Читать книгу Two Worlds of Music - Berta Geissmar - Страница 6

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After the first year of the war, Bodanzky, the Hofkapellmeister of1914-18 Mannheim, was appointed to the New York Metropolitan Opera. The choice of a successor in the great musical tradition of the town would have been difficult enough without the limitations imposed by the war. But the Theater Commission which was responsible for all questions concerning the Mannheim Theater and orchestra, selected a few likely candidates, and sent a small committee accompanied by Bodanzky to Lübeck to hear one of them. The young conductor was barely 28. He conducted Fidelio. Without further hearings, he was unanimously chosen. The Theater Commission had recognized his genius. He was Wilhelm Furtwängler.

In September 1915, Furtwängler took up his duties as first conductor of the opera and Musikalische Akademien concerts that date back to 1779. His first performance was Der Freischütz, conducted in the presence of his predecessor, who sat in the center box with my mother. It was full of promise of what was to come, and his first concert, which included Brahms’ First Symphony, gave Mannheimers the satisfactory feeling that in spite of his youth the new man in charge of their musical life was well able to carry on the fame of their old tradition.

For a young man as painfully shy as Furtwängler, it was disconcerting to discover that the Mannheim public looked on its Hofkapellmeister as a kind of demi-god; he was common property and everything he did and said was the talk of the day. Fortunately, Oskar Grohé, the intimate friend of lieder composer Hugo Wolf, was a member of the Theater Commission, was sympathetic to the young conductor’s position, and was well able to look after him and offer him the protection of a broad back behind which to hide.

One afternoon shortly after the Freischütz performance, our bell rang. Mother called down to the maid, “I am not in,” but was too late. Furtwängler stood in the hall—a very tall young man in an enormous black hat and a Loden cape.

It was not his first visit to our house. As a little boy he had spent his holidays with his grandmother who had lived in Mannheim, and who had been a friend of our family for years. Even then he had begun to compose, and when he was a boy of fifteen, my father and his friends played his first quartet. The parts were hardly readable and Furtwängler, with his head of golden curls, went from one stand to the other to explain what he meant. Now the youth returned as a man and the old friendship was renewed. My father took him under his wing, and soon he was at home with us, and found a sympathetic hearing for all the problems of his new life.

Furtwängler was tall, slim and fair. The most arresting features of his fine artist’s head were the high and noble forehead and the eyes. His were the eyes of a visionary, large, blue and expressive: when he conducted or played the piano, they were usually veiled and half closed, but they were capable of widening and emitting a tremendous vitality when he entered into an argument or a conversation which interested him, and they could grow tender and radiant when he was in a softened and happy mood.

His character was involved. He had a logical and persistent mind, direct and forceful: at the same time, particularly in his youth, he was shy to the point of extreme sensitiveness. Sometimes it seemed that he was only completely at ease with his enormous dog “Lord,” which followed him everywhere, even occupying his room at the theater during rehearsals, with the result that nobody else could ever get in.

He was not then, nor did he ever become, an homme du monde; but he brought to bear on life not only his musical genius but his other fine mental equipment. He had been carefully brought up by parents both of whom came from scholarly and musical families. From them he inherited, among other things, his love of beauty and his appreciation of art. His mother was a gifted painter, who painted charming portraits of her four children; his father was the well-known archaeologist, Adolf Furtwängler, a great authority on Greek vases and coins, Director of the Munich Glyptothek and Professor at the Munich University, where he was adored almost as much by his students as by his children, of whom Wilhelm was the eldest. During his youth he travelled with his father to Greece and Italy, opening his eyes to the glories of ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance, which meant so much to him during his whole life. On tour, his first excursion in any town was to its museum. On our first visit to London we went to look at the Elgin Marbles and the unique collection of Greek vases in the British Museum, which represented for him the world in which he had grown up.

This love of art provided him with one of his favorite pastimes, one in which he often indulged as a relaxation from his strenuous and busy life. Reproductions of famous paintings were spread out on a table and covered up except for some small detail, from which one person who had been sent out of the room was called upon to identify the picture. Furtwängler himself never missed. His knowledge was uncanny.

Furtwängler’s father was one of the first German skiing enthusiasts, and he often took his young sons on tours in the Bavarian Alps. Furtwängler attained almost professional skill at the sport, and he still tries to take a winter holiday where he can ski. Almost every sport appealed to him; he loved tennis, sailing and swimming. The family’s country house on the beautiful Tegernsee was a paradise for the children. He was a good horseman, but too dramatic a driver when he acquired a car. His passion for passing everything on the road occasionally landed him in serious trouble. Hardly had he obtained his driver’s license and a wonderful Daimler-Benz, when he offered to drive Richard Strauss to the Adlon Hotel. As they drove through the Linden after a rehearsal at the State Opera, the two famous musicians were so deep in conversation, they ran straight into a brand-new white car and entirely smashed it. Furtwängler and Strauss were unhurt, and escaped with a shock, but not without considerable trouble.

