37, “live” – After the home season ended the SFO would take a midnight train down the coast to L.A., poker games afire as the Southern Pacific ambled along Mr. Steinbeck’s valley. Then instead of rehearsing between performances the company could sit by the hotel pool. Presumably the aquatically inclined Dr. Reiner took some dips. Whether or not there’s a correlation with all this laidbackness, this second act from Figueroa Street opens in quite a different tone from its Covent Garden counterpart of the year previous. While Reiner in London comes on as an elegant snake, the sinuous Mayfairian carrier of nocturnal illicit passion, the identical podium hawk let loose in the Wild West is a veritable tiger, his introduction more urgent, enflamed, even slightly jagged. Wagner’s poco accelerando crescendo going into the eighteenth bar is perceptibly more tenacious than on Bow Street back across the Atlantic. But hark, subtleties abound! Very instructive, this performance, in what it tells of the interaction between a “dictator” of the baton and an idiosyncratic singer like Kathryn Meisle whose white voice rode the thinnest line of intonational purity but who interpreted the role of Brangaene with such zest for nuance it could be lieder. Reiner admits readily to the orchestral bloodstream Meisle’s dainty but magnificently provocative sotto voce, clearly he relishes the shadowy shadings of this Brangaene who in her great warning speech early in the act pulls back, at the mention of spy (meaning Melot), to a slightly delayed piano more naked and conspiratorial than I ever remember hearing it, fairly taking a Wagnerian half note for a dance in her nimble, secretive head tone. Sui generis!

And there are other Wagner broadcasts with their encyclopedias of felicities from which to drink: — an incomplete list would point you to the uniquely springy glide of the PARSIFAL Transformation Scene as relayed from Covent Garden spring of ’37 . . .  then the deep and delicious lyric pang Reiner teases from his principal oboe midway in the MEISTERSINGER third act Quintet, that great island of a set piece – now we’re at the re-launched Vienna Opera in May ‘55, a minute and twenty seconds into this ensemble – this pang transpiring on the top of a leaning two-note afterthought-of-a-phrase, under which the composer has marked the descending half of a “hairpin” (you can picure a little arrow) with its not-always-detected implication of an accent at the start, and I must also tell you that we’re a bar and a half into a poco rallentando espressivo and Eva surrounded as she is by loving swain and loving mentor too has begun to muse on the meaning of her joy; then in the next scene as the meister approach the rostrum Vienna’s seriously energized Philharmoniker flickers like strobe lights at a disco . . . and for fifty years I’ve been savoring the unique head tone of the low-lying entrance of deep-breathing strings beginning their mellifluous sequence of legato sighs at the first piano of the stormy Act 2 prelude to Die Walkuere (the lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde are fleeing the dreadful Hunding), Reiner’s haunting gesture occurring in the justly celebrated San Francisco broadcast of 11-13-36 featuring as never happened elsewhere both Kirsten Flagstad and Lotte Lehmann. Those sighs, crumbs of amorous remembrance, boast curves upon which no Vogue model or Playboy bunny could improve.

And oh in that Meistersinger, the dizzying blizzard of Eva’s delight when her Stolzing turns up in Act 2. Five star stuff. Here, my friends, the greybeards of the Philharmoniker are “immersed” in what a famous and rather daring author, in the totally different context of a certain deliriously lyrical novel, would call “the euphoria of release.” And I’ve missed something else extraordinary-and-then-some, the Reiner/Chicago Isle of the Dead of Rachmaninoff — Sibelius’ dashing Lemminkainen would shred half his libido to get to this Michigan Avenue island where the music is so buoyantly/rapturously orgasmic as to set a new standard in such matters. The best music to do it with I’ve found yet. And what about Reiner’s prancing, loose-limbed, nose-thumbing, incomparably leggiero Peter and the Wolf of Prokofieff (with his old San Francisco Siegmund Lauritz Melchior as narrator!), a performance that moves like a quick-witted child.

And now a question: who is it that adds an addictive lap-slapping snare drum to the fourth act prelude of Bizet’s Carmen (Met broadcast 1-31-53)? Reiner of course. Formidable!

1888-1965

A face noble and Northern, austere but harboring perhaps a chink of humor, a face that looked as if a sculptor had just finished it, leaving a loose ringlet of hair to fall against the tall forehead met by high cheekbone. Yes, a face that suggested a military tunic belonged just below it rather than the perennial bow tie and, in rehearsal pictures at least (not that he liked to rehearse that much!) a prominent pair of suspenders. But while Knappertsbusch, or Kna as he was called in the trade, could growl like the most stentorian of parade ground sergeants – and his vocabulary of scarcely printable epithets wasn’t paltry either – such behavior was to a large extent façade. Kna spoke roughly, the great bass baritone Hans Hotter remembers, but with a twinkle; he was bluntly direct, but scrupulously fair; and beneath the rather alarming exterior performers in his charge found an unsuspected gentleness. Courtly, cussing Knappertsbusch’s dry sense of humor left a trail of anecdotes that follows him still in assorted memoirs. One records too that his obstinate integrity got him in hot water with the Nazis and out of a job as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, a post in which he succeeded Bruno Walter in the early Twenties. So he took his music off to Vienna, performances reflecting both his craggy exterior and the rather soft center inside.

Often with a Kna performance the ear is taken along a hard-surfaced musical line, a sort of orchestral pan forte, but likely as not it’s modulated by emotional warmth and a friendliness of spirit. Then there’s his tendency to keep the music alert with an extra sforzando or two: a crack in the surface can make a design! His performances were full of wonderful little passing gestures of color or dynamics that might be missed if one wasn’t paying attention.  He was, of course, never preaching an orchestral Style. As Wieland Wagner, the great enfant terrible of postwar Bayreuth put it, Kna didn’t do, he just was. There are no great operatic tempo systems a la Furtwaengler, although Kna would, occasionally, set a Moment on the expressive pedestal of a considerable ritenuto.

A good example occurs in his Vienna Philharmonic recording of Bruckner’s Fourth from the 1950s. While Furtwaengler in Stuttgart ranges well up and down the metronome to convey his vision of such diverse Brucknerian elements as the soulful-pastoral horn call at the outset, the rather combative octaves at Letters A and D, the somewhat leisurely of the theme at B which is said to refer to chickadees, then the poetical downward scale pointing toward the development at G – you can find him at 60, 76, 60, 88 and 48 beats to the changeable minute – Knappertsbusch transacts all this expressive business between half = 63 and 72, except that he permits a wispy variation on that downward scale to be frozen at a lovely and very low-lying 40 (!) to the minute, pathos-bright. This is bars 209-217, highlighting flute and clarinet and to be played, Bruckner notes, calmly.

Which brings us to an anecdote: Furtwaengler and the beret-sporting Ludwig Suthaus, the Tristan of their 1952 studio recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra, were having a conversation about breathing in slow tempos, and Furtwaengler is alleged to have said, with his own twinkle under bushy eyebrow, “Go and try singing this under Knappertsbusch in Munich [postwar, that is], he’s even slower than I am.” But Kna’s Wagner timings can now and again be shorter — remember, too, that a longer timing of a performance by any rubato-savvy conductor might reflect the cooking up of several creeping passages with almost as many that are relatively swift. Kna’s tempos for Tristan and friends while adhering quite carefully to Wagner’s numerous calls for acceleration and retardation do average a little slower than those in what for want of a better term we might call “normal” performances, but such mathematical comparisons mean nothing in the face of the urgency of his 1950 Munich Tristan. Here from the start is the agony and the warmth of this ever-fascinating tale, culminating in a My God, What Have We Done? welling out of the Prinz Regenten pit as act 1 stumbles to its final questioning note in a splintering euphony, the potion drunk, the fate of the lovers sealed. This is a fluid, conversational, echt-organic Tristan, practical and domestic rather than lofty and stylized in the Furtwaengler mode, human rather than spiritual, muscular yes but without the streaming Furtwaenglerian weight that remains, in that London studio under the perfectionist eye of the producer Walter Legge, forever statuesque. Mischievous footnote: I sat near Legge at dinner in Zurich once — in two words, he HELD COURT. But onward! Dangerous, sinuous and rapturous is Knappertsbusch’s unfolding of the second act and we can only thank this slow conductor for zipping through the “optional” pages leading to the meat of the lovers’ great duet, pages these which are an integral part of the composer’s concept to be sure but can if not handled succinctly wear out singers and listeners alike.

Now the roll call of Knappertsbusch’s discography. Almost without exception the composers he attended to were main line Austro-Germanic and substantial: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Richard Strauss, Wagner. Meat, potatoes, gravy. But there is a William Tell Overture from 1928 with a delightful hunting horn atmosphere in that sizzling finale associated in the minds of oldsters with ye Lone Ranger. And the Nutcracker Suite, a 1950s recording out of Vienna, why this is a gem from first to last. Note an overture with short, mincing steps, full of anticipation, a naughty boy skip, and a deliciously nonchalant Chinese Dance. The icing on this Christmas cake is a Waltz of the Flowers in which the harp’s preamble is in its windup measures as crisp as Knappertsbusch’s entrance into the orchestra pit, which usually took the form of giving the downbeat a surprising several seconds before welcoming applause had fully receded. The efficient ripple here is a deadpan foil to an oom-pah-pah entering with ravishing lightness and an accent on the second syllable so keenly Viennese even a symphonic Professor Higgins might misplace its author’s Westphalian roots.

And the list of lolli-kna-pops would be incomplete without mention of the diffident cello and demure winds at the opening of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, an event peopled by chattering woodwind chaperones while half-lunging violins beg for recognition.

On to Beethoven! Now the Knappertsbusch listener who associates this conductor primarily with, say, the 1951 Bayreuth Parsifal in which tempos can lie embedded in a sort of lirico-ethereo cement, well, that listener might be surprised to encounter the lightness, charm and a considerable ration of briskness in his Beethoven Pastoral with the Dresden Staatskapelle. Hey, this could be Clemens Krauss or Franz Schalk at the helm, old style Viennese as can be, the rhythm maybe just a wee bit loose? The glory, of course, is in the details. First movement, a confiding poco diminuendo (it’s not in the score) just after the bar 4 fermata sets the tone of tenderness. This movement, by the way, runs in the fast pack, averaging pretty near a folksy-feisty 60 beats to the minute. Then melt in the Scene by the Brook to a series of Knappertsbuschian felicities: at bar 13 the tremble of vibrant and generous tone in a benedictory moment for the first violins (Beethoven marked it dolce) with the woodwinds and horns having melted away to give them a brief spotlight pastorale; then, in bar 28, as the music moves ardently toward the movement’s second key, a subtle and lovely diminuendo (not in the score!) at the top of an upward arpeggio in those busy first violins. As the late John Updike might have put it, Kna is falling into the crannies of the music. Such unnotated diminuendi are intimacy enhancers, great little boons to love scenes such as this. And how rarely conductors take the risk. Of the scores of conductors I’ve encountered in the Pastoral only Knappertsbusch and Erich Kleiber have skirted the dynamic straight and narrow on that enchanting page containing bar 28. Oh yes, Tommy Beecham too, with the RPO, but the arpeggio-perpetuo element of this movement he seems to find exceedingly boring and his brook wins no Michelin stars.

The Picnic movement of the Pastoral Knappertsbusch initiates at Beethoven’s marking, dotted half = 108, and the composer’s presto before the nastily intruding storm is absolutely taken at its word and-then-some. The Storm itself, running considerably FASTER than the composer’s marking, extremely BIG and URGENT, is obviously modeled on a Wagnerian tempest, the Wagnerian tempest Beethoven predicted! One’s tempted to say only a conductor frequently in the pit for Die Walkuere could send us running for cover from such an exciting show of thunder/wind/rain/the works. Yes, I will take Knappertsbusch and Stokowski to the desert island in this music. The tension is so great that in what you might call Beethoven’s “aftershocks” passage Kna conjures a kind of sigh or moan midway in bar 141, on the syncopation-like diminuendo of violins and violas. And then, as if to prove to followers of received wisdom that this is the familiar SLOW Knappertsbusch after all, he takes the hummy roll of melody in the Thanksgiving movement at 50 rather than the composer’s 60 beats to the post-storm minute.

