Sean Winter has posted a brilliant clip of noted German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler giving a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1942 on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday:
There is huge debate about this performance, and to watch it is to be disturbed, but it seems to me that Furtwängler is actually pressing the score to the point where actually the music begins to break down (deconstruct). Is this someone who knows that the music being played, and the context in which that happens, are inimical to each other, so much so that the music collapses? The fury of the final bars suggest someone who is struggling to keep control We will never know (but note if you stick to the end how he shakes Goebbel’s hand and then wipes his hand with a hankerchief).
In his comments, Sean notes that “the comparison between the act of interpreting a text and the act of performing a musical score has often been made.” He compares Furtwängler’s interpretation to a recording on original instruments by John Eliot Gardiner and concludes that “Gardiner is the exegete, Furtwängler the preacher.” I dare say that Sean could not have picked two examples further away from each other on the interpretative scale. Gardiner is clinical, every detail is exposed in its proper place and the score proceeds as literally written by the composer. Furtwängler is flexible, bending, shaping and drawing out phrases to fit his view of the musical text.
As one who leaned in the past toward the immovable interpretation, a la Gardiner, but especially that of Otto Klemperer and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, I tended to shake off the more fluid interpreters like Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein et al. However my recent shift to more “dynamic” translation texts may also indicate a willingness to engage these latter personalities. Indeed, this is a hermeneutic comparison close to my heart on several levels and one that I also should explore in greater detail.