Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
He pushed and pulled at scores as if they were Silly Putty–ignoring all the composer’s markings for how passages were supposed to be played, feeling his way through concerts as though he were making up the music himself. Sometimes you get the feeling the orchestra was alternately struggling to follow him and staring at him in disbelief. When it worked, the results could be weird and spectacular: he could give a Brahms symphony the dark splendor of a Rembrandt painting, he conducted Don Giovanni as though it were the sound track for the apocalypse, and he once turned Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” into an anguished, wailing dirge.
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EMI has now brought out a restored and digitally remastered version of his performance of Bach’s masterpiece the Saint Matthew Passion. It’s from 1954, the last year of Furtwangler’s life. By then his conducting had become less overtly perverse and more contemplative. But it’s still typical Furtwangler: a performance on kazoos would sound more historically informed. The score is severely abridged, and then conducted with his usual waywardness with the tempi (even with 14 substantial omissions and several trims of the recitatives, this performance runs nearly as long as some uncut ones). It’s also typical in its tolerance of imperfection in the name of spontaneity: if a singer’s voice blew out on the high notes (as happens more than once), Furtwangler wasn’t about to go into a studio and rerecord. The background, and sometimes the foreground, is dense with the small-arms fire of coughs and chair creaks, and the pauses between numbers are filled with frantic page flipping, as the performers skip over the mutilations of the score. (Yet this CD is happily untypical in having halfway decent sound–some of his releases are almost inaudible.) But redeeming it all is Furtwangler’s imposing vision–not of what Bach meant, exactly; maybe of what Bach would have meant if he’d known what Furtwangler could do for him.
Nothing much happens here in most performances I’ve heard: Jesus might as well be an after-dinner speaker, and his accompaniment is a routine Baroque filigree (all of Jesus’ recitatives are accompanied by shifting clusters of strings–the musical equivalent of a red-letter edition of the Bible). But in Furtwangler’s version, as Jesus breaks the bread and pours the wine, the strings mysteriously rise and overflow with lovingly abundant, Wagnerian lushness, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voice soars nobly into crescendo after triumphant crescendo. It’s an impossible, wildly operatic scene. Furtwangler’s Jesus proclaims the New Testament as though it were a victory speech on a battlefield; he becomes another Siegfried or Parsifal, a mythic hero possessed by a vision of divine grace.
The more I listen to Bach’s music, no matter who performs it, the stranger it becomes to me. I’m sure he was as conventionally devout as any other citizen of Germany, but compared with the solid, comfortable Lutheranism of his neighbors, his internal landscapes seem as Byzantine as an opium dream. His music is so ecstatic and so cold, so fantastically impassioned around the margin and so reserved about its ostensible subject, that I sometimes think I’m witnessing a kind of confidence trick. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, and the authentic performers have brought me up against an impassable barrier of changing taste and historical convention–Bach’s original audience might have found limitless emotional depth in the chilly formalism of the music. But I think Bach’s audience might have been getting the Gospel just the way Christians have always been most comfortable thinking about it: which is to say, at a safe and stylized remove. Meanwhile Bach’s own strange, secret faith remains undisclosed–hidden somewhere down another turning in his labyrinth.