The time-taking Kna returns in a forceful Beethoven Fifth, “live” from Berlin in 1956. The opening movement is passionate, endangered, sculpted with a metallic grandeur and pathos, the three-dots-and-a-dash taking in their instrumental exchanges alternate voices of pleading and compassion. An almost laughably vigorous delivery of the lower strings’ churning counterpoint in the third movement trio, sounding a good notch above Beethoven’s forte, brings a smile: this could be Kna the giant imp at work.

Then the best of all. In the last phase of the snaking transition to the grand finale, that sinuous limbo, just after bar 350, Kna takes Beethoven’s sempre pianissimo of finger-tapping timpani and meandering violins and lowers it to his own personal ppp, as if to squeeze the music through some exquisite needle of near-silence, the last kilometer of a tunnel of expectancy, an End of the Endurance so to speak, before the parade ground sunshine of the Big Bang allegro to come. Or perhaps he just liked the sound of that diminuendo! At all events the effect is rather like Willem Mengelberg taking a significant breath before launching into the climax of the Lohengrin prelude on an old Columbia 78.

Knappertsbusch’s Eroica? Interesting that in two broadcast performances, Munich/50 and Bremen/51, he sets forth even more slowly than Late Studio Klemperer, staying mostly in this ballpark of high spaciousness but finding with the exultancies of the recapitulation a good excuse to ease the tempo significantly while not jarringly upward. Impulse or design? Probably the latter. Even in the case of a conductor who felt strongly that rehearsing with its tendency toward boring the players, and himself of course, should be held to a minimum.

More creative interpretation in a 1958 Schubert Unfinished broadcast with the orchestra of the Munich Opera. It comes out of nowhere, rather in the manner of the third act of Meistersinger, other music in these players’ fingers and souls. Under wraps this Unfinished proceeds, veiled, guarded, exceedingly poetical-romantical. And then, thanks to broad pacing and 10-out-of-10 intensity, with shiny shafts of trademark Knappertsbuschian orchestral artillery, the development builds to a GREAT LAMENT. But what’s most interesting about this performance is that by emphasizing the moderato in the posted allegro moderato of Schubert’s first movement, and the con moto of the composer’s andante con moto in the second, Knappertsbusch with a slower-than-usual movement 1 and a faster-than-usual movement 2 re-invents this sawed-off while hugely viable symphony as a virtual Introduction and Allegro, or, in emotional terms, Tragedy and Release, with one big weight removed. No chance here of these near-twin movements running together like stew and salad on the same bowl-like plate.

Special delight: the hummily curving line of Kna’s lovingly melodioso phrasing at the start of movement 2. Unique!

And for more in the sui generis department: step back to 1925 and an early electrical recording of Haydn’s 92^nd in which a slightly cloying but engaging introduction gives way to an allegro spiritoso so urgently “on point” in its phrasing as to evoke a hyperventilating lover. Pacing is fast here but not as fast as Kna’s inflection suggests. After this ants-in-the-pants exhibition the succeeding adagio unfolds very slowly, con amore, almost a Mendelssohn nocturne . . . Next off my pile of Knappertsbuschiana is a Bach Third Suite with Vienna Philharmonic players dating from the month the Allies were hitting the Normandy beaches. Hounded out of Munich by the Nazis in ’36, Kna had retreated to the sympho-operatic heaven of the Ringstrasse and environs where he could conduct in relative peace. Rather big band Bach, of course, done with the jolly determination of a podium hunk. The famous air is andante vibratissimo, and the bourrée unusually broad, sly and perky, becoming so festive it might be the recessional in a wedding ceremony. And come to think of it, my new wife and I, prompted by a young baroque musicologist friend, marched out some years ago to the finale of Bach’s Wedding Cantata. Nothing more logical than that!

Now I’m listening to a 1952 Schumann Fourth with the Munich Philharmonic. Kna’s broad and jaunty way with the finale echoes his festive treatment of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth, and thinking about this connection one can’t help wondering if Schumann wasn’t using Beethoven as a model here: sinuous transition, brassy finale, great zebras of churning notes a la the Third Leonore Overture toward symphony’s end . . . More fast Knappertsbusch tempos to report, the finale for instance of a Mozart Jupiter ”live” from Vienna in 1941. His 1929 studio recording of Mozart’s 39^th with the Berlin Staatskapelle opens with an introduction absolutely majestic while almost falling over itself, full to the brim with sweetly bounding flourishes. And movement 2, nominally an andante: Kna’s courtly and decidedly up-tempo performance is so refreshing as to suggest a dance out of Pride and Prejudice.

And now we come to Brahms, perhaps Knappertsbusch’s greatest glory as much or more than his famous erector sets of Wagner where knee-jerk snailish tempos (remember of course he wasn’t always slow in this canon) can lose their rationale — why, Fricka berating Wotan in slow motion is a non-starter! Knappertsbusch shared with Brahms a personality blended with grit and warmth, a taste for big-bone musical structures and no-nonsense behavior, so they were truly made for each other and it often shows. Although truth to say the first Kna Brahms I pulled off the shelf, a Fourth Symphony from Cologne 1953, claims a rather plain Jane first movement. This is not Brahms in the Max Fiedler/Oskar Fried lane, the tempo struck is characteristically a little broad and frequently maintained. To paraphrase modern jargon, “It’s the simplicity, stupid” – excuse me, readers, that does not apply to you! So Kna like some accomplished footballer has run around the left or right end of those complex and highly dramatical interpretations that can be wonderfully interesting and moving, coming up instead with something anti-sissy, anti-geeky, possibly anti-Freudian?

But there’s a haunting moment at bar 258, the quiet tidal recapitulation about to begin and Kna, as if briefly lingering to imbibe the beauty of a pretty Bavarian damsel, pauses just that extra Max Fiedlerish amount to make the actual sounding of the recapitulation when it does come in all the juicier. And then more Moments! With the warm-throated recapitulation of the second movement’s ever-flo second theme Kna gruffly digs this music out of its hiding place, stern as a judge, but mellow underneath; and when this music takes on greater weight in the score he gathers it into an Elgarian peroration worthy of Nimrod and then some in a jam-packed Royal Albert Hall. Kna is warming to his task, complexity is growing. In the great passacaglia he’s a naughty boy at bar 9, the timpani’s trill into a staccato eighth punctuated with a snappish unscored sforzando on said eighth, BANG! And then we know we’re in for an interesting ride, fevered in fact, sustained and humming hairpins in variation 10 very trembly indeed, the flute in No.12 brisk (!) but plaintive, the espressivo dialogs in 13 Woebegone Plus, the legato arpeggios of sub-brass strings in 14 breast-stroking very slowly upstream, undulous orchestral serfs.

Brahms’ Third Symphony was, I’m told, Knappertsbusch’s special favorite, he wanted the slow movement played at his funeral. To say that his Stuttgart Radio broadcast of the Third from late 1963 is a remarkable piece of work is, I think, an understatement, because here is music translated into the journey of a soul. The protagonist in that Wuerttemberg studio may have been aware that his earthly days were numbered, and like the proverbial drowning man reviewing his life and hopefully adjusting as-best-he-can to its alternative — only it’s done here in slow motion! — Knappertsbusch conjures his own shall-we-call-it a Liebestod? The heroic grip of the opening of Brahms’ Third came naturally to such a muscular and unhurried conductor as Knappertsbusch, so the epic strength of its jumbo liftoff comes as no surprise. But there’s more, a floating in great waves of resignation, the music clothed in a pathos very close to despair. All is in order, though, and when the recapitulation arrives on the crest of Brahms’ elaborate taxi toward the tonic it’s as if the Gates of Heaven had truly opened, the orchestra is so comforting and golden while necessarily stark.

There are several other Knappertsbusch Brahms Thirds out there, and comparisons (we’re looking closely here at the first movement) are interesting. At the Salzburg Festival in 1955 an eight years younger Kna had the same blueprint of this music in mind but his mind was in a different place, so this performance while strong and scrappy and sometimes warm as fudge right out of the oven is more a performance than the confession of ’63. It is sweeter and more innocent because the man on the podium is not a condemned man! . . . And different circumstances in 1942 when Kna recorded Brahms’ Third in Berlin for Electrola, having presumably taken a rumbling train up from Vienna, past Brno, Prague, Dresden, the great old places, along the innocent Elbe, huddling in a cold compartment surrounded by tired military and Hitchcockian spies perhaps in trench coats out of a modern “Euro Trash” opera production. And you know what, practical happy old Kna had decided to rise above all this and in that Berlin recording session he launched into a Third that’s more Pastoral than Eroica, the mellowest of the lot, far from the maddening war.

This is the Kna who could find a place for the Meistersinger apprentices, well, a reminder thereof, in his Fifties Paris recording of Strauss’ Don Juan, not long after the great oboe scene. And that reminds me: one day in Paris I was innocently walking along Avenue Niel in the Seventeenth and who should be strolling along this leafy boulevard in the other direction, at an implacable tempo moderato causing this pedestrian to weigh the consequences of being run down, but the great Kna himself. He was as natty as ever in his Churchillian bow tie and seemed with his tall superstructure as monumental a figure as an old Cunard liner – or should I say Hamburg Amerika?  He was probably thinking of Brahms. Or how he almost became a philosophy professor. Or was it simply Paris? — about this time in Munich he prepared a notable production of that most un-Germanic of operas, Charpentier’s Louise, a love letter to the city of Gauloises, onion tarts and songwriters’ Aprils.

When the fabled recording producer Fred Gaisberg first experienced the conducting talents of young John Barbirolli, who went on to become quite celebrated indeed, he hailed him as “the English Coppola.” That ebullient imprimatur referred to a very dimly remembered musician who was, in the Twenties and Thirties, the musical director of French HMV. This Piero Coppola, who may have been a very distant cousin of the film figure Francis Ford Coppola, and that fellow’s father the NBC Symphony  flutist Carmine Coppola, was short, bald, very talented, and shy – which could explain his virtually vanishing into the then backwater of Lausanne musicmaking from 1939 on. Where on earth is he, we juvenile collectors of Coppola’s fairly numerous pre-war recordings wondered in the Forties when he was as invisible as the momentarily stalled-in-his-tracks (or is it off-the-rails?) Otto Klemperer.

The Milan-born Piero Coppola had an epiphany when as a young man he heard Debussy conduct, and that could explain the utter conviction of his Paris recordings of the master’s most popular orchestral works. La Mer in Coppola’s hands is a novelistic thing, alive with danger and beauty. The opening movement of Iberia hangs loose, tension and transparency given equal weight, soul featured over glamour, and the rumble and rumination of the succeeding Perfumes of the Night could not be more vivid. Also for the annals is a Schumann Rhenish Symphony which brings the scherzando element to the fore in a lithe, jubilant performance of an opening movement that tends to sound topheavy if its instrumental furniture isn’t toted carefully to our ears – furniture, this, which Schumann sometimes seems to be juggling not unsuspensefully like a sidewalk “maestro” of airborne oranges and apples. Coppola’s ultra-dramatic Cathedral movement, exploring, groping, fairly bursting with suspense, seems to pump at the feisty pedals of some monumental protest.

1887-1964

Some years ago I bought a history of the New York Philharmonic (then Philharmonic Symphony) and the only conductor listed therein I’d never heard of was a Rumanian with the euphonious but stuttery name of George Georgescu. GG’s musicmaking remained a mystery for several decades until I chanced to find a CD devoted to this maestro conducting a program of Richard Strauss. The booklet illustration suggested a French politician, dignified and intellectual, pocket handkerchief flying in a nod to the ways of the boulevardier, and the notes informed us that Georgescu, originally like Toscanini, Barbirolli and Hans Kindler a cellist, had been mentored by Strauss himself and became a pupil of the great Nikisch, as much a magnet for young conductors in the early twentieth century as Alice Waters for Californian chefs two or three generations later.

Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel had figured in Georgescu’s New York engagement in the Twenties (he seems to have turned up in Philadelphia in 1960 as well) and there it was on this intriguing CD, recorded live in Poland in 1956 with the Bucharest Philharmonic, well actually the Bucharest George Enescu Philharmonic. Verging perhaps on the precious now and then, this was still an impressive Till, elegant, fond, transparent. Sly little rubati told us Georgescu could slide gently off a tempo as if it were an unintimidating Balkan log. Death and Transfiguration, done for the Prague Radio in ’54 with the Czech Philharmonic, proved a catalog of dangerous delights. Beginning with the sort of inflection that suggests utter exhaustion. The syncopated-&-tripleted strings of the first page, pp con sordini says the score, almost die out, virtually killing the music’s endangered protagonist (notice, by the way, that in the fifth bar Strauss skips a heartbeat so to speak with a longer rest than the many preceding). Then the lovely oboe solo after Letter B, very tender says Strauss, comes on in a continuing atmosphere of artful hesitation, the CPO’s first oboe keeping the dynamic lid well on and refusing absolutely to rush. Logically enough – although I imagine one could argue otherwise — Georgescu makes a very interesting distinction between the oboe’s pp sehr zart and the first flute’s answering pp dolce, the latter translated, as if this were the dying man’s nurse in freshly laundered white, into a fruitier, healthier sound. Perhaps Georgescu’s thought process hit on the fact that the second flute, soon entering the sickroom under a long note from flute no. 1, is marked just plain piano!

With the giant whack of the allegro molto agitato Georgescu’s strings positively ooze from the depths, the music boiling up with a tension suggesting the great god Furtwaengler or the under-rated Kletzki. And when it diminuendos to the cradle song of Strauss’ meno mosso (p dolce here) the lead flute continues Georgescu’s program of airiness and asymmetry, playing with a frail vibrance, the sound fascinatingly veiled as if behind a curtain, or the aural equivalent of the sedated. Enough, in short, to make one yearn for more Georgescu. Wagner. Mahler. Beethoven. Quite missing, alas – but maybe out there on the web . . . ? Hello, a miracle, the post is bringing me from the snows of Vermont a set of Beethoven symphonies and overtures by our interesting Rumanian. The package is open and here’s the Coriolan overture for a start. Ten out of ten! Pathos, breadth and clarity immediately register, the distinguished gent presiding over his crew of Rumanians is clearly in total command. He signals a wonderful compassion in the second theme, an elegant desperation worthy of T.S. Eliot in the development, he gives us a smooth and touching largamente ride overall. Comrade Nikisch would approve of this sensuous and emotion-savvy performance, sans aucun doute.

The Eroica is pitched at a relaxed hub tempo, with a questioning aura as if perhaps this is the sinfonia eroica perduta. But Georgescu is not lost. Defiance sets in with the famous six chords near exposition’s close. Note the echoes of Furtwaengler in pensive early measures of the development rather rudely awakened by the ensuing fortissimo – from which point the luminous clarity of Beethoven’s contesting upper (busy bee) and lower (rumbling) strings is strikingly felicitous in Georgescu’s hands. With the succeeding funeral march characteristic notes of hesitation and defiance are struck early on. Overall this is a most stately dirge, a seriously slow base tempo maintained or virtually so from minor well into the major section to come, resulting in a near-18 minute timing. Then in the finale the ritenuto-ed and dignifiedly choked-up delivery of the pages following the poco andante oboe scena is not only original but astounding.

Also original: Georgescu’s avuncular allegretto for the first movement allegro con brio of Beethoven’s First, a tempo with a cozy and august grip to it. And marvel at the introduction to his Beethoven Fourth, moving at a tempo so slow, dogged and wary it seems to match perfectly the progress of a prisoner, on all fours one supposes, through a meticulously tunneled and absolutely unofficial exit from his place of incarceration. A Florestan left over from Fidelio perhaps? Or is the image — or how about a film score? — The Creation, murky preparations succeeded at Beethoven’s eventual fortissimo by a blaze of LIGHT! In any case the succeeding allegro vivace could scarcely be chirpier, Nature is having a ball. But the second movement, a great Beethoven adagio that can be read as a love song, Georgescu casts as an ultra-slow and striding marcia funebre, as if it were a varied echo of the Eroica’s great dirge. I also like the comically tenacious clocktick of the second movement of the Eighth: Georgescu has landed in cloud-cuckoo land for sure. Then comes Mr. Speed: the engagingly urgent first movement of the Ninth is a treno rapido, one, though, that brakes for curves. The beginning of the slow movement is halting, rhetorical yet confiding, summoned by a master in the art of multiple suggestion plying his gramophonic trade in this crazy world of Music, “that spectral alternative to language” as one of my favorite writers puts it. As for Georgescu’s Pastoral Symphony: when has the slow movement floated on such a cushion of drowsiness, an enchanting Beethovenian anaesthesia. While the post is piling up on the front hall floor at home!

And we’re left to wonder why this conductor of such obvious charisma and daring isn’t mentioned in the same breath as old Nikisch and Furtwaengler. Quirks of geography and politics, somewhat. Rumania for starters is far to the East. Since the country’s masters during World War II were Nazis Georgescu opted to play ball with them to protect his orchestra; for this the succeeding Communists banned him from public appearances for a number of years. An echo of the ousted Mengelberg! But exile seems not to have impaired in any way the finesse and spot-on drama of Georgescu on his stand.

. . . Meanwhile as our encyclopedic hotbed of conductorial decision-making, nuance-foraging, passion-gathering and so on proceeds I’ve come across a delightful clipping, a budding conductor in San Francisco remarking that “conductors are detectives, looking for little clues as to what the composer wants us to do.” Those clues are often not spelled out, hence the need for Poirots of the podium! . . . And who was it who said that “style (as of conductors) is not imposed on subject matter (the music), but arrives from it.” Think upon it.

1886-1978

Just as Pierre Monteux was closing down his interesting tenure in San Francisco in 1952, his countryman Paul Paray was taking over the imperiled Detroit Symphony for what would be an extended and delightful run, chronicled for the ages with a large shelf of recordings exhilaratingly engineered by Mercury Records with its celebrated trio of stationary microphones out in front of the orchestra, eavesdroppers extraordinaire. Paray and Monteux tend to be paired, a couple of indestructible Frenchmen who took over ailing orchestras and sent them on their way, recording a repertoire almost identical in its embracing of French and Russian repertory, along with just enough Beethoven and Brahms not to get in the way (especially in Monteux’ case at RCA) of very big names inextricably associated with that repertoire. Paray was first at bat with Wagner, a composer dear to Monteux as well. Both recorded Schumann, Paray doing more symphonies but Monteux repeating the Fourth.

Now before I looked into the matter very closely indeed I might, oh dear, have rated Paray a shade lower than Monteux. The Paray style is leaner, plainer if you will, quarters and eighths can be a bit shorter. To borrow a phrase from a favorite novelist, in a Paray performance notes can be heard “in rows as true as surveyors’ lines.” But to say that Paray’s style tends to a certain verticality, a kind of straight-upness of phrase, is to miss the charm and imagination of his musicmaking, its gliding undulant quality that makes him seem at times a French cousin to Felix Weingartner. It helps to see a video: look at the 85-year-old Paray conducting a Paris radio orchestra in Faure’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite, his face highly animated, hand to heart, arms expansive while he stands, like the much chubbier Monteux, mostly in place. No, we are not Lennie or Michael. With the death of Mélisande his eyes float heavenward, there you are! A conversation with the orchestra is clearly Paray’s goal, and the arabesquing, cajoling body lingo of a younger, well theoretically younger man, is his instrument. Bewitching.

Now an alphabetical journey through (mostly) Detroit recordings by Paray:

BEETHOVEN SECOND SYMPHONY – Quite a serioso, even stressful introduction, proto-eroico, with a palpable change of atmosphere when, bar 24, with great nobility, Paray introduces the affecting vignette of the violas and cellos moving up a minor third and down a diminished seventh, a subtle variation, this, on the final notes of the symphony’s very opening clause. In the development of a brisk allegro con brio Paray shakes sequences from the orchestra as gracefully and methodically as an upstairs maid snapping a rug out a window to shed accumulated dust. The slow movement is characteristically dainty and courtly, the scherzo, less fast than some, a regular hen party of mincing conversationalists.

BEETHOVEN PASTORAL SYMPHONY – This classic, done with Paray’s Paris orchestra the Concerts Colonne about 1933 — you can almost hear the honking taxis outside — is a near-forgotten gem. The Arrival in the Country is sunny, even sassy, tempers could be flaring! Paray elbows the music right along while a big step below Beethoven’s famously mad metronome mark of 66 beats to the help-get-me-out-of-here minute. “Come on, mes amis,” the music seems to be indicating, “last one in the swimming hole is a rotten oeuf.” Elegant woodwinds play with great panache and personality by Beethoven’s Brook, contributing to an increasingly passionate scene. The Storm is one of the most alarming, hair-raising ever: strings caught in the path of brass and drums scamper like mice.

BERLIOZ SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (Back in Detroit now) — A more delicate Fantastique, this, than Monteux’ Californian Berlioz, and sharper edged. Exciting it is without a doubt. For this observer the best of all in a springy package is the lilting, wide-awake Scene in the Country which, thanks to pacing fractionally above the 84 beats of the score, is catchier not to speak of more urgent than the norm.

BRAHMS FIRST SYMPHONY (“live” from Detroit 1962) – Something different: a tout droit introduction on a single wave of pathos-inflected energy, with lyric grace aplenty, this giving way in a reversal of the usual slower-to-faster routine to a BROAD allegro carrying a big stick of gravitas. Such spaciousness, reminding a bit of elderly Klemperer, constitutes a zoom up expressivity’s ladder and when the lyric second subject arrives Paray is already in a non-rush mode eminently suitable for the pining easily detectable at this turn of sonata form events. Paray’s reverse engineering has pulled a good tempo right off the rack, clearly avoiding a case of “all dressed up in the intro and nowhere to go in the allegro.” In a passionate second movement Paray secures a hummily vibrant sound while his strings contrive to splinter concurrently with emotion. Perhaps the intermezzo movement is too feathery and urgent, very late for the duchess, but a good foil for the finale, begun in great SADNESS.The famous horn is a knight in shining brass, the big tune friendly, but danger lies ahead . . . Next the BRAHMS FOURTH SYMPHONY – Good adjectives here: undulant, languorous, moonlit. An echo of his “contrary” Brahmsian tempo arrangements in the passacaglia when he pairs relatively propulsive pacing for mellow variations 14 and 15 with a slower-than-usual tempo to follow . . . And we pass by estimable DEBUSSY (check those winged Wayne State Sirens soaring on festive clouds after an exceptionally breezy Festivals!) to: — LISZT, LES PRELUDES – Certainly not as rubber-burning a Les Préludes as many, this one is however as sinuous as can be, intimo grazioso galore, with conversational inflections from sexily delicate winds and snappy brass. Yes, the spirit of Weingartner could be hovering.

RACHMANINOFF SECOND SYMPHONY – A grand, enunciatory and weltschmerzy opening, with an almost demented procession of pizzicati in the lower strings: we’re in a kind of gorgeous wasteland. The allegro moderato is lilting, zephyrean, more svelte than voluptuous. The scherzo verges on the monolithic but remains engaging. In the slow movement the clarinet sings on hopeful breezes. Monteux, they say, didn’t like this highly saleable music much; Paray at times seems truly enthusiastic about its charms and tensions . . . and RAVEL – Paray recorded a shipload of Ravel, all good. This man’s favorite is a Tombeau de Couperin with a windborne Prelude so leggiero as to be almost not there, and a Rigaudon with phrasing that dances on the head of an anorexic pin.

