MON., JUNE 09, 2008
In This Feature
Magazine Archives:
Reclaiming Wagner, Pt. 2
by Justin Davidson
If he wanted to scrub the theatrical tradition clean, however, Wieland had to honor and renew the musical one, and that proved another kind of hurdle. Hitler’s campaigns of racial and political purity had deprived the festival (and the rest of Europe) of many great conductors, and the prewar generation of Wagnerian singers had gone to America, or into retirement, or both. Those conductors who had kept working through the Nazi era were not in good odor because, well, they had kept working through the Nazi era. This last factor turned out not to be all that crucial, however. The imperative to bring Wagner’s operas back into German cultural life, and to do so at the highest possible musical level, trumped all other considerations. So for the 1951 festival, Wieland felt free to recruit two conductors with large talents and unsavory histories: Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
In 1931, the prickly Furtwängler had a squabble with Winifred and abandoned the festival in a fit of pique. Five years later, it was Hitler who coaxed him back. Fifteen years after that, the world had been transformed — and yet, there was Furtwängler in Bayreuth again, returning this time to lead the opening-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. It was typical of the confused cultural politics of the time that Beethoven’s humanistic symphony could represent both continuity and a new dawn in Hitler’s early days, and that it could carry the same symbolic weight in postwar Germany, too.
If Furtwängler was a regretful and reluctant emissary of the past — he conducted only that single concert in 1951, and no operas — Karajan arrived with his eyes fixed firmly on the future (especially the future of his own career). He, too, had hitched his reputation to the Nazis. He joined the party and eagerly accepted posts that came free because their previous occupants were Jews. During postwar denazification proceedings, he assured Allied officials that he was clean, in part because his conducting had not been to Hitler’s taste — an exquisitely amoral defense. By 1951, the Americans wanted Germany working again more than they wanted it ideologically impeccable, and nobody could deny that Karajan knew how to conduct German music.
You can hear, in that momentous “Rheingold,” that honed instinct for making Wagner’s long lines breathe, for the red-earth colors of his orchestration and for the urgent yet flexible rhythms. Those are the hoof beats of another Germany, galloping away from its past — but not too far away. Karajan, who was born a century ago this year, managed to dance away from his Nazi associations to become one of the world’s most celebrated conductors. Winifred Wagner died unrepentant in 1980. Wieland died 14 years earlier, leaving the festival to his brother. The octogenarian Wolfgang has just retired — the last of his clan to have been dandled on Hitler’s knee.
To go back to the beginning of Justin Davidson's feature "Reclaiming Wagner," click here.
In 1931, the prickly Furtwängler had a squabble with Winifred and abandoned the festival in a fit of pique. Five years later, it was Hitler who coaxed him back. Fifteen years after that, the world had been transformed — and yet, there was Furtwängler in Bayreuth again, returning this time to lead the opening-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. It was typical of the confused cultural politics of the time that Beethoven’s humanistic symphony could represent both continuity and a new dawn in Hitler’s early days, and that it could carry the same symbolic weight in postwar Germany, too.
If Furtwängler was a regretful and reluctant emissary of the past — he conducted only that single concert in 1951, and no operas — Karajan arrived with his eyes fixed firmly on the future (especially the future of his own career). He, too, had hitched his reputation to the Nazis. He joined the party and eagerly accepted posts that came free because their previous occupants were Jews. During postwar denazification proceedings, he assured Allied officials that he was clean, in part because his conducting had not been to Hitler’s taste — an exquisitely amoral defense. By 1951, the Americans wanted Germany working again more than they wanted it ideologically impeccable, and nobody could deny that Karajan knew how to conduct German music.
You can hear, in that momentous “Rheingold,” that honed instinct for making Wagner’s long lines breathe, for the red-earth colors of his orchestration and for the urgent yet flexible rhythms. Those are the hoof beats of another Germany, galloping away from its past — but not too far away. Karajan, who was born a century ago this year, managed to dance away from his Nazi associations to become one of the world’s most celebrated conductors. Winifred Wagner died unrepentant in 1980. Wieland died 14 years earlier, leaving the festival to his brother. The octogenarian Wolfgang has just retired — the last of his clan to have been dandled on Hitler’s knee.
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