Springtime for Furtwangler
When the two con men in Mel Brooks's classic film comedy The Producers decide to mount a sure-fire flop on Broadway, they hit on a musical comedy called Springtime for Hitler -- a nostalgic romp through the life and loves of the Fuhrer guaranteed to outrage and disgust the New York theater crowd. Real-life producers Alexander Cohen and Max Cooper might have brooded a bit about the possibility that the British play they brought to Broadway in October would prove to be Springtime for Hitler 1996 -- only without the inadvertent success Springtime for Hitler enjoys in The Producers. For Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides is a sympathetic account of what happened when the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler found himself accused of being a Nazi after World War II.
Unlike Springtime for Hitler, Taking Sides is certainly not pro-Nazi, though it may be somewhat antiAmerican. The play is primarily concerned with the question of whether in fact Furtwangler was a Nazi, and, if not, whether he was unjustly maligned. Nowhere was Furtwangler more vilified than in New York, and so, despite the critical and box-office success of the original London production, it took courage to bring Ronald Harwood's fascinating but flawed play to Broadway.
Taking Sides is a contest of wills between Furtwangler and Major Arnold, an American army officer assigned to prepare a case against the conductor for a German denazification tribunal. (Harwood mixes fact and fiction throughout; the character of Arnold is entirely his creation.) Furtwangler has the self-confidence of genius and an imperious manner born of years of adulation from an adoring public. But in these circumstances, he is close to helpless. Arnold holds all the cards; indeed, he holds the future of Furtwangler's musical career and life in his hands. Each in his own way is used to commanding others -- Furtwangler as a conductor and Arnold as an army officer -- and so the stage is set for a powerful confrontation pitting an inner spiritual authority against the brute force of the military.
I would be the last person to compare Ronald Harwood to Shakespeare, but there are moments in Taking Sides when the intensity of the exchanges between the two men almost reaches the fever pitch of the battles between Othello and Iago. The bewildered and tormented Furtwangler, a man who feels comfortable expressing himself -- only in music before a sympathetic concert audience, is faced instead with the unfamiliar task of articulating his thoughts in words before a hostile philistine who has the power to silence him.
Harwood captures Furtwangler's strength and conviction, both necessary for someone whose calling it was to impose his will on hundreds of musicians; as one character puts it, "a conductor is also a dictator." But his Furtwangler also has human, all-too-human, qualities, which allowed Goebbels and Goering to manipulate him for the benefit of the Third Reich.
The two halves of Furtwangler blend together seamlessly in Daniel Massey's brilliant performance. Massey does a superb job of conveying the artist's otherworldliness -- the way Furtwangler is simply at a loss when it comes to fitting into everyday human surroundings. Massey's Furtwangler finds an ordinary object like a chair something to be wondered at and dealt with as if for the first time. Characters in Beckett plays have an easier time taking a seat.
His adversary, Major Arnold, has been chosen by the American authorities to build the case against Furtwangler precisely because he has never heard of him and has no idea how great an artist he is. To convey to Arnold how important Furtwangler is in Germany, his superiors tell him the conductor is " Bob Hope and Betty Grable rolled into one."
Ed Harris can't help but imbue Arnold with some of the all-American character he embodied in both The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. This strengthens and balances the play, perhaps in spite of Harwood's own intentions. Arnold is basically a one-dimensional character in the script, although Harwood makes him puzzling in one respect.
Why, we wonder, is he so determined "to nail the bandleader" despite the fact that his inquiry is turning up little or nothing that suggests the " bandleader" was doing the bidding of the Nazi party? In the second act, Arnold reveals he has been traumatized by the sight of concentration camps and is taking out his rage on the most convenient object at hand -- even though he is repeatedly confronted by evidence that Furtwangler personally saved many Jews from those camps.
In point of fact, Furtwangler was acquitted by the denazification tribunal (an event that takes place after the play comes to a close). The evidence of his Nazi activities or sympathies proved so flimsy that it dissolved upon examination, while there was overwhelming proof of his willingness to stand up to the Nazi authorities and even to insult Hitler personally. In 1945, a contemporary of Furtwangler's described an occasion nine years earlier when the Nazis tried to badger him into accepting an official position:
Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler cornered [Furtwangler] and tried everything to make him accept, climaxing in Hitler's shrill threat that he would send him to a concentration camp -- and Furtwangler's calm answer: "Herr Reichskanzler, I will find myself there only in the very best company!" This so surprised Hitler that he couldn't answer, but vanished from the room.
Furtwangler's prosecutors tried to make the case that he helped only famous Jewish musicians, but in truth, his aid was widespread and undiscriminating in the good sense of the term. At the hearing, the number of Jews who came forward to testify to Furtwangler's efforts on their behalf persuaded even a heavily biased tribunal to rule in his favor.
The worst one can say against Furtwangler is that he was politically unskilled and naive enough to allow himself at times to be manipulated by Hitler, but the same could be said of Neville Chamberlain and many others who had more reason than Furtwangler to know better.
Harwood demonstrates considerable dramaturgical skill in shaping the plot to keep the audience from simply siding with the great artist against the crude soldier. The play opens with Arnold preparing his assistant for the interrogation, predicting exactly what the next witness will say on Furtwangler's behalf. His prescience makes the initial pro-Furtwangler testimony we hear seem like a predictable party line. Harwood uses the trappings of stock courtroom melodrama -- surprise witnesses, the announcement of newly discovered evidence, traps set for the unwary defendant -- to lead the audience and Arnold to think Furtwangler is indeed about to be nailed at any moment.