Comparing Paray and Monteux’ Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is a satisfying exercise, especially as both recordings, Paray’s from ’59, Monteux from ’46, while some stylistic miles apart, are ultra engaging. Paray begins in that infinitely leggiero mode, the music bubbling as if a soufflé could dance. And the second waltz out of Michigan is as coy as it is light, dawdling fascinatingly. Monteux enters the ballroom a beefier character, a tad less elegant, but in that second waltz he finds a misterioso element, and as the set proceeds his ardor, depth and capacity in what you might call the role of climax-tician keeps us totally involved. The haunting, heartbreaking finale finds two excellent advocates, Monteux more seriously plaintive, Paray more debonair but scarcely less caring, that light touch from Detroit transporting us into an exquisite ether with possibly orgasmic properties.

RIMSKY KORSAKOFF RUSSIAN EASTER OVERTURE – Motown grooves! Note the dancing allegro soaked it seems in vodka, then the almost jazzy trombone solo, fast and bouncy cum pathos.

Now while General Motors pumped out big-finned Cadillacs for their Ike Age customers Paray attended to SCHUMANN SYMPHONIES — Dialing into Paray’s Schumann Second contented listeners will find a characteristically rhythmic performance, luminous with a stained glass sound pleasantly lean and brassy. Musing and lilting is the gorgeous slow movement, the rather mysterious contrapuntal passage midway along breathing hard in Paray’s poco nervoso mode of mid-movement travel. Good momentum and atmosphere here where both can be lacking! Then the finale, a hearty mobilization of Detroit energies, a real March of Joy. Propulsive while crisply chordal, the opening of Paray’s Rhenish is made from sturdy chunks of orchestral building material, the horn call at the end of the development delightfully brassy. An excellent tempo decision for movement 2, that scherzo marked with maddening imprecision very moderate (a prescription for paralysis, this) — Paray simply takes off, giving this slightly wishy-washy movement the perkiness it needs. The nicht schnell “slow” movement is sweet and hummy, moving like the fingers of a lover. And the famous Cathedral Scene: Paray understands very well it’s a long upbeat to the scintillating finale . . . Also from Detroit a sleek and springy Schumann No. 4, more pinstriped than herringbone. The windswept scherzo, with a torrid trio of sinuous legato eighths, is especially fine.

And “live” from Amsterdam in dark January of 1940:  –  STRAUSS’ TILL EULENSPIEGEL – A high flying performance, all flicks, specks and bubbles, avoiding level ground as deftly as the Tombeau de Couperin mentioned above. Then back in Detroit, chunks of WAGNER – Paray’s first act Lohengrin prelude pleads its case sweetly, sounding more truly caring than many of its gramophonic brethren. The Meistersinger act 1 prelude sets off in the irony of a pedantic tramp, becoming in due course perky as can be and very exciting, the texture light, contrapuntal lines in very bold relief. Good fun from Michigan is had by all in a Tannhaeuser overture with a pilgrims’ procession that sounds like a trombone concerto!

Another rouser Paray does nicely enough to win him our equivalent of a couple Michelin stars is Saint-Saens’ Third Symphony. But guess! The straightest route to the dark soul of this charmer is taken by none other than Arturo Toscanini in the NBC broadcast of 11-15-52. Taut and tenebrous, ever spacious in tempo (and this is late Toscanini, mind you) this is a performance stamped all over with the love and conviction of its author. I would toss half of Toscanini’s Verdi into the Po for this half hour of airwave Francophilia . . . Have I missed anything? Yes, Paray’s wonderful Detroit recording of music from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the overture with any lurking gravitas flushed out, a skirt-swishing scherzo staccatissimo as one might expect from this particular conductor, then a propulsive nocturne in which we meet again that soulful hornist Bill Sabatini, a temporary exile from San Francisco, his delicate-yet-forceful tone as inimitable as ever.

And from Gerald Jackson, that top London flutist, a telling vignette: “The Frenchman Paul Paray was at once very grave and very gay. I still recall an intensive rehearsal of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice when suddenly he gave us the off-beat with a twitch of his backside instead of the baton.” (But the departed conductor who, I think, used more of his body than anyone, a whole quivering network of bone and muscle, was Klaus Tennstedt).

At least one prominent historian of the Metropolitan Opera – and perhaps some copycats too — dismissed the diminutive and ubiquitous Gennaro Papi as a routinier. But to categorize thus this creative ball of fire, this master of operatic edginess – he had a long history in winter and summer opera in Chicago, then came to the Met in the mid-Thirties – is to absolutely miss the point. Look in more modern times to Nello Santi, fifty years now at the Zurich Opera, for a maestro in this mode, a conductor of fire, charm and total mastery of that sweet science called rubato.

Off to Cleveland we go. The Met is on tour, it’s April 17, 1937, and Papi is in the pit for Carmen with Rosa Ponselle. Here is my log of this performance: A) an urgent, light-stepping prelude, the toreador tune dished out with a characteristic Papian asymmetry, B) a “here goes” micro-breath before the Fate theme, this of course written into Bizet’s score with a fermata rest, C) a tumbling children’s chorus with swiping piccolo and toybox staccato, D) a mad dash of those stampeding stage-door Romeos as the cigarette girls take their break, E) an opening of the Micaela-Jose duet exquisitely fragile, sad, tender, F) a great orchestral embrace as same duet ends, G) in the second act a whirling gypsy dance, a cavalry charge into a lilting toreador aria, then with the Flower song an introductory English horn that seems to announce: “Oh dear dear, all is lost!” Then we’re indebted to Papi for brisking up the smugglers’ chorus early in act 3. Bizet’s allegretto moderato pegged at 96 beats to the mountaineer minute is a shade conservative, the effect more dour perhaps than ideal for these bandits with riches on their mind — at 120 beats Papi gives them the drive to hustle a bit. Next bright idea: by pitching the heart of the Card Scene ten beats below the 66 of Bizet’s andante molto moderato he delivers Tragedy at its most riveting. Not to say painful!

Also from the Met (“and here is our conductor, Gennaro PA-pi,” intoned beloved Milton Cross many a winter Saturday over the Blue Network, chewing his vowels with relish):

2-15-36: An Il Trovatore coming on as a veritable jungle of emotions. Biting anger, caprice, a sly edginess: all this to scrape most delightfully the bottom of the barrel of pathos . . . 4-10-37: A Cavalleria Rusticana stocked with languorous curtain rise, indolent opening chorus, prancing Alfio, a meandering bass line around Santuzza’s entrance which is profoundly disturbing. In short, a sultrier, more dangerous Cav there never was . . . 1-8-38: Another Trovatore to remember – for the elegant ripple of strings in Leonora’s first act cabaletta, the No Rush of Manrico’s, let’s face it, narcissistic serenade, the tension and refinement of the subsequent trio involving our heroine and her competing suitors . . . 2-26-38: A rip-roaring Aida with a jaunty, swinging chorus of Egyptian hawks in the first scene, later a snap-crackle-pop Triumphal Scene stamped with Papi’s trademark volatility. Tchaikovsky’s beloved term incalzando (meaning heating-up) might have been invented for this interpretation . . . 3-11-39: A Rigoletto which comes to the point quickly in the deep despair of an accursed prelude on the downswing from its fist-clenching climax. And this provides an echo to the post-climax dash-dot-dash-dash’s of the prelude to Lucia di Lammermoor from 2-27-37: they suggest the forced curtsys of a heroine at a fete against her will. The loony devil-may-care of the harp cadenza summoning Lucia into action has the abandon and unreality of a Harpo Marx set piece . . . Then there’s 12-21-40: A Don Pasquale displaying Papi as a master of teasing rubato and brio supreme: the music just seeps out of an enchanting buffo woodwork.

The last word I give to the late San Francisco critic Alexander Fried who wrote in a sympathetic obituary (Papi having died a few hours before a scheduled broadcast): “Without being the exhibitionistic or arrogant type of conductor, he had an interpretive style that was consistently individual and scrupulous. Indeed, he conceived certain tempos in popular operas – zipping little vivacities in Rigoletto, for instance –that were so much his own that such stars as Lily Pons and Lawrence Tibbett had to be very careful to blend in with them . . . People who did not care for Papi and who, for mysterious reasons, could not detect his finesse, considered him a routinier. No routinier ever loved music as Papi did.” Amen. And on a lighter note a Papi anecdote. One day Al Fried ran into him in the lobby, and said: “You know, maestro, I admire your conducting very much, but you haven’t lost that habit of hissing at the orchestra. You’d be surprised how one can hear it [in seat L-1] even over the trombones.” “All right,” said Papi, without losing a beat, “the nexa time I putta potato in my mouth.” Case closed.

Another recording I grew up on was the 1933 abridged Der Rosenkavalier with Maria Olczewska, Klemperer’s onetime girlfriend Elisabeth Schumann and his maybe-almost-girlfriend Lotte Lehmann, conducted by Robert Heger, not exactly a household name in the annals of conducting and one that would, I’m sure, be relegated to some lower pocket by those pigeon-holers of performers according to “tiers,” first, second, and I hope no worse than that. But Robert Heger was a wonderful conductor, one of those fiery craftsmen of the pit who tend to serve more as a “first conductor” at a big-name opera house than “general music director” – and if German or Austrian spend most of their career in German-speaking countries; and don’t make as many commercial recordings as Bruno Walter or Toscanini. Think also of the muscular/poetical Rudolf Moralt — oh, the anguished brass and those palpitating flutes early on in his ‘48 Vienna Parsifal — and there’s Arthur Rother, a great favorite of the baritone Fischer-Dieskau, or the underrated and rather Blech-like Horst Stein, author of the most lyrical Elektra in my experience. Or Heinrich Steiner, whose subtle and rather Harnoncourtian Freischuetz overture “live” from Berlin in ’36 is world class.

And there was the much-maligned Heinrich Hollreiser, who, said the San Francisco Opera’s boss Kurt Herbert Adler quite accurately, could do a wonderful show, a lilting, tingly Wagner say, if you lit a fire under him (aka dressing room pep-talk from the coach) before the performance. Another candidate for frequent contempt was the Met conductor/administrator Paul Breisach whose 1943 Don Giovanni contains passages I’ve never heard better: the delicacy and pathos of the Anna-Ottavio duet early in the first act would be the opening evidence in my case for the defense. I should also mention Bernard Haitink’s teacher Ferdinand Leitner, a g.m.d. to be sure but underrated in view of how mellifluous and undulant a Wagnerian evening he could produce with his Karl Muck-trained baton. And how many Karajan-Solti groupies know the name Joseph Keilberth? Furtwaengler considered him the best of his junior colleagues because he understood the art of climax so well.

But back to the subject of this chapter. Just in from Hamburg in 1965, my wife and I were amazed in the little lobby of the fabled Sacher Hotel behind Vienna’s Staatsoper to see that the evening’s performance, Der Fliegende Hollander, would be conducted by none other than Prof. Robert Heger. Ah, so he wasn’t a mirage, that not-a-Walter-or-Toscanini who had conducted those gemuetlich chunks of Rosenkavalier for a cumbersome 13-disc Victor album thirty-two years before! Alas, we had other plans for the evening (crepes, I think, at the Balkan Grill), for which I now kick myself: to have seen Heger at his impressive exercise would have been something to tell one’s grandkids. Listening again to the ‘33 Rosenkavalier after many a Straussian moon I couldn’t fail to notice the mixture of wistfulness and sexuality in the prelude — but surely you know about the famous “orgasm” in the horns four bars after #4, whoopwhoop etc., it took the music director of the Budapest Opera to explain it to me! Then there’s the sweet-soft atmosphere as the curtain rises, with that nasty old real world held totally at bay, and the perfection of leggiero in the breakfast music. A very Viennese performance in short, recorded in that very town, but for all its laidbackness never rhythmically sloppy – terrible habit we commentators have of putting in these oft-redundant buts; I added this one to distinguish Heger from his slightly less immaculate colleage Franz Schalk.

