News
We have already written of the celebrations for our fiftieth anniversary.
For various reasons, the date of the fiftieth anniversary is fixed for Saturday 19 October — and no longer the 12th as indicated in the newsletter of 1 January — and the Board has settled upon the definitive programme.
After our General Assembly and a ‘glass’ among friends, we shall offer you a concert, to be held in the Salle Cortot, a venue steeped in history, an annexe of the École Normale de Musique which this year celebrates the centenary of its foundation by Alfred Cortot.
In order to establish a bridge between the generations and across frontiers, we have chosen to invite a string quartet, the Varian Fry Quartet, comprising young musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, something that brings us even closer to Furtwängler.
You will find the Quartet on the site of the Berliner Philharmoniker and on its own site.
We are currently working towards the success of this project, and will keep you posted..
As we have already said, it becomes very complicated to organise lectures in Paris, given the costs of the halls and current time-tables. In addition, and for a long time now, we are well aware that this concerns solely members who live in the region...
One way to mitigate these inconveniences is to create a podcast, addressed to all members, notably by offering an English translation of the spoken contributions. The SWF is working at what could be its first podcast: the ‘pilot’ is currently being prepared so that it can soon be tested by the governing body.
The subject: Furtwängler at the Festival of Görlitz, conjuring up through sound (and image) the contributions of the conductor and his Berliner in the ‘Musical Celebrations in Silesia’ of 1925, 1928 and 1931.
We announced it in November: the SWF offers you a previously unpublished, large-scale study of the centenary celebrations of the Wiener Philharmoniker in March 1942.
This 20-page study contains three sections:
– an historical overview: a snapshot of the Philharmonic at the time drawn up by the well-known chronicler of French media, Christian Merlin,
– a detailed calendar of the various events, with some rare and hitherto unpublished documentation and iconography,
– Furtwängler’s speech in homage to the orchestra
In view of the importance of the document, we have made a point of presenting it also in English (something that cannot be the case for all our studies), including Furtwängler’s speech that had never been included in his ‘Writings’ published in Great Britain. Jeremy Drake has been entrusted with this voluminous work.
Furtwängler speaks to a musician (Vienna, 1939)
The list of Furtwängler’s concerts (v. bottom of the homepage) reveals the recurring, albeit infrequent, participation of Furtwängler as a soloist in his concerts: at the piano for concertante works, but also as a partner in chamber music or an accompanist for singers. In time, such performances became even more infrequent, until he appeared at the keyboard only in the 5th Brandenburg or — albeit for an entire recital and in Salzburg — to accompany Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
It is in a concerto of Mozart that we find him in a concert of the Berliner in Hamburg, on 17 April 1936, and here is a facsimile of the programme.
2019 is not just any old year for the SWF.
In January 1969 an association was born, the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society, which doubtless had no idea that people would one day celebrate its fiftieth anniversary!
This celebration will not be held in January — time is needed to prepare it and hold a General Assembly — but in October next, and in Paris. Already the management team is working to prepare what will be ‘our’ day: the General Assembly, the release of a disc, a cocktail and a big public concert.
Even if it is still very early, make a note in your diary right now for the date Saturday 12 October. Before then we shall have occasion to return to this event.
In the meanwhile, the Board of the SWF wishes you and all who are close to you, a
Happy New Year!
PS: It is also the fiftieth anniversary of "one small step for a man, one giant..."; yet it is obviously less important.
The well-known site ResMusica recently awarded its ‘Clefs d'or’ (Golden Keys) to standout recordings of distinction. And in the selection is a double CD album from Audite, ‘Furtwängler at the Lucerne Festival’, with, notably, Schumann’s Fourth Symphony and a novelty, the Overture to Manfred.
This album had been referenced by Philippe Jacquard in November 2017 as a current news item on our website (see article).
You can consult the article that ResMusica devotes to it.
Who was the hallucinating character in the photo posted with the competition of the 15th?
It was not so easy to recognise Ludwig Suthaus, the Tristan of the performances of Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin Staatsoper in early October 1947. Fixed in a somewhat frenzied pose (the scene preceding the arrival of Isolde in Act 3), Suthaus was photographed by Abraham Pisarek, responsible for a series of photos taken during the rehearsals, others of which (Schlüter, Klose…) are already featured on our site, attached to the date of 3 October in the concert list.
Too difficult? Nobody found the answer.
This news item is the one hundredth posted since the inauguration of this new site a year and a half ago.
These articles have enabled us to announce to you: 7 releases of recordings, French (SWF) or Japanese, on disc or through downloading, 20 programme facsimiles, a dozen or so studies, 5 lectures, and lots of other news items.
Since recently, you have been able to add your own comments.
How about a little competition to celebrate this? Who is this singer and what role is he apparently performing? To get you going: the photo was of course taken on the occasion of an opera conducted by Furtwängler, and after the War.
If you are a member of the SWF and you have a solution, send an email to site@furtwangler.fr before 19 December, and the first person to provide the correct answer will receive the following discs (Christmas presents!):
Bruckner’s Ninth (SWF 041), the Schubert CD (SWF 973) and the Lucerne double CD (SWF 961-62).
This line from Victor Hugo — “Come! An invisible flute…” — finds a quite prosaic echo on our site: our album of The Magic Flute (Salzburg 1951) is no longer visible there. A victim of its success, it is out of stock. Yet be reassured: it will be reborn digitally, and in the course of February 2019 it will be possible to download this great moment of music and theatre... and in high definition 24/96!
What a curious programme was the one printed and distributed for the Berlin concert of 28 September 1947!
The concert was organised for members of the allied occupation forces, hence mainly Americans (the Titania Palast was in the American sector). Was this the reason for entrusting the preparation of the programme notes to someone no doubt more able to wield a rifle than a pen? The turns of phrase are such as to discourage our very modest English, and we asked our faithful member Roger Smithson to try to decrypt this hotchpotch.
We thank him warmly and note the presentation, not unintended, of the programme’s title page: Yehudi Menuhin (in large letters) is accompanied (in very small letters) by an orchestra that must doubtless be of the third zone and in the hands of some obscure baton wielder…
Who has heard of Coffeyville, a small community of ten thousand souls in the state of Kansas, a stone’s throw from Oklahoma? And yet many lovers of French comic strips and of the ’poor lonesome cowboy’ Lucky Luke should remember it: it was there that a bloodbath ended the saga of the gang of the Dalton brothers on 5 October 1892.
What on earth has this to do with Furtwängler and our association, I hear you ask?
The statistics of the SWF website are clear: it is this forsaken locality that has recorded the greatest number of connections to our site for the whole of the North American continent and even for the world, France excepted.
A ‘Furt’ fetichist? No, doubtless some robot programmed to operate continuously in order to extract information and statistics. However, lacking credentials and a member’s card, it cannot get much. Our site resists, just as the town and its banks resisted the outlaws.
PS: Same conclusion for Perm in Siberian Russia. It is much bigger than Coffeyville, but less fun…
William Walton in Wien.
Three Ws that hail the performance of a work by Walton by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Furtwängler. The archives of the Philharmoniker inform us that this enfant terrible of English music (the epithet is not ours) had five of his pieces programmed by the orchestra — over a period of 70 years!, including two with Furtwängler. Where were the other conductors? And it is said that Furtwängler did not do much for his contemporaries! Or else he was very happy to have the same Christian name…
You will find the facsimile of the programme of 5 December 1948 also online with the concert and in the rubric ‘ask for the programme’.