What can we learn from Wilhelm Furtwängler
70 years after his death?


On 15 September 2024, the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society commemorated Wilhelm Furtwängler, who died on 30 November 1954, at the Berlin University of the Arts. Wolfgang Schreiber, music journalist and author of the 'Süddeutsche Zeitung', gave a lecture on the significance of the conductor, which we are reprinting here with the kind permission of the author.

Furtwängler's scores of Schumann's Fourth Symphony and Bruckner's Fifth Symphony


In the foreword to his edition of Furtwängler's conducting score of Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Henning Smidth writes, among other things: "Furtwängler's good friend, the Swiss clarinettist Antoine de Bavier, made an exact copy of the conductor's score. This is now in the hands of the German violinist and conductor Michael Kuen. He is a great admirer of Wilhelm Furtwängler, and we soon realised that the publication of this score would be of great interest to all admirers of Furtwängler's art."


Partitur


You can buy the score for 90 DKK, about 12 Euro here: william dam publisher under the keyword ISBN 9788794037259.
(If you use the Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser, you can have the page translated via the settings option).

The score of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony was also published by Henning Smidth. Furtwängler conducted this symphony a total of 28 times, the first time in Mannheim in 1919 and the last time in Berlin in 1951. He initially used the first edition from 1896, later he exclusively used the edition by Robert Haas. This historical score is a gift from the conductor's widow, Elisabeth Furtwängler, to the defunct Wilhelm Furtwängler Society of America and its president, Dade Thieriot.

This score is also distributed by the Danish william dam publisher at a price of 90 DKK, about 12 EURO. When ordering, please enter the title 'Wilhelm Furtwängler's score' or the ISBN '9788794037303' in the search field.

In memoriam: Gerhard Mues (15.7.1935 - 5.4.2024)


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The Wilhelm Furtwängler Society mourns the loss of its long-time treasurer Dr. Gerhard Mues, who died on April 5, 2024 at the age of 88. Born in Berlin, he studied pharmacy at the Free University of Berlin, received his doctorate and worked as a pharmacist in Berlin-Schöneberg for many years. The intellectual father, a physician, passed on his interest in classical music to his children Gerhard and Ingeborg. In the Mues house there was a gramophone and an impressive collection of records. One of the young Gerhard's favorite works was Mozart's Requiem.
In 1976, Gerhard Mues was one of the founding members of the Society of Friends of Wilhelm Furtwängler, which later renamed itself the "Wilhelm Furtwängler Society". He and his colleagues were tireless in their search for documents and high-quality concert recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic with Wilhelm Furtwängler that had not yet been published. Most of them were found in the archives of the Berlin broadcasters SFB and RIAS. In the 1980s and 1990s, recordings appeared in a satisfactory form, initially on long-playing records, then on compact discs. Without the efforts of the Berlin Furtwänglerians, many valuable recordings would certainly have been released late. Gerhard Mues was also a member of the Otto-Ackermann-Society from 1979 until its dissolution in 2009.
Gerhard Mues resigned from his position as treasurer of the WFG in 2018 for health reasons. However, he remained connected to the Furtwängler Society and took part in its activities. Unfortunately, his mobility decreased significantly and he also had problems with his failing eyesight in recent years.


1928 - Premiere of Schönberg's Variations for Orchestra

Wilhelm Furtwängler's repertoire consisted mainly, but not exclusively, of pieces of the classical and romantic aera. He also performed works from the 20th century and music by composers of his time, including Béla Bartók, Boris Blacher, Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Hindemith, Artur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. Four works by Arnold Schoenberg (Pelleas and Melisande, Transfigured Night, Variations for Orchestra and the Five Pieces for Orchestra) and Alban Berg's Violin Concerto were also performed in Furtwängler concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlin.
A special role played Arnold Schönberg's Variations for Orchestra op. 31, a key work of New Music and of the composer himself. Wilhelm Furtwängler premie-red the Variations with the Berlin Philharmonic 95 years ago, at the beginning of December 1928. The rehearsals were turbulent and the premiere ultimately turned into a fiasco. How this happened describes Volker Tarnow.

"Zeitschichten" (Time Layers) -
Chronology of the Magnetic Tape Age

The 2007 published 600-page book "Zeitschichten: Magnetbandtechnik als Kulturträger" - a chronological sequence from the first