Substantial “live” performances of Wagner led by Heger have surfaced over the years, much to his credit. The l942 Berlin Tristan is a darting, smoldering performance urgent to the point of what might be called controlled frantic. The scene in the first act wherein Tristan, backed up by Kurvenal, tells Brangaene he’s too busy keeping the ship on course to deal with other matters (i.e.: of emotion), well, that scene comes on like an angry family drama, an energetic soap opera if you will. The classic Berlin Lohengrin from ’42 with Maria Mueller and Franz Voelker is a first class work of art — the prelude comes from Nowhere, plaintive while almost statuesque; paced quite broadly, it moves with majesty and lilt, sad, restrained, always true to its lyrical tone. Then as the first act evolves Heger spreads the music like good sonic toast with a layer of fascinating misterioso. The sizzle and echt-Viennese vibrance of Philharmoniker violins fairly crinkling with a sweetness just short of cloying, these make an Immolation Scene from a 1933 Goetterdaemmerung across the street from Madame Sacher’s hostelry an addictive experience. And how nice the unrushed ardor of the Prize Song in the final scene of a 1943 Berlin Meistersinger, peopled by a rather emaciated sounding wartime chorus of, one figures, senior citizens and 4-F’s.

Strauss. Wagner. Yes, of course. In fact, Heger’s Wagner with its all-there personality seems as trade-markable in the twenty-first century as, say, Beecham’s – I’ve just discovered Sir Thomas’ RPO Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, so aureoled and hyper-intimate, just short of unctuous. But Heger was quite a Puccinian as well. A 1954 Vienna Radio Manon Lescaut stands out for its long and supple line, precision of articulation, and, for this is a performance as emotional as craftsmanly, its quick striking of notes plaintive as well as jolly. The Intermezzo is milked to a turn, gracefully, its heavy regretful steps striking a bull’s-eye at our willing heart-strings.

Back in wartime, D-day very recent history, Heger and the pianist Walter Gieseking retreated to the near-Shangri La of Baden Baden for a concerto program recently surfaced on CD. Find here a younger than springtime performance of the Grieg, full of ardor and élan, even if it begins with a positively terrifying DRUMROLL: this call to arms might have sent a few burghers heading for that nearest exit such as we 21^st century audiences are always instructed to “make a note of” before the house lights dim. Enjoy in the second movement the warm, fuzzy strings, nice and sweet. And in the Schumann concerto Heger produces from his Radio orchestra a magical intimacy of tone. Higher “tier” conducting I cannot imagine. Even London and Milan got to experience it now and then, Heger did cross the Channel and train down the gorgeous Gottardo . . .

And a postscript: Just found, the ’51 Munich Opera recording of Tannhaeuser conducted by Heger with a characteristically blazing baton. The overture is almost Mengelbergian, rather more formal in shaping but no less visceral in its gut-kicking intensity. A springy start, then huge warmth in the cellos at good ol’ bar 17, a wonderful crescendo of compassion to follow, then a uniquely lengthened upbeat to ahem, so to speak, the amen of the pilgrims’ procession. The allegro has a feverish sensual abandon: never has this music been more aroused, absolutely kicking off its trousers without care for where they might land. In the final minutes sinful strings buzz hysterically around the hear-no-evil see-no-evil brass. The opera in a nutshell. And imagine: at the very end of the opera Heger manages the rare feat of making Wagner’s rather abrupt final cadence work. Big bangs mustn’t be awkward!

The author of these words grew up on the old Cetra-Parlophone recording of Turandot, that exotic operatic animal which wasn’t being sung in the U.S. in the Forties because the dramatic sopranos on this continent chose not to choke on its terrifying tessitura. Dating from 1938 in Torino, it introduced us to the enchanting fragility of the young Magda Olivero in the role of Liu – this was before her premature retirement and a subsequent comeback that carried her career, before nothing less than a cult following, well into her senior citizen years – and also to the quintessential robusto of that pulsing Maserati of a tenor Francesco Merli: he took on Calaf with its signature Nessun Dorma. And the conductor of this first-ever recording of Turandot was a fiery Italian named Franco Ghione whose conducting seemed to a teenager just right, and now, for a much older fellow, no less just. Certainly Ghione was instrumental in creating the effect of a “live” recording when it was in fact a studio job.  Stark opening chords give way to a daunting sense of depravity and indolence in the snake-charmer oboe while the Mandarin drones on about the latest execution of one of Princess Turandot’s ill-fated lovers in old Peking. Then all choral and orchestral hell breaks loose.

Ghione himself could be something of a Vesuvius. At the time of this recording he was spending a few months each year with the Detroit Symphony where, according to the faithful Wikipedia, his insufficient English caused him at times to explode in frustration. Explosions seem to have been only artistic in the preparation of the three important recordings he left us, the other two being a 1934 La Scala Pagliacci with Beniamino Gigli and, “live” from Lisbon in 1958, an iconic Traviata featuring that dark Garbo of the opera Maria Callas.

Leoncavallo the composer of I Pagliacci left in his score plenty of indications of tempo and nuance — this of course doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have enjoyed certain small deviations from the instructions he settled on for a printer eager to get to the public a book of black and white notes dangling Jungle Gymishly from their frames along the staff. Exhibit A: Ghione at the very start of the opera creates an instant atmosphere of unforgiving gravity with a tempo a little slower than the 88 dotted quarters of the page, focusing more on the composer’s italicized deciso and vigoroso than the vivace accompanying his metronome marking. And Tonio’s Un nido di memorie (which always opened the second side of “78” Pagliacci recordings) reaches deeper than usual into the soul of the “author’s recollections” thanks to a tempo a little again below the metro mark. No less felicitous is the finesse and fatefulness of the opening chorus; then in her wistful Ballatella Nedda who’s remembering the ever-liberated song birds of her childhood is quickly flying, but, as the composer requests, without rushing. A little later her candy-covered mockery of Tonio is devastating . . . And hanging, it seems, over everything alla Ghione: a gauze of regret!

On to Lisbon. What a marvelous collaborator Callas had in Ghione, a conductor of refinement as well as rich dramatic imagination. The act 1 prelude is profoundly moving, brimming with nuances of tragedy, Verdi’s closing allargando-diminuendo-&-morendo taken very much at their word: the music runs down like a terminally ill patient. The atmosphere in the first party scene is tense, suffocating, for all the surface elegance of its leggiero-savvy guests. When Violetta is introduced to Alfredo the amorous treble of the orchestra seems in its rolling dotted-rhythm legato to be squeezing out of its veins an exquisite note of compassion. The lovers’ duet is permeated with wistfulness, coming to a broad rapturous close, Violetta and Alfredo trying to hold onto each other against the real world an inch or two away. That world Ghione observes accurately in act 2 scene 2 when he injects the matador chorus with a laidback meridional swing.

. . . And if only Ghione had had a few more comfortable syllables of English, or more patience, perhaps we would have seen more of him in the U.S. But than again, perhaps that wouldn’t have been Ghione.

Time to convene a chorus of musicians-critics-foreign correspondents to salute with their authoritative passion the art of Wilhelm Furtwaengler, an art which in its long heyday mostly in Berlin and Vienna magnetized believers (many) and non-believers (almost as many). The pianist Paul Badura-Skoda writes of the “blooming and streaming richness” in his musicmaking; violinist-guru Yehudi Menuhin recalls, as listener and co-performer, an overwhelming impression of “vast pulsating space.” Neville Cardus of The Guardian bows before “his penetration into the germ cell, the blood stream, the nervous system, and the brain center of Tristan and Parsifal [which] was absolute and consummate.” Pablo Casals the cellist, conductor and humanitarian salutes Furtwaengler’s impatience with “traditions” and “sclerotic schools.” And from the pianist Edwin Fischer pour goblets of poetry: Furtwaengler was “a figure from Gothic sculpture, as seen in his resemblance to the statue of the Knight in Bamberg Cathedral . . . [he was] restless, impulsive, self-torturing, rarely content, and shook at the gates of heaven and hell.” Gothic or not, Furtwaengler had, as the critic Geoffrey Sharp delights in telling us, “mannerisms in plenty; the occasional obdurate rhythmical puffings like a model steam locomotive getting under way; the intense, almost fanatical vertical shaking of the head; and, in calmer moments, the curious practice of hanging his left hand out to dry – almost as if it were no longer a part of him.” Sharp is quick to point out these quirks constituted merely the front window as it were of “a treasure house” of human experience which, in music that interested him, “he illuminated in varying perspectives according to his lights, which could be very searching.”

No one has put it better than Josef Krips, a conductor whose angelic, dancing style did not immediately call to mind the great Furtwaengler: “He knew about the eternal line in a great piece: when he started the first bar, in his mind he was already in the last. The music came from eternity and went back there.” Also: “He hated rough accents where they were not especially indicated: this caused his [deliberately somewhat fuzzy] way of downbeat, which was difficult for musicians who didn’t know him.” Krips doesn’t mention the preliminary “stabs” before launching Beethoven’s Fifth which, to critic Sharp, seemed to be aimed at some predatory insect.

And the veteran newsman Louis Lochner remembers a Mozart Requiem conducted “ecstatically, as if in a trance.” Restless, streaming, blooming, searching, ecstatic, eternal – the adjectives applied to Furtwaengler’s vision sound positively Wagnerian, as if a stately Tristan and portly Isolde on loan from their great love were reviewing his concerts in their not un-purpled libretto-ese. Ah, the vision, it was inimitable. But it inspired: between writing these paragraphs I chanced to watch the 2006 DVD of Lohengrin conducted by Kent Nagano in Baden Baden and there it was, I instantly felt, in the unusually slow and rich unfolding of the second act’s murky opening page, the spirit of Furtwaengler. What a hoverer he remains over today’s musicians, and record collectors of course, this architect of long lines, connoisseur of transitions, an inspired manufacturer of a magic glue that binds performances in endless tissues of poetry.  Here is, par excellence, the maestro of great tempo systems, evolving successions of huge accelerandi and decelerandi produced as if by the easing this way and that of some mood-sensitive rheostat. Furtwaengler is the conductor who with his love of stately animations, panoramic erasures, those handsomely crafted transit zones, will maneuver us into sightings, suspensions, incredible destinations out of which, give him a little time, he will proceed grandly, gracefully, with a certain tremble, to more passages read in metaphoric capitals.

Time to quote that wise and witty maestro Sir Adrian Boult: “I am inclined,” he writes, “to think it was this tension, this uncertainty [of that mysterious beat] that contributed a great deal to the magnetic power and warmth of the tone quality that came from Furtwaengler’s performances. If an orchestra doesn’t know quite where it is, it plays with a certain intensity that contributes enormously to the vitality of the performance [author’s italics].”  Sir Adrian grants that it “seemed a miracle” the players did come in together. “Furtwaengler’s concentration had chosen for them.”

But all that odd genius of communication didn’t interest the Nazis. This, we repeat, is not a book about politics, but just about everybody who’s heard of Furtwaengler knows that he remained in Germany during the Nazi period when he was, according to popular U.S./U.K. sentiment, supposed to follow the also-Aryan Erich Kleiber’s example and move to Buenos Aires and Havana or some interpretorial Timbuktu where, speaking in a better or worse Spanish, English or whatever newfound patois, he would guide new orchestras other than his beloved Berlin Philharmonic — in whose affairs the cynical and capricious Nazis were maddeningly meddling, leading him in fact to resign for a while in the mid-Thirties. He should take his Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Bruckner with him – by the way, he also liked Hemingway and read Jane Austen — in his perhaps hastily-packed bag, he should not have against that loathsome regime he detested the best revenge of keeping the sane fires of a great culture burning in its midst.

Furtwaengler, before and after he saw that his theory the Nazis were a passing phenomenon was unfortunately incorrect, felt it his sacred duty to oppose the Nazis from within, help their victims on scene. And then too, the bad guys who with total accuracy distrusted him, this crazy conductor who would defend Jewish musicians and root for a staging of Hindemith’s impossible new Mathis der Maler, well sir, they held over him the possibility of imprisoning his mother. But most of all, thought Yehudi Menuhin, that embracer of the blessed art of reconciliation, Furtwaengler felt expatriation imperiled somehow his very identity.

