Berlin Staatsoper – 28 September 2025 – Wilhelm Furtwängler Gesellschaft

Our friends from the German Society organised a morning event in a foyer — the Apollosaal — at the Berlin State Opera. It took place on 28 September.

In addition to speeches — including one by Helge Grünewald, the president — guests were treated to the two central movements of Furtwängler’s Sonata No. 1 in D minor for violin and piano.

We are delighted to be associated with this festive event — which demonstrates the vitality of our sister society — by offering our members the souvenir album (French + English) which contains the text of the speech, photos, and a link to the video made for the occasion.

Exactly a century ago, on 19 January 1926, Furtwängler conducted the Viennese premiere of one of the most powerful oratorios of the 20th century, Le Laudi di san Francesco d’Assisi, by the Swiss composer Hermann Suter (1870–1926), who died a few months after this performance.

The work, based on the Canticle of the Creatures, written in the 13th century by Saint Francis of Assisi, is composed for soloists, mixed choir, children’s choir and large orchestra.

Furwängler had an exceptional cast at his disposal: Amalie Merz-Tunner (soprano), Frieda Dierolf (contralto), Karl Erb (tenor), Josef von Manowarda (bass), Georg Valker (organ), Friederich Wührer (piano), the Peterlinischer Knabenchor Mariahilf, the Singverein der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

This ambitious score is all too rarely given the attention it deserves. Even back then, it took a certain amount of audacity to programme it!

Since the early 1960s, all Furtwängler enthusiasts have known that Bruckner’s Ninth was recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic on 7 October 1944 in the Beethovensaal. And — despite what was stated on all Deutsche Grammophon LPs and CDs — this was not a live recording, but a ‘Magnetofonkonzert’, with the radio microphone as its only audience.

And yet doubts remained about this date, raised in particular by reading the booklet accompanying the voluminous CD edition of the ‘war concerts’ by the BPO a few years ago.

It is credit to the SWF that, after some complicated research, it is now able to reveal the exact dates of the recording sessions for this Ninth Symphony. You will find the explanations in the newsletter (pdf) available to our members.

Research is now focusing on Mozart’s 39th, which has been labelled for over fifty years as 1942/1943… And why not 1926/1954?…

As previously announced, here is the first volume — SWF D22 — of the complete Polydor recordings, available in the shop.

It includes the earliest recordings, notably Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This is the result of exceptional remastering work, based on collector’s copies.

At he cost of € 10,00.

Content: Weber Der Freischütz: Ov. – Beethoven Fifth Symphony – Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’Dream: Ov. – Bach Suite No. 3: Air – Schubert Rosamunde: Entracte No. 3 & Ballet No. 2

Next chapter: March/April.

The board of the SWF sends its best wishes to all: may 2026 be a very happy year for you and your loved ones.

As a gift: a discovery made by our member George Zepos. Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Budapest on 10 November 1943. For this performance, the conductor was able to count on the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and the Municipal Choir, as well as soloists Magda Rigo (soprano), Maria Basilides (alto), Andreas Rösler (tenor) and Georg Losonczy (bass). The concert was broadcast. Unless we are mistaken, this brings the total number of performances of this symphony by Furtwängler to 109.

Furtwängler and the Budapest Philharmonic (Erkel Theatre)

Next 24 January, the Japanese orchestra Symphonica will give a concert at Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo to mark its 40th anniversary. Under the baton of Kenjiro Sakairi, it will perform Schumann’s Fourth Symphony from the score revised by Furtwängler. The second half will feature Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. For those interested in this revision, we refer you to the facsimile of the score and to the study (PDF in French and English) published with SWF D15.

On 9 January, the first volume of the complete Polydor recordings made by Furtwängler will be released.

It contains his very first recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Along with the Freischütz Overture, these are Furtwängler’s first ‘waxes’. But few people know that they were recorded under rather bizarre conditions, using technology imported from the United States that would prove short-lived… 

These electrical recordings were made using the ‘light-ray’ process, introduced in the spring of 1925 and abandoned in early 1927.

The attached study (pdf in English) will allow everyone to see what our beloved conductor has been through… Unbelievable but true.

Coming soon – in high definition

In 1926, Furtwängler made his first recording. In 2026, spread out over the year, the SWF will release a downloadable collection: the complete Polydor recordings (1926–1937). We have chosen this title for convenience, as Polydor was only an export label for Deutsche Grammophon recordings (distributed under the label “Die Stimme seines Herrn” in Germany, “Decca” in the United Kingdom, “Brunswick” in the United States, etc.).

