Background
Wilhelm Furtwängler was bom in Berlin on 26 January 1886.
Wilhelm Furtwängler was bom in Berlin on 26 January 1886.
After studying in Munich, Furtwängler became Director of Opera at Mannheim in 1915, subsequently succeeding Richard Strauss as conductor of the Berlin opera concerts.
In 1922 he was appointed Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, a position he held until the end of World War II. He also led the Vienna Philharmonic from 1927 to 1930.
The leading conductor at the Berlin State Opera from the autumn of 1933 to December 1934, Furtwängler was for a time out of favour with Hitler because of his spirited defence of the composer Paul Hindemith, denounced by official Nazi propaganda as a musical ‘degenerate’. Nevertheless, he arrived at a mutually beneficial accommodation with the Nazis, who used the conductor's international reputation as an advertisement for their cultural policy.
The magnificent symphony music and opera performances of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Berlin State Opera under his direction helped to obscure the degradation of the other arts under the Third Reich. Appointed a Prussian State Councillor and in 1936 Director of the Bayreuth Festival, Furtwängler’s activity during the remaining years of the Third Reich was the subject of much criticism abroad.
Cleared by a German de-Nazification court in 1946, Furtwängler was reappointed four years later as Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, a position he held until his death in Baden-Baden on 30 November 1954.
A traditional conservative who disliked the modernism of Schoenberg and was one of the great exponents of romantic music, Furtwängler chose to remain in Nazi Germany, along with most of the outstanding figures of the German music world.