So Furtwaengler soldiered on in Berlin, where he’d come from Mannheim, still a dark podium horse, back in 1922, feeling terribly isolated but making great music. Probably he kept some anti-Nazis sane. Then in ‘38 when the Nazis ordered the dissolution of his scarcely less beloved Vienna Philharmonic (“I’m married to the Berliners, but you Viennese are my darling sweetheart”) he managed to move a mountain or two in this eastern satellite and the gemuetlich Philharmoniker was saved, many wartime documents of its sonically site-specific musicmaking surviving for our turntables and CD players. Now Furtwaengler’s wartime Berlin broadcasts tend to have a crazy intensity, a great musical Importance. But the toll of what Ernest Ansermet called his “constant struggle with the Nazi leaders” – I like also Sir Thomas Beecham’s phrase “he protected the weak and assisted the helpless” — took its toll, as did an unnecessarily long de-Nazification process after the war.

And then Furtwaengler died too young, at 68, just before a tour to the America where many insufficiently informed and absolutely unforgiving foes lay in wait. His luck in the U.S. had never been particularly good except with record collectors. A promised lengthy reengagement after his New York Philharmonic debut in the Twenties proved a mirage, and an invitation to succeed Toscanini as music director of the Philharmonic in 1936-37 backfired in the face of Jewish opposition. There was also the flap heard ‘round the world a decade later when a flock of musicians, Menuhin prominently not among them, threw barrels of cold water on the idea of a big guest engagement with the Chicago Symphony.

But enough of such history. That poetical Nagano Lohengrin shoots us back to Bayreuth summer of ’36 for broadcast snippets from an awesome Furtwaengler performance of Wagner’s opera. We join at the beginning of the third act, the prelude registering an unusual amplitude while moving forward with a 10-out-of-10 intensity, even the delicate midsection sounding rather possessed. The Bridal Chorus, with bubbling harps, is nothing less than exalted: the D major of the eight ladies midway calls to mind an INVOCATION, then the celebrated “Here comes the you-know-what” returns on a roll, an oceanic wave – this before a very slow and dreamy start to the love duet which is more faithful than some to Wagner’s urgent request for molto tranquillo, that of course being a state of mind as well as tempo, a challenge conductors must sort out. Much, alas, is missing from here on, but the fanfare-rich assembling of the vassals has been saved for a gasping posterity: the giant sweep of the performance at this point is extraordinary, we are lifted out of our sofas-and-chairs metaphorically and then some. Of course Neville Cardus used to say that Furtwaengler sought to go into an orchestra and “stir up sleeping fires.” Here is The Art of Galvanization on vivid display.

But Furtwaenglerites know about his Wagner. Listen for a moment to the astute pianist Claudio Arrau who went on record saying that Furtwaengler’s Debussy was the best of that composer’s orchestral music he’d ever heard. Exhibit “A” is surely the Berlin Philharmonic broadcast of Nuages from 5-1-51. Coming on as it does doleful, hopeless and blank, with a certain bone-teasing chill, this Berliner cloudscape steers nimbly to the “voice” of the wispy-washy heroine of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande — have we said it before, the creative wires of Nuages and Pelléas were fated to get crossed in Debussy’s workroom. Furtwaengler’s interpretive aids are a very delicate but not unfirm touch, great dynamic care, inflection that establishes a personality. Well, the novelist Julian Barnes has it right: the sky “can be a theater of possibilities.” Shadings of tempo and dynamics are subtle but very telling, the slight retreat in speed and volume for instance when the initial wigwag of the winds returns in violins halfway between rehearsal numbers 1 and 2 – with, one might add, no such changes spelled out in the score. The launch of that grotto grope of chromatically rising clarinets in octaves four bars after 3, dark stuff this, over a wonderful suspension-laced meander in the strings, is another cue for Furtwaengler to intensify his performance with a small pay-attention weight on the tempo.

The succeeding Fetes betrays, perhaps, a certain tendency on Furtwaengler’s part to evade simplicity, he applies a peppery layer of anguish to a scene generally considered to be quite jolly indeed – it’s picnic time in the Bois de Boulogne, a scherzo bucolique, n’est-ce-pas? But his not uncharacteristic gravitas might be defended as echoing somewhat the tone of his Nuages. Unarguable, meanwhile, is the swing with which Furtwaengler conducts that proto-Bolero of a procession midway.

From Debussy a small distance to Ravel! Furtwaengler’s Rhapsodie Espagnole with the RAI Orchestra of Torino (3-3-52) steps immediately into espressivity’s deep end: the nocturnal prelude beginning the piece is indolent, obsessive, pleading. More clouds here of course: find them in the near-endless dee-dah-duh-dah scales of one orchestral department then another moving like ants over your patio floor then disappearing. The salubrious perfumes-of-the-night we frequently inhale in this prelude are under wraps and by the time Furtwaengler reaches the noodle-doodles of  back-alley bassoons against crickety violin trills — this is ten bars before the movement’s end — the music is sounding quite loony indeed, capturing perhaps some substantial wee-hours depravity. And Ravel, I suspect, would approve.

Now do we spy in this conducting a tendency toward an “irrational factor” such as Vargas Llosa seems to unearth in his sympathetic study of Flaubert. Deliberate irrationality, of course! Next the Malaguena, a dance from Malaga, and Furtwaengler divides his listeners into two camps, those who will and those who will not accept a more malevolent than “Malaga-esque” approach. At a tempo more like 136 than Ravel’s 176 beats to the minute the familiar charm and fire give way to a dangerous edge, a heart of darkness. We seem like V.S. Pritchett in the threadbare Madrid of Enrique Arbos to be passing many mournful people in the street all in black.

And Furtwaengler is exactly on Ravel’s prescribed tempo in the Rhapsodie’s finale.

The easy living of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, we’re talking the suite of excerpts opening with a three-star Daybreak, might not seem natural stuff for so high-minded and provocative a musician as Furwaengler. But then again, he’s the expert in streaming and blooming sounds, much in demand in this music. The fact is Furtwaengler’s Daphnis broadcast from Berlin 3-21-44, not exactly an easy time in that bunkering-down city – one can’t help noticing the persistent obbligato of late winter coughs — is totally idiomatic, a passionate and transparent performance launched with a serenity worthy of Olympus. But hark, why is the prolonged fortissimo at Daybreak’s end so tenacious, biting, blinding? Always a tossup to read current affairs into a nuance, but is this amazing blare simply a reflection of Furtwaengler’s taste for BIG and INTENSE, or is it an Edvard Munchian SCREAM hatched from the baton of a conductor who has had enough, enough, Enough of the Third Reich?

If Debussy and Ravel are not composers Furtwaengler’s record company keepers were desperate to record him in, Stravinsky and Bartok were not much favored either. But as the twentieth century unfolded Furtwaengler the Beethovenian and Brucknerian kept abreast of new musical developments. One of the best-known photographs of the master has him watching intently over the shoulder of a solemn Igor Stravinsky at the Bechstein. The “live” Berlin performance of the divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss dated 5-18-53 couldn’t be more charming, with a warmth, flexibility and taste for mood-building (i.e. cozy ruminations in the first section) more akin to that of a Stravinskian like Michael Tilson Thomas than the composer-himself-as-conductor. One tends, rightly or wrongly, to be on the lookout for a certain “German” heaviness in Furtwaengler; I can’t say I noticed such the last time I listened to this springtime broadcast.

As for Bartok! The ‘53 recording of the Second Violin Concerto with Menuhin and the Philharmonia is desert-island stuff, not one note in a million unfelt. The fiercely rhythmic percussion in the jazzy vivace of the first movement development is enormously engaging, in the finale the tension is magnificent in the thirty second buildup to the waltzing reappearance of the shuffling main theme, and there are many other felicities. In short: this recording alone would secure Furtwaengler a fine reputation.

But hasten we must to repertoire for which Furtwaengler is generally known, Schubert’s Great C major Symphony, for instance, Schumann’s Fourth, Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The 1950 Salzburg Festival broadcast of Mozart’s opera is full of marvels, beginning with the enormous chords launching the overture. Scary! And off the music goes, meandering through murky introductory regions with an almost manic grandeur. Taut and omnivorous it spills from the hi-fi, devouring the air around it. Mozart’s molto allegro comes on a tad slow, but molto energico. The finality of the timpani’s contribution is unquestionable, the whole orchestra is grabbing us by the scruff of our metaphorical necks. Alas, dear Don, the spirit of retribution is in the air.

Then as the curtain rises Furtwaengler in a twinkling brings his Wiener Philharmoniker down to dramma giocoso earth (that of course being the opera’s subtitle), setting a lighter tone for Leporello’s buffo screed — what a drag, he sings, to work for a 24-7 libertine! Minutes later with the ambiguous scuffle of the Don and his “victim” Donna Anna the conductor’s tempo is spacious, his grip, as if on the Don’s clutching hands, tenacious. And next, something amazing in the annals of interpretation. With Furtwaengler palpably extending the big fermata on which the Commendatore is run through and summoning from his orchestra a suspenseful pause, like this . . . . . . . the violins’ innocent arpeggio triplets succeeding such a momentous pileup of high dramatic tension (C major they might seem, only they’re morphing into the dominant of F minor) suggest nothing so much as the blood dribbling out of the poor man’s wound: duhdeedee/duhdeedee/duhdeedee. It took me years to stop looking for this effect in Fritz Busch’s very different and in its way very wonderful Don Giovanni from Glyndebourne.

The show continues. The orchestral sound has solidity, yes, but Leporello’s catalog song is playful galore, the chorus setting off the Zerlina scene all a-whirl. Then another lesson in interpretation, the possibilities of tempo! Tito Gobbi, Furtwaengler’s Don, leaves aside the snarl of an angry libido and woos Zerlina  (La ci darem la mano) in an oily-leisurely andante, following more or less the composer’s tempo prescription – which in any event Mozart would never have sought to lock into some moral velocic imperative. And then, get this, it’s a no-brainer actually: once this country girl is won over and the music vaults a double bar into the 6/8 of a seduction virtually achieved, Furtwaengler has Gobbi and the adorable Irmgard Seefried skipping off in a veritable allegretto not marked in the score. Only surely it captures their momentary joy only too well! It’s as if some production code had not yet gone into effect: think of how Astaire and Rodgers seem more irreverent in Flying Down to Rio than later on.

A case could be made that Furtwaengler has a soft spot for Zerlina’s music, or certainly the grazioso Mozart asked for in her pair of cuddly arias. Luminous indeed is Batti, batti o bel Masetto, the flock of violin trills just before the 6/8 suggesting merry birds in top chirp mode; Vedrai, carino is dreamy and long-lined, showing off the light cream of Seefried’s soprano to great advantage. But the Don himself is not shortchanged, hear Furtwaengler’s taste for delicacy in the enchanting plink of Deh vieni alla finestra. And then there’s Furtwaengler the ironist, the connoisseur of the loopy. In the first act finale there’s a place where three orchestras, one in the pit, two on stage, proclaim their every-band-for-itself in a mad horse race of three concurrent rhythms, 3/8, 2/4 and 3/4. No conductor has caught better the nagging sense that a tri-rhythmic tipsyness is about to run the music right off the rails. A landmark, this, in the annals of orchestral inebriation.

Schubert’s Great C major Symphony, ah what a wonderful working over Furtwaengler could give that maddening piece with which so many of us have a love-hate relationship. Tunes it has, energy, backbone, some indisputable moments, waiting of course for a sweet prince to soul-kiss them into excitement; but it reeks of obsessive rhythmic snap, picket fence repetitions of phrase, emotional objectivity. There’s certainly very little amour in it. And this is why Furtwaengler whenever he conducted the C major invoked in various sections and movements the same Plan A in which a seamless succession of gracefully reached tempos faster and slower than their predecessors was put into play, metaphorical hand ever close to that rheostat dial. The point, of course, to worm into the music the asymmetry Furtwaengler felt, rightly I think, was good for it.