A complete remastering underlies this one-of-a-kind edition. The files will be available in 2 formats: HD and CD-quality (44-16).

Each volume features a drawing of Furtwängler on the cover.

To find out more about the content and schedule, click on the document below (pdf – 2 pages).

Stay tuned on 26 December for a study about Furtwängler’s first recording, and on 9 January for the very first episode (SWF D22) of this series!

Mark Kluge, who wrote the introductory text in the booklet accompanying Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, took an interest in the three Telefunken recordings — SWF D21 — that we have just released.

Here is the study he wrote about them.

The “Nicolai Concert” (named after the orchestra’s founder) is the highlight of the Vienna Philharmonic’s symphonic season. And traditionally, Furtwängler would perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony there. The concert on 12 February 1950 (preceded the day before by a public dress rehearsal and a concert for the Young Musicians) took a completely different turn. The programme he chose could have been that of any other concert: Beethoven’s Eroica following Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, preceded by the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BWV 542), performed on the Musikverein organ by Franz Schütz. The reason for this is clear: the Bach Year was just beginning.

Why did it come to this? A very serious incident occurred between Furtwängler and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the influential association that also owned the Singverein, Vienna’s finest choral society, which supported major musical events, notably Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It would take too long to explain here the reasons for the quarrel between the conductor and the Gesellschaft, in which Karajan’s name is involved.

Nevertheless, from that day onwards, concerts featuring a choir will be performed by the conductor with the services of the rival ensemble, the Singakademie. This choir can be heard in several of Beethoven’s Ninth (1951, 1952, 1953), in Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem (1951) and in Saint Matthew Passion (1952 and 1954).

Here is a PDF facsimilé of the programme, one of the 75 programmes now available.

The SWF D21 downloadable product (see details in the 14 October news item) is now available in the shop.

In a single product — at the exceptional price of €6 — we have brought together the three recordings made by Furtwängler for Telefunken in 1941 and 1942. We would like to point out that we were able to extract the high-definition files from copies of very high quality. It was, of course, the Adagio from Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony that required the most work in order to accurately reflect the dynamic levels intended by the composer.

The cover reproduces an engraved woodcut by Peter Trumm. Finally, let us remember that we stuck to the BPO ‘s tuning pitch at the time, which was A at 440 Hz.

There are only two possibilities for the date of the recording of Bruckner’s Adagio from Symphony No. 7 in Berlin in April 1942:

– Henning Smidth, in his well-known discography (‘Olsen’ 1970), indicates Tuesday, 7 April.
– René Trémine gave the date of Wednesday, 1 April.
– Wilhelm Furtwängler site by shin-p indicates 7 April, but mentions: « Teldec states that this recording was made on 1 April. »

So what? If we stick to the data we can extract from the Berliners’ activity at that time:

– 1 April was a day off between rehearsals (31 March) and the concert (2 April) of the St John Passion conducted by Georg Schumann, with the BPO and its Sing-Akademie choir.

– 7 April. An unpublished document does mention something, but it is difficult to decipher, and in any case it is certainly not ‘Aufnahme’ [recording], as appears to be the case for other confirmed dates. Actually, we can read ‘Doppelprobe – Krauss f. Reise’ [two rehearsals – Krauss for the tour]: Clemens Krauss spent several days rehearsing — from 7 to 10 April — preparing for the BPO concert in Vienna on the 11th, and above all for the long tour from 22 April to 23 May in Spain, Portugal and France.

Conclusion: we can go with April 1st. That is the date we will indicate on the upcoming SWF D21. After conducting similar research, it appears that the Overture to Alceste was engraved on 28 October 1942 and not on the 29th, as is usually stated.

On 28 November: SWF D21

We have compiled the three recordings made by Furtwängler for Telefunken, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

– Beethoven: Cavatina, from Quartet Op. 130 [15 October 1940]
– Bruckner: the Adagio from Symphony No. 7 [1 April 1942, not 7 April]
– Gluck: Overture to Alceste [28 October 1942, not 29 October]

The high-definition files were created from copies of 78 rpm records in exceptional condition belonging to Jean Testas, one of the founders of the SWF and owner of one of the most fabulous collections of old wax recordings.

Without overlooking the string orchestra version of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 130, a monument of interiority, or the grandiloquent reading of Gluck’s Overture, this edition finds its highlight in the sumptuous interpretation of the Adagio from Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.

High definition means you can hear the full range of the melodic curves, without losing any of the dynamic layers that are so important in Bruckner’s music.

The new product will be sold at the exceptional price of €6.

Here is an excerpt (mp3) from the Adagio.