Harwood also allows Arnold to use all his professional skill -- he was an insurance investigator in peacetime -- to turn the most powerful exculpatory evidence against Furtwangler. Does everyone tell the same story of Furtwangler's goodness and cite his unceasing efforts on behalf of Jews in the music world? That kind of agreement among witnesses, Arnold says, is the first sign of fraud. Did Furtwangler really succeed in saving Jews from the camps or helping mere to escape from Germany? If he did, in Arnold's eyes that provides the surest proof that he really did have friends in high places.
But Harwood offers an alternative, sinister, and very troubling interpretation of Arnold's role in the interrogation. Arnold seizes on any anti-Semitic remark Furtwangler is ever reported to have made, and yet he himself refers to arson as "Jewish lightning" and pointedly calls a subordinate "Weil" instead of "Wills," thus contemptuously restoring the Jewish name the subordinate changed when he emigrated to the United States. In Harwood's portrayal, Arnold is something of an anti-Semite himself and thus is morally compromised in his crusade against Furtwangler.
Harwood even suggests that Arnold may be the front man for an American conspiracy against Furtwangler. Arnold is perfectly capable of feigning emotions to accomplish his purposes as an interrogator, and thus his outburst about the concentration camps may simply be a calculated stab at breaking the conductor down after all else has failed. At the play's end, Arnold admits the case against the conductor is weak, but still advises the denazification tribunal to go ahead with the hearing because he has a pliant journalist named Delbert Clark who will report the story any way he wants.
There was a reporter named Delbert Clark who did, in fact, cover the story for the New York Times and did slant his reporting against Furtwangler in a way that poisoned the conductor's reputation in the United States. And many people, including Jewish musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, have wondered publicly why Furtwangler was singled out for harsh treatment by the American authorities when other conductors with more tainted records -- like Herbert von Karajan, who did join the Nazi party -- were allowed to return to their musical careers with comparative ease.
Still, despite Harwood's dark hints about a conspiracy against Furtwangler, his play succeeds in conveying the atmosphere in which it seemed perfectly plausible to subject the conductor's wartime activities to intense scrutiny. Given the horrors of the Nazi regime, so unprecedented and so fresh in 1946, even the slightest suggestion that Furtwangler might have been implicated in Hitler's atrocities had to be investigated. The legitimate outrage all decent people feel at Nazis and Nazi sympathizers means that, to this day, Furtwangler's case remains controversial, arousing passions for and against him that give Taking Sides whatever dramatic complexity it possesses.
Ultimately, though, Harwood takes an easy way out by having Furtwangler break down in an admission that he was wrong to stay in Germany. He suddenly becomes ill and must be helped off-stage, leaving unresolved whether his outburst constitutes a confession of guilt or merely the acknowledgment of an error in judgment.
The abrupt and overwrought ending is symptomatic of a problem throughout. In his effort to keep his material dramatic, Harwood is repeatedly tempted into making it melodramatic. At one point he has a crazed woman charge onto the stage, ostensibly to attack Furtwangler but really to defend him because he once saved the life of her Jewish husband. The central situation in Taking Sides is so inherently dramatic that there was no need to gussy it up with false melodrama.
Harwood fails to measure up to another challenge: the need to convey a sense of Furtwangler's genuine greatness as an artist. An audience unfamiliar with Furtwangler's work must take his genius on faith. This is always a problem when someone tries to portray art either in drama or film, but just because it is diffcult does not mean it can't be done. Taking Sides does feature a few recordings of Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies conducted by Furtwangler, but hardly enough to convince a novice listener of his preeminence.
If I had to name the single greatest conductor of this century, it would be Furtwangler. At his best, he achieved revelatory results beyond the capacity of any other conductor. He could draw sounds out of an orchestra that have to be heard to be believed, particularly the warmth and tonal richness of the strings. Above all, Furtwangler struggled his way to the inner meaning of the music he conducted, and more often than not he used his flexibility of tempo and his exquisitely molded phrasing to reveal and highlight musical form.
And now that we have far greater access to the recordings Furtwangler made during World War II, we can better understand why the conductor chose to stay in Germany throughout the ordeal of the Hitler years. These recordings suggest what a price he paid in personal terms for his efforts to keep alive the great tradition of German music in his country's darkest hour. Their grim power, coupled with the anguish that suffuses them, belies Arnold's theory in the play that Furtwangler stayed in Germany to lead a hedonistic life as the pampered darling of the Nazi elite.
The man conducting these performances, with all their hectic drama and febrile energy, is suffering. And yet, in their achingly beautiful moments of musical repose, one catches glimpses of the higher world of German culture Furtwangler was desperately reaching for and clinging to throughout the Nazi years.
It is worth listening above all to Furtwangler's 1942 performance (with the Berlin Philharmonic) of the Beethoven Ninth. It is by no means his best recording of the symphony, but may nonetheless be the most remarkable Ninth we have. In the last movement, with its great choral outbursts affirming the joy of freedom, the music becomes almost hysterical. Trying to put oneself in the place of the 1942 audience listening to this performance in Berlin, one begins to understand what so many people meant when they said that Furtwangler was their only beacon of hope within Nazi Germany.
To put oneself in the place of Furtwangler during this performance is next to impossible, but one can at least empathize with his desperate effort to salvage the grandeur and beauty of Beethoven's vision in the midst of Hitler's betrayal of the German cultural heritage.
Furtwangler's wartime recordings give us a chance to hear the conductor truly speak for himself in the only way he really could. Taking Sides is no substitute for that, but it is a valuable and lively piece of theater. Maybe it is springtime for Furtwangler after all.