The symphony’s introduction, a clever package of procession-evoking variations more and more drawn into the orbit of the ensuing allegro ma non troppo, could be its most dramatic bit. Trust Furtwaengler to push the envelope of this tempting episode and look no further than what is perhaps his greatest C major, the one with the Vienna Philharmonic caught “live” in Stockholm 5-12-43 – presumably in the wake of a long train trip VIENNA-DRESDEN-BERLIN-SASSNITZ-the MALMO ferry and on up to the capital, blackout curtains obscuring the countryside much of the way. The introduction here is characteristically slow (not the andante of the page) and quieter on the average than most, inflection worthy of a Debussyan sky aimed at capturing an inescapable sense of resignation. It’s almost a Marcia Funebre of the most somber sort. And such is the terrifying dolefulness here in safe old Stockholm with its sexy waterside statues and chocolate sauce in silver restaurant gravy boats that Furtwaengler’s customary brisk tempo for the succeeding allegro ma non troppo is achieved via a transition that sounds like an angry cavalry charge of his Philharmonic artillery, nothing less! The music has to break free of its despair. Helping, of course, are the insect triplet staccati of violins who begin their sneaky buzz about Schubert’s launch-pad theme at measure 61, this on the heels of crescendoing octave jumps in a pair of horns who seem to be standing on one foot then the other with an impatience worthy of urinary distress.

A Vienna Philharmonic broadcast of the C major from a decade later, 8-30-53 at the Salzburg Festival, is launched with a strangely disappointing introduction, thanks in part to “old boy” hornists seemingly unwilling to imbue the opening motto with anything remotely like the strong feelings registered at the magnetizing start of the ’43 version. With the ensuing allegro this performance proceeds through the usual arrangement of contrasting tempos aimed at de-squaring Schubert’s martial-rustic-ceremonial material – riproaring theme 1, slower theme 2, then an accel., then a mellow tempo for the great trombone scene with its big handsome notes, accel. again, etc. — but in a relatively uptight manner, until Furtwaengler has had enough of either his or his orchestra’s insufficiency (the Philharmoniker sounds at times like rather clumsy removal men heaving furniture about) and out of nowhere in the last pages of the movement there builds and BUILDS a tremendous excitement. An awesome dreadnought of fortissimo has steamed right into this Salzburg performance’s muddy waters.

Then in a live Berlin Philharmonic performance only seventeen days later – we’re still focusing our flight of C majors on the first movement – Furtwaengler seems to have totally recovered his mastery of what in modern parlance might be called “that inner thing.” Again the opening is exquisitely plaintive, the music is leisurely and deep, effectively lost. And, a minute or two later, eager to arrive momentarily in the freedom of the succeeding allegro the music positively YEARNS. Another bonus of the 9-15-53 C major is the most mellifluous trombone scene of all.

Now to the andante con moto, fiercely repetitious but containing at least a couple of wonderfully dramatic paragraphs: the haunting antiphony between a pair of lonesome horns and hummy string chords taking place on a distant horizon just below one of the best Cloud Nines in the symphonic literature, this leading suspensefully to the first return of the movement’s opening A minor (Schumann, by the way, singled out this passage in his account of this movement) . . . and a few minutes later, at the crest of an increasingly tempestuous development – which could, almost, be mimicking Mozartian swordplay — a pause (not as LONG in the printed score as Furtwaengler habitually and so effectively made it, we all hold our breath!) answered by a bittersweet variation of the movement’s opening ditty in lyricism-ready cellos –this I hum to myself patiently in a broad Furtwaenglerian tempo when I’m giving blood or waiting for a very long traffic light to change — this in turn giving way after fourteen potentially mesmerizing bars to a weight-off-the-shoulders return to the major mode of the movement’s second subject. This is where your little boy’s kite soars to the heavens.

And perhaps these MOMENTS are all the better for being surrounded by longueurs, musical Po Valleys searching for a Ferrara or a Mantova.

Not surprisingly, given what we know about the three first movements tallied above, Furtwaengler’s Swedish and Berlin C majors continue as close siblings in this hefty andante con moto, and for starters that means base tempo is andante ma non con moto. The mood is plaintive, tints of nostalgia invading the flow, the tempo stretching just before the second subject, a primly lyrical and rather inscrutable theme, comes on at a slower tempo than that of the opening. This is a tempo designed for spreading soulful wings. Next, in the antiphonal passage with its drowsy summons as if from mobile phones lost in thought, Furtwaengler becomes slower yet, before the initial A minor returns slower than at its first appearance – so the trend is, to borrow the title of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography dealing with the inter-war period, Downhill All the Way. Better to call it Inward Ho!

That troublesome Salzburg performance marches to a somewhat different drum. Certainly not as deep and tension-stocked as its brethren – it seems to operate outside the carefully laid plan apparent in Stockholm and Berlin, as if perhaps its pilot didn’t have his head completely clear – it does have its passing passions. And remarkable indeed is the vividness with which, after that kite escapes heavenward from the village green, Furtwaengler brings out the accented syncopations of the violins swiping in this case playfully-aggressively against the downward legato of the lyrical second subject theme. As for the LONG pause Furtwaengler repeatedly painted for us with a very large brush, well, it’s a case of what the pianist Leon Fleisher, speaking in a different context, has called playing “as late as possible, without being late.”

And a long brush is used in Furtwaengler’s benchmark Schumann Fourth recorded in a Berlin church 5-14-53. The most remarkable feature of this characteristically capacious performance is the absolute snail-crawl in which he inches (millimeters?) forward the oscillations of divided violas at the end of the scherzo, ushering them thereby straight into Thomas Carlyle’s definition of music: “a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!” Not purely in the service of a lovingly lirico-misterioso line does Furtwaengler toy with these overtly bland chords marked nothing more than poco ritenuto within the context of a nominally speedy scherzo. What Furtwaengler hears by the simple process of reading the next page of score, the launching of a slow bridge passage headed gingerly toward the fast finale, is that those oscillations truly belong more to that oncoming bridge than the down-winding scherzo of which they seem at first glance to be an integral part. “Tis “Elementary, dear Watson” — so prepared, the shudder of large notes at the start of the official bridge is like a giant mouth of music opening wide.

Well, Alfred Brendel thinks Schumann’s notation is “a very personal mixture of pedantry and inexactness.”

* * * *

As for Schubert, the noted pianist opines with affection that whereas Beethoven composes like an architect Schubert with his talent for delivering us into dreams is a sleepwalker of the compositorial workroom . . . And that brings us to Furtwaengler’s Big B’s, Beethoven for starters – meanwhile it occurs to me that Furtwaengler would have conducted some of Benjamin Britten’s music as well as Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner, not to speak of Bach. Let’s begin with Beethoven’s Eroica, a quite incendiary threesome of performances from 1944, 1950 and 1952. Look to the opening movement and the same plan of attack in each case, with rather small differences in shading here and there. The point, of course, is repeatedly to invoke Wagner’s primal pronouncement re the importance of “delicate yet constant change of rhythm, which alone is able to take a fixed, classical, so to speak ‘note-for-note-played’ piece of music, and bring forth from it that which it really is: something emerging and growing, a living process . . .” The colors of Rembrandt more than the technique of Durer, that is the Wagnerian/Furtwaengleresque ideal. Space, it goes without saying, is always available for tempo to move a little this way and that with perfect grace.

As for emerging and growing, Furtwaengler in the Eroica’s first movement development customarily approached that new and lyrical theme at bar 284 — a quiet, rocking theme dipping in the oboe and rising in the cellos like independent tidal minds moving about the rocks beneath one’s seaside window — with Beethoven’s enormous pre-theme pileup of SFORZANDI suggesting in their Railing-at-the-Heavens the near-demise of another Commendatore about to be run through. As for the theme itself, veritable valley after peak and a way station of course on Beethoven’s harmonic journey, the adjectives I noted after listening to each of these three performances were virtually identical: 1950 pathétique; 1944, musing; 1952, fragile.

The broadcast from 8-31-50, a Salzburg Festival affair, gets off to an especially gripping start because in this performance the Eroica’s first chord sounds as if it’s being wrenched with great tenacity, and suspense, from a recalcitrant socket. Naturally the attendant birth and growth of this symphonic child is a little more vivid and prized than that of its obstetrically less menaced brethren. But all these performances take fire, the elixir of spirituality pours – with, one might add, not quite the artistic disarrangement of a Fried or Mengelberg at their occasional furthest out. The celebrated Vienna Philharmonic Eroica from 1944  begins in a rather more stately manner; in due course it proceeds, by impulse or design, to something more possessed. Design it could be! As Elisabeth Furtwaengler quotes her husband in her extremely moving memoir, About Wilhelm Furtwaengler, “for me [these classics] are never the same works” . . Now was it Paul Valéry who said a work of art by the likes of Beethoven is “never truly finished, only abandoned,” as if to say it’s the interpreter who picks up the missing pieces of one and another lovely puzzle! At all events, moods of Furtwaengler’s biorhythmic moments obviously made their inroads, but as Frau Furtwaengler reminds us, her husband studied even his core repertory again and again, “sometimes catching something which had so far eluded him.” The endless life of art . . . .

Now we inspect a trio of Beethoven Fifths spanning seventeen years: 1926, 1937, 1943, all with the Berlin Philharmonic, the last of them “live,” during the war of course, a year short of D-Day and the Russian front no picnic. Almost too neatly fitting the circumstances of their respective hatchings are the messages of each of these fascinating Fifths. The ’26 says look here, I’m a bright young conductor and I can’t help being somewhat under the spell of my fabulous predecessor Arthur Nikisch . . . The ’37 says, well, this is my first big international record for HMV/Victor and I don’t want to scare away the folks in Nottingham and Dubuque with too “mannered” an interpretation . . . And the ’43 says, for God’s sake, man, here we are in Berlin, the roof is falling in, but we’ve got our Beethoven, BEETHOVEN did you hear, that’s what’s sustaining us, we’re not all a bunch of Nazis, so listen up and have your socks knocked off.

A bit of chapter-and-verse. The ’26 opens with an appropriately stentorian dot-dot-dot-dash, then sets off on its contrapuntal Morse in an urgent leggiero. Soon a crescendo, leading quickly to the fermata’d chord at bar 21 which Furtwaengler extends to an a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e  m-a-x-i-m-u-m, followed by an equally drawn out pause on what we musn’t forget is a rest to which – even if it’s just a quarter rest – Beethoven affixed a fermata. This three-star hiatus is pure Furtwaengler, dark horse recently in from Mannheim — how many suspense-dispensing angels pass here, perhaps a dozen? – but the glare of tenacious Nikisch hovers in that chordal shoulder-grab at 21. Now more buildup, the music arrives at the great fanfare launching the second subject and Furtwaengler comes on grand enough he could be thinking, at least a little, of his mentor’s intrerpretation. Remember the famous 1913 recording . . .

The especially-for-export ’37 version, we’re still comparing first movements, comes on elegant and vibrant, very light, that interesting pause on the quarter rest notably briefer than in ’26 and that 150-watt fanfare less Nikischy by some distance. A fine performance, finer perhaps if one hasn’t heard the slightly self-conscious but more dramatic ’26 version first, but not quite so characteristic. Winged it is, glamorous, sweet, a svelte damsel to be sure.

Then ’43!! The famous opening is baleful, the succeeding Morse more spacious than before. The FERMATA at 21 is tenaciously HELD. And soon the performance sounds possessed, by angels or demons one isn’t exactly sure. It crashes up to the fanfare, and said fanfare is curious indeed because it seems very soon to let out a sigh, a very telling sigh. The fact is, Beethoven’s diminuendo at the end of this announcement is advanced in this reading to a more central position, creating one of the biggest shadows in the history of Beethovenian performance. Absolutely unique!

. . . And so the performance proceeds, letting itself go in the metaphorical sense while proceeding with total efficiency as well as intensity. An element here of pounding on a door to get the hell out. Well, Beethoven’s highly rhythmic Fifth provides material for such activity without flinching. Summation: it’s all so exciting one simply doesn’t want to hear another Fifth for a long time. And that is why you can write your own review of the 1947 Furtwaengler Fifth signalling his return to the Berlin concert scene. And the 1954 Fifth in Paris which this observer, a GI stationed an hour south of the capital, missed by one day.

