The Warner boxed set of the complete official recordings of the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler has won an International Classical Music Award in the Historical category. This award was the occasion for Pierre-Jean Tribot (Crescendo/Belgium, member of the jury) to make the following interview with Stéphane Topakian, the main editor of this set and a great connoisseur of the maestro’s art.
– For many years now, many live recordings of Furtwängler have been released. As a result, we have lost sight of the importance of his official legacy, which seemed to have been forgotten by the regular re-releases of Universal and Warner? So how can we consider these official recordings in their contribution to our knowledge of his art? Moreover, one has the impression that Furtwängler, the epitome of the conductor, gave his all in concert. Listening to the recordings, isn’t this impression wrong?
– Furtwängler considered the live experience of the concert as irreplaceable. The live recordings that can result from it are of course unique moments, but do they alone represent Furtwängler’s vision of this or that work? Certainly not. I’ll give you an example: one always quotes such and such a recording of a Beethoven symphony during the war or underlining the exacerbated or even desperate side of the discourse. But this would be forgetting that Beethoven never prescribed that his works should only be played in case of war.
In a way, Furtwängler goes as far, if not further, in his vision of the scores, free from external constraints. If Furtwängler was not very convincing in his first steps on the record (he was betrayed by a rudimentary technique), he quickly understood that the recording represented a way to get his art across, provided he invested himself in it in a different way. One could say that for Furtwängler the ‘how it is perceived’ is more important than the ‘how it is performed’.
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– It will soon be 70 years since the chef left us. Yet he remains a legend on the podium. If the art of interpretation has evolved, Furtwängler’s place remains immense and in the pantheon of musical glories, he continues to sit at the top, eclipsing almost all his contemporaries. What makes him so special?
– I think there are two layers to Furtwängler. The most immediate one is of course his interpretations of Beethoven’s or Brahms’ symphonies, his readings of Wagner’s operas or Beethoven’s Fidelio. There he appears irreplaceable. But after all, one can be just as convinced by Jochum’s Bruckner, Karajan’s Strauss, Schuricht’s Beethoven etc.
But there is a deeper stratum, and I think that it is this one that, unconsciously, continues to move music lovers: I mean the place of the interpreter in the chain of discourse that goes from the heart of the score to the heart of the listener. This does not mean that the interpreter must only do what he or she wants to do in order to be successful. If he must not abandon his personality, it is to put himself at the service of the work. If you listen to a performance by Furtwängler with the score, you will be surprised to find that he is one of the most scrupulous performers there is.
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– To a young artist or music lover who would like to know more about the conductor’s art, which recordings would you advise to listen to first?
– My answer will surprise you: let the person who wants to discover Furtwängler be guided by his instinct. He will never be unhappy.
