The morning after the first night of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995, I received a call from Otto Klemperer’s daughter.
‘Tell me,’ said Lotte, ‘is it true that, in Mr Harwood’s play, the denazification attorney addressed Dr Furtwängler as “Wilhelm”, or even “Willi”?’
I said something in reply about dramatic licence and the interrogator being, erm, an American.
‘No one,’ thundered Lotte Klemperer down the phone, ‘ever called my father “Otto”.’
Appearances meant everything to the generation of great conductors that survived the Nazi era, whether as anxious refugees or, in the case of the Berlin Philharmonic chief, as a cultural poster boy for a criminal regime. After the defeat of Hitler, Furtwängler argued that he had given selfless service to his fellow Germans, keeping alive the Geist of Bach and Beethoven. ‘People never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror,’ he told the tribunal. ‘I do not regret having stayed with them.’
Furtwängler was not a member of the Nazi party and there is evidence that he helped a number of Jewish musicians to escape the Gestapo, and the country. His lofty self-exculpation was rubber-stamped by the western allies who did not want this central figure to go conducting for the Russians in East Berlin. It has since been swallowed by a slew of biographers all the way down to Harwood who, having raised a quizzical eyebrow in his script, let old Willi off with no more than a finger-wag.
Now, out of the blue, a letter has turned up that shows Furtwängler in a less noble light. The letter is written by the eminent pianist Artur Schnabel to his secret American lover (which may be why it took so long to turn up).
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