His love of sport, and the training he received from his father has stood Furtwängler in good stead all his life. By no means a faddist, he is careful of his health, and no day is too busy to interrupt his routine of two walks and an “air bath” before he goes to bed. Because of this, perhaps, he hardly ever has had a cold.

He maintains the same discipline over food. He is practically a vegetarian, never smokes and never drinks. Before a concert his meal is always especially light—a couple of eggs, a little fruit, or some biscuits perhaps, though during the interval of long operas, like Die Götterdämmerung, he eats sandwiches, nuts and fruit, and drinks quantities of fruit juice.

This, then, was the young man who came into my mother’s hall in his long cape, and around whom my life was to center for so many years: the genius compounded of intellectual directness and an almost excessive shyness, whose timidity made him efface himself in any gathering, but who had so great an attraction for women that, if they did not fall victim to his musical genius, they were fascinated by his personality. It used to be said that there was something of the Parsifal about him, with his limpid blue gaze and his voice that could be so caressing that the most ordinary sentence could sound like a passionate declaration of love.

Yet nobody, not even the most beloved woman, could ever deflect him from his work. His music always came first. When he was going to be married, he wrote to me expressing his anxiety as to whether his future wife, whom he dearly loved, would understand it.

When Furtwängler came to Mannheim in 1915, I was a young student. Little wonder that I was fascinated by his personality, found his music a revelation, and discovered sympathetic understanding in his sincerity and modesty. But I was so impressed by his wide knowledge on all subjects that it took me a long time to bridge the gulf which my respect for him created. Furtwängler himself, always simple and natural, was in no way responsible for adding to my constraint; it was entirely in my own mind.

One day, however, my shyness was overcome. We had met by chance at a party at a Heidelberg professor’s house and went home together. It was early summer, and when we came to the ancient bridge near the Neckar facing the castle ruin, a little shriveled old woman sat selling the first cherries of the season. Furtwängler bought a bagful and said, “Now let’s see who can spit the stones farthest.” So we stood there spitting our stones into the Neckar, and suddenly I was on common ground, and our lifelong friendship was sealed. For the sake of that friendship it was perhaps just as well that his stones went farthest as we leaned on the parapet of the Neckar bridge. I learned afterwards that such competitions were a favorite sport of the Furtwängler family, and that father and sons were all addicts. Among them, Wilhelm considered himself a champion!

Soon we shared many interests. Furtwängler was at home in university circles and often came to Heidelberg while I was there for a walk along the Neckar or on the Königstuhl. Or we spent the evening with one of the professors—the Geist von Heidelberg—Ludwig Curtius, the famous archaeologist who had assisted the elder Furtwängler and tutored the younger; Rickert and Jaspers, the philosophers; Max Weber, the famous economist; and Friedrich Gundolf, the young romantic friend of the poet, Stefan George. And when he came to dine with my family, he often came an hour earlier to talk about my studies, about music, and about books in my little sitting-room. There too, he began to tell me about his own work and troubles, and soon I was on the way to becoming a kind of confidential secretary.

In Mannheim, the theater became the center of attraction for me. From the box which my family had occupied since the time of my great-grandparents, I heard all the operas for the first time. I went to Furtwängler’s rehearsals whenever possible, and life, already rich, was enhanced by his friendship and our mutual interests.

Yet it was a grave time, and in spite of our full life, the war weighed heavily upon us. My private life was also shadowed; my father had begun to show signs of a serious illness from which he was not to recover. My parents had been very happily married, and I had been devoted to my father. When he died in July 1918, both mother and I felt that life had stopped, and sought the seclusion of the Black Forest.

Furtwängler was on holiday when my father died. I knew he was my friend, of course, but it seemed to me that his interest focused in my father and I was not at all sure that our friendship would not be greatly limited by his death. But one day he wrote to me. He was back in Mannheim and wanted to discuss various things with me. Could I come? I could. We met in our house—our house which seemed dead and deprived of its real spirit. That evening Furtwängler put me on my feet. His confidence that I would face anything in life bravely inspired me with courage which I had entirely lost. He drew me into a discussion of his own problems, and in sharing them I felt that I was needed. It was a new mainspring of my life.

Soon another problem arose. My father had been the soul of his own concert society; who could take his place? I was recommended to succeed him on the committee but I hesitated. In those days few women served on committees. Again Furtwängler encouraged me. He declared that I was the only possible successor to my father, little guessing how much the knowledge and experience I was to gain in the post would eventually mean to him.

Meanwhile the fateful month of November 1918 had come, and with it the Armistice. The relief was so tremendous that few realized the implications of the peace.