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From the notes of
Bertel Hildebrand

...I didn't see Furtwängler again until he was fourteen. In winter he was ice-skating on the Kleinhesseloher See. He was already fully developed (he was then almost fifteen), very slim and tall, curly blond wild hair. Thick eyebrows underneath which shone his beautiful fiery and expressive eyes. Very mobile and supple, he skated extremely well... he had a winning quality in him and immediately made a deep impression on me.

Every day I walked over to the lake and he was already there when I arrived. I felt that he too was happy to see me. But at the beginning, we acted as if we met by sheer luck. One day he invited me home to meet his parents who were expecting me for tea. Of course I accepted with pleasure. The family made a very happy impression on me; his father so nice and distinguished, the mother so talented and with all those lovely children, and my friend at the center of all this, with his strength, genius and wonderful young personality... Willi, they called him that, played the twelfth Schubert sonata for us. This is how I recognized his obvious talent: he played with such maturity, passion and interpretative strength that I was deeply impressed. He didn't want to play us any of his own compositions but asked me to play some of my own songs. Acutely embarrassed, I played two bergères on poems by Goethe. He looked at me very tenderly and I was surprised that he liked them: "so charming, so feminine" he kept on repeating. His approval encouraged me to continue composing. It was the first time I heard him play and that I saw him with his parents. However, he didn't say much about his family even though our relationship was already serious. For example, his mother organized a delightful evening of dancing. We both looked forward to it eagerly because we were happy to see each other frequently. But later on, we never went out dancing together, nor did we even go to a dancing club. In spring, my parents made a trip to Florence which kept us apart. But we wrote to each other every other day or so. Even though he was only fifteen, his letters were extraordinarily mature and his judgment particularly warm and enthusiastic on anything intellectual - all the elements were already there, his interest for history, his love of Penthesilea and for Kleist in general. He wrote to me:

"I realize that history interests me the most when it deals with an extraordinary event, an outstanding personality or the development of a particular historical period and the way it influenced that person. There are periods that appear very vague, full of diplomatic quarrels that remind me of a group of gossiping, quarrelsome women; but the development of the whole period is elsewhere, in areas one hasn't even dreamt of."

As for his relationship with musical notes, he said:

"For me each note has its own face and tonality, so that when I hear something in a different key from the one in what originally written in, I get the impression that I am listening to something completely different";

And he used to tell me in his own charming way that I reminded him of the scherzo in Beethoven's Seventh symphony. His letters were full of talk about events he has personally experienced, and they were stimulating. From the time we were children our relationship had this wonderful quality of being both stimulated and stimulating on the spiritual level.


Bertel was one of the six children of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand (1847-1921) who had become one of the great attractions of Munich, town or art and culture, ever since some of the town's great personalities, from Eleonora Duse to Bismarck, asked him to make their bust. Adolf von Hildebrand was befriended with Clara Schumann and Cosima Wagner and also took an interest in the career of the young Willi Furtwängler. The Hildebrand couple owned a villa in Florence, where they entertained the elite just as in their big property in Munich.

The French writer and diplomat Jean Giraudoux was posted in 1905 in Munich. He met there the conductor Felix Mottl, who became the director of the Munich opera, and through Adolf Hildebrand he also met the young Furtwängler, aged nineteen.

Furtwängler and Bertel Hildebrand broke off their engagement and she married the composer Walter Braunfels of whom Furtwängler conducted a few works.

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