Elisabeth Furtwaengler is vivid about the atmosphere in which Furtwaengler’s wartime concerts took place. The extraordinary intensity of the ’43 Fifth is no surprise when one reads that “the people came to the Philharmonie under very difficult conditions; often bombs had fallen during the previous night . . . one had to climb over heaps of rubble . . . everyone had the feeling this might be their last time to experience a concert.” Also, she says, many in the audience were in the anti-Nazi resistance, some would die after the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life. Interestingly enough Furtwaengler must have had some hope: the cursed war would end. He and his young wife had a child. And when he had an engagement at the Lucerne Festival in the summer of ’44 he was able to leave mother and child in Switzerland. There, reunited with them a little before the war ended – thanks to a long-standing invitation from good Ernest Ansermet – he would spend his two year postwar exile.

And other Furtwaengler Beethovens:

Concertgebouw “live,” 7-13-50: A genial, fastidious Amsterdam performance of the First Symphony stamped with the personality of . . . yes, a prankster. Well, a very upmarket one. The introduction is, to be sure, a thing of high seriousness, tender, touching, a little guarded, a little possessed (well, this is Furtwaengler, the Sviatoslav Richter of the podium, never totally semplice), but the succeeding allegro con brio is quite racy, even frilly, and slyly arrived at too! Delicate stuff. The second subject comes on perky as Doris Day and in the development Furtwaengler relishes Beethoven’s ticking-and-tootling. A buffo brio is ascendant without a doubt and a cheerful Leporello might be ushering in the recapitulation. Then, no surprise, the tiger in the tank is unleashed in a very festive conclusion, trumpets and drums all ablaze, larger than life . . . The finale is launched with an introduction the portentousness of which is tinged with obvious tongue-in-cheek, owing a sou or two to the maker of Clock and Surprise symphonies. The pauses between one then another upward snippet of the violins, each a note longer, are exaggerated with characteristic Furtwaenglerian patience in measures 2, 3 and 4, and so as not to lose an iota of suspense a micro-pause is added just on the line separating the fourth and fifth bars, as if some epauletted doorman of the bar lines had put in a fleeting appearance, all this to suggest, I very much suspect, the near tongue-tiededness of a nervous lover.

Hamburg Philharmonic “live,” 6-9-47: A Second Leonore Overture in which the a-i-r-s-p-a-c-e Beethoven provided on the second beat of the opening bar gives Furtwaengler the opportunity – at a slow tempo permitting Fate plenty of time to express itself – a chance to let his timpanist WHACK out a second fortissimo a fraction even bigger than the one just sounded as part of the overture’s initial tutti. The effect is rather as if a very angry man had batted a tennis ball against an innocent but annoyingly impassive backboard with all his might. Fate continues to have a field day with the big wind chords attended by string swirls at bar 36: explosions, these, with dust settling around them in the form of sixty-fourth note motes. Oh, to have heard Furtwaengler conduct La Forza del Destino! Then Beethoven’s allegro slips in, almost out of nowhere, throbbing. The hummy development in Furtwaengler’s hands is pure kammermusik, the final pages of the overture a cavalry charge assuring us that the imprisoned Florestan has been properly rescued and then some.

. . . And a Vienna Philharmonic Fourth Symphony from January 1950: Most treasurable here is a second movement that opens loving adagio arms at a tempo scarcely more than half Beethoven’s marking of eighth = 84. Music in the yoga position, you might say, but flowing like a feeling-no-pain Pastoral brook of sorts, with a perfect serenity not to speak of scant ambition. Beethoven does write cantabile under the ever-so-songful main theme — at 84 beats it would, I suspect, sound more like a white-tie aria than Furtwaengler’s caress down in the 40s . . . Now our Vienna maestro has a bit of an amorous plot up his sleeve: when the main theme returns at bar 42 – quietly in the wake of a big crescendo, and in more floral dress than before – he capitalizes on Beethoven’s weaving triplet sixteenths to promote a much richer, more vibrant theme than before. After a while it seems to perspire with love . . . And after that curious developmental passage beginning at 54 which Mengelberg found so crazy (Furtwaengler gazes on it rather more happily) this Viennese performance treats us to a singularly unrushed, awestruck return to the next appearance of that core theme, this at bar 65, pianissimo cantabile this time, in the flute, the atmosphere so enchanting it must be a case of a willing beloved appearing before the eyes of her swain. Rapture incorporated!

And Wilhelm had his young Elisabeth . . .

Wartime again, a “live” Pastoral from Berlin March ’44: Such a lovely calm in the scene by the brook, bringing perhaps a collective drop in the blood pressure of the audience gathered for this reverie. Note meanwhile the long crescendo Furtwaengler devises in a series of subtle lifts to the second theme, bars 21 to 29. But he doesn’t spare his alarm-weary parishioners in the Storm wherein Beethoven’s timpani crescendo from piano to forte at bars 49-51 becomes absolutely terrifying and reaches fff at least. Even Stokowski and Mengelberg might flinch. Twenty bars later and this storm has slowed a bit and gained extra weight, like a sated monster.

And now a dozen vintage Furtwaengler performances, in alphabetical order:

Bach Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Vienna Philharmonic “live” at Salzburg 8-19-51 –  Romantic, delicious and very moving. Movement 1: while purists run for cover you can enjoy the lovely tenderness of the first concertino interlude, following an admittedly megalithic tutti; then the LONGING that permeates the second concertino; and the delicate footsteps of flute and friends on the patio stones of the third; and so forth, with a positively operatic passion getting into the act a bit further on. More here than a lowest-baroque-denominator progression from A to B to C. Movement 2: Very slow indeed, the music a thing of the heart on an expressively extended sleeve. Movement 3: A misto of regret, ardor, exaltation.

Brahms Variations on a theme by Haydn, Berlin Philharmonic “live” 1942 – Characterization is intense enough here one wonders if this music couldn’t be a kind of pre-Elgarian Enigma Variations in which each section is a musical “picture” of an interesting character in the composer’s life. Clara Schumann, anyone? At all events the first variation is broad, insistent, consuming, the third full of a sweet nostalgia, the fourth an amazing quasi-dirge, absolutely not Brahms’ andante con moto but more moving perhaps than any other performance in this archivist’s memory. Alfred Frankenstein, one of my favorite program note maestri, called the seventh variation a languorous barcarolle and Furtwaengler is obviously in total agreement.

Brahms Symphony No. 3, Berlin Philharmonic “live” in Torino, 5-14-54 – Ten days earlier I heard the same team do Brahms’ Third from a top balcony seat at the Palais Garnier in Paris, a long stick of  asparagus in white tie wriggling on the podium a kilometer off. I was a GI on leave from duty of sorts an hour south of town. I remember only the opening, and here it is in Torino, a slow, poetically uncertain opening, crescendoing from below, not quite in accordance with the here’s-a-forte of the score’s bar 1, as if a great orchestral flower were unfolding to the tune of winds and brass. Well, Furtwaengler must have been thinking, Who’s Afraid of a Maximized  pre-Blast Upbeat? Then at the third bar and the beginning of the passionate first theme enjoy one of those crazy yank-it-out attacks from the Philharmoniker, vibrating! Being as he was a sort of Bergmannesque opener of lyrical Pandora’s boxes, Furtwaengler makes of the Third a soulful and complex affair, vulnerability drenched, very exciting to hear when one’s in the mood for the orchestral equivalent of ten rich ragouts. Note the transparency — the unlocking of not always available doors in the instrumental texture means that with the first movement’s second subject opening, especially pathetic here in its micro-rhythm 9/4, we hear clearly not only the piano grazioso theme of the clarinet but the concomitant syncopated piano of tied quarters, these in a solitary flute, suggesting nothing so much as the proverbial telephone wire peopled by two birds here, another two there, sounding quite frail and forgotten.

Bruckner Fourth Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic “live” 10-22-51 – A good demonstration model of Furtwaengler’s fluid, fervent Bruckner, the opening horn unsurprisingly quiet and seeing a vision of course in that performing fool of a sky, the overall line of the opening movement long and organic, easy adjustments made from ferocity to rumination. Bruckner’s SQUARENESS is laid low by an imaginative tempo system ranging as wide as Furtwaengler’s approximately half = 48 to 92 in the development. Bear in mind Bruckner’s tempo for the movement is 72 beats with an occasional rather leisurely or somewhat animated thrown in. Professor Tovey discussing the tick of the Brucknerian mechanism said the composer’s mind “moves no faster than in four bar steps of moderate alla breve time.” Here with his marvelous velocic lubrication, his rising fevers of spontaneity, Furtwaengler hastens Bruckner’s cerebration . . . Note as well a slow movement in which the art of daydreaming while remaining fully awake is perfectly demonstrated, then a shimmering and sassy scherzo, and a finale in which Furtwaengler’s patience tends to avert choppiness.

Franck Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic “live,” 1-28-45 – A very dramatic performance easing via Furtwaengler’s clever rheostat from lugubrious to inflamed, with the pocket woodwind closeups of the first movement taken slowly enough to break a heart. The nominally allegretto second movement comes on very slowly too, worming its way to our ears . . . and Haydn Symphony No. 88, RAI Torino “live,” 3-3-52 – Furtwaengler being a conductor who can burn delighted listeners out with his rich and soulful style, it’s a pleasure to list here a performance that might have been conducted by any musician with a good feeling for Haydn’s charming assets. The opening movement is jolly, sturdy and sweet, the slow movement flows perfectly, the minuet has an agreeable peasant weightiness, and the zippy finale, a postilion’s delight, is launched with the slyest mincing steps.

Liszt Les Préludes, Vienna Philharmonic “live,” 3-3-54 – Not a favorite piece of Furtwaengler’s, but the show must go on! A boiling, gleaming, penetrating performance, thick as a 2-inch Porterhouse steak.

Rossini Gazza Ladra Overture, Berlin Philharmonic, 1930 — Charmingly pomposo, sly and unaffected: it could be Molajoli or Panizza conducting as easily as Furtwaengler. To borrow a phrasing from an earlierday French critic, there’s no sea of stylization here to be beached in . . . and  Sibelius En Saga, Berlin Philharmonic “live,” 2-10-43 – Why isn’t there more Sibelius from Furtwaengler, just this, I believe, and the violin concerto. Heavens, the monumentality and richness of vision of the Finnish master cry for his interpretive feedback. Suffice to say this is a performance full of grace and surge, molto liquido, with a characteristically TREMENDOUS climax near the end.

Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements, Vienna Philharmonic “live” at Salzburg, 8-15-50 – Stravinsky bad-mouthed Furtwaengler of course, saying nasty things about his conducting of his music, but this is a great performance, the opening movement positively eroico with its grip as well as motion, its gravitas and zing. A Pacific 231 bearing down on you! Alas, the slow movement is laid out so beautifully, like a fine table setting, that the essential triviality of the music is exposed. Flute and harp might as well be goldfish in a tank . . . and Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, RAI Torino “live,” 6-6-52 — The novelist Edmund White has written about characters that he suspects are given a part “in which the dialog keeps running out.” That you cannot say about Furtwaewngler: another case in point is this taut yet grazioso performance encompassing, of course, many emotions. Carefuly organized, it does however create the impression its life is evolving on the spot. That is Art . . . .

I n t e r m I s s I o n   T i m e –—-

T HOUGHTS  IN  PASSING   During   S e v e n t h   I n n i n g   S t r e t c h :

When Rachmaninoff was asked by a journalist for a definition of Music, he replied:

“Music is a calm moonlight night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide! Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart; it is Love! . . . The sister of Music is Poesy, and its mother is Sorrow!”

Ruminating on his listening life in 1928, conductor Sir Adrian Boult remarked: “It’s true that practically all of the greatest performances that I can remember have been slower than average.”

Edmund White remembers a piece by Brahms “as unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation.”

And hark to Nietzsche: “Music scatters pictures like sparks.”

The actor Simon Callow writes that in interpreting a part in a play – but this could apply to musical interpretation as well, “you must go with the impulses of your character, . . . exceeding the parameters set by the author.”

And godfather Nikisch: “Make every performance like an improvisation.”