Furtwängler in Italy
Statistically speaking, between 1922 and 1954 Furtwängler conducted 69 symphonic concerts, 112 operas and 76 works by 31 composers in Italy. The majority of the repertoire consisted of the works of his favorite composers: Beethoven (17 times the Fifth and 11 times the Seventh) and Brahms (12 times the First). Two dates stand out in Furtwängler's musical life in Italy: the two performances of the Wagner Ring cycle at La Scala in 1950 and Rome in 1953.
Furtwängler's debut in Italy goes right back to Easter 1922 (16 April), at the Augusteo in Rome, with the orchestra of the Accademia Santa Cecilia. On the program: Beethoven, Wagner and a work by Malipiero (Pause del silenzio), which was not well received by the audience. However, the conductor himself was met by continuous applause. The year after, Toscanini invited him to conduct two concerts at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan: but their success was relative, perhaps dampened by the poor acoustics of the concert hall, or by the orchestra's lack of skill in symphonic music.
In 1932, Furtwängler's own orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, celebrated its 50th anniversary. On this occasion, it went on a grand tour throughout Europe, giving 26 concerts, and stopped in Turin (Italy) on May 2. The 8 concerts attracted a lot of attention since it was thirty years (Nikisch in 1901) since the Berlin orchestra had last played in an Italian concert hall. The audience and the critics discovered the extraordinary qualities of this 92_member orchestra, but favorable reactions were not unanimous. Furtwängler's conducting was said to be excessively virtuosic; he was accused of interfering occasionally with the general musical line, and losing himself in unimportant detail. On the other hand, his performance of Beethoven's Fifth was said to be «extraordinary». This Italian tour produced a lot of discordant opinions and it is hard to imagine now that the audience almost didn't even applaud the Brahms second symphony, given at La Scala of Milan on May 11. Maybe they still remembered the tremendous impact left by Toscanini and the concerts he had given with the New York Philharmonic two years earlier.
The Berlin Philharmonic returned to Rome and Florence in April 1934. On April 25, Furtwängler visited Mussolini at Palazzo Venezia, to the great anger of Toscanini in America, who criticized his colleague. The orchestra came back four years later, in May 1938, with some unforgettable concerts that are famous in the history of the Maggio musicale fiorentino: especially the concert on May 1 in which Furtwängler conducted the Bruckner Eighth; and above all, the two outstanding performances of the Bach Saint-Matthew Passion. The audience applauded the "beauty of sound, the soloists' vocal qualities, the cohesion between the choir and orchestra ".
The day before (May 16), another unforgettable interpreter gave a superb performance of the Verdi Requiem at the Basilica Santa Croce: Victor de Sabata.
"Thus, two of the greatest conductors of their time celebrated in a one last moment of quiet and serenity their farewells to a world that Europe was going to destroy in the most cynical fashion imaginable. Music reunites them in an symbolic way, like two survivors clinging to the life raft of a civilization bent on its own destruction" (Angelo Scottini).
The Berlin Philharmonic's tour of 1941 (ten concerts in January) appeared to cement the German-Italian alliance. Despite the inevitable political capital that the two regimes made out of the tour, Furtwängler refused to play the national hymns of either country. Artistically speaking, the tour's success represented one of the highlights of Furtwängler's and the orchestra' careers together, both from the point of view of interpretation and virtuosity. The critics now recalled another mythical tour, that of Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic in 1930.
Furtwängler didn't return to Italy for another six years, after the war and his own denazification, when he went back to Rome on April 6 1947. After concerts in May 1948 and May 1949, the most important event was the Wagner Ring that Furtwängler conducted at La Scala in Milan in May 1950 (in Bayreuth the theater was still closed). Milan's High society quickly transformed these evenings into something special, that later came to be seen as historically important. In 1951, Furtwängler came back to La Scala and conducted Parsifal (five performances in March-April) and Orpheus and Eurydice. The triumphant success of these performances made Furtwängler's reputation in Italy as the supreme interpreter of this work even though some critics claimed his interpretation was a bit on the slow side (1).
Fresh from a tour of Egypt, Furtwängler returned to Italy with the Berlin Philharmonic that same year, for four further concerts. One only dissenting note came from the critic Andrea della Corte who criticized Furtwängler
"for letting himself surrender to pure contemplation of beauty, of excessive hedonism and of inexplicable slowness."
The five performances of Meistersinger von Nürnberg at La Scala in February-March 1952 concluded another important chapter in Furtwängler's career and this was in fact the final work he performed in Milan (he wanted to conduct Tristan and Pfitzner's Palestrina but death put an end to all this).
The performances met with an enormous success. The March 9 concert was recorded live by the radio, and the recording was broadcast on March 22 and 24 1952. Unfortunately no trace of it remains in the archives of RAI. We'll never know if it was deleted, or if something else happened to it.
In January 1952, Furtwängler and RAI signed a contract for eight concerts with the orchestras of Rome and Turin. Both were recorded and were highly successful. In December, he conducted the Beethoven's Ninth; a performance that was considered only so-so: "weak and lacking bite." In the Autumn of 1953, the Management of RAI and Mario Labroca offered Furtwängler the possibility of conducting and recording the Ring at the RAI studios in Rome. Everything helped to turn these performances into a historical event. It took Furtwängler a whole month to prepare the work, the RAI orchestra was augmented with musicians from other orchestras. The radio gave the conductor total freedom and liberty. But it was to be a long time before EMI finally released these recordings.
During his stay in Rome, on November 16, Furtwängler accompanied the violinist Gioconda de Vito in a private concert in the presence of Pope Pius XII in the Consistory Hall at the Vatican. Furtwängler's final tour started on May 8,1954 at La Scala with the powerful opening chords of the Beethoven Fifth.
"The man who stood there conducting soberly and almost imperceptibly was the guardian of a flame that was slowly and painfully being snuffed out. Furtwängler had reached the ultimate possible stage for an interpreter, he had attained the status of a living legend." (Angelo Scottini).
At each concert, the audience was left with the feeling of having attended an unprecedented musical event. The poet Eugenio Montale wrote after a concert at the Teatro Argentina in Rome:
"During Wilhelm Furtwängler's performance of the Beethoven Fifth last night, I got the impression I was looking at a painting of Titian or Tintoretto. The first with its peaceful polychrome images, the second with its dense dramatic contrasts plunged me into the secrets of Beethoven's turbulent world; Furtwängler's conducting and his soul were revealed in the light of such rarely-glimpsed heights. Furtwängler brought to life a vision of many colors: the musicians came together in a single bloc of iridescent sound."
Few realized that a mythical gold age was coming to an end. The critic Piero Buscaroli wrote:
"Furtwängler's last season was filled with a majesty that was tragic and monumental. On the arches of cathedrals that had been destroyed, from a national soul that lay exhausted and breathing its final moments, emerged this final melody. One after the other, all the gigantic forms of the art of an entire civilization raised themselves for a final time before the night descended upon them for ever."
[ 1 ] The mysterious Parsifal recording, so often mentioned, does not exist. It was never broadcast; instead, that evening another Parsifal was broadcast, recorded in 1950 and conducted by Vittorio Gui with Callas, which led to the many misunderstandings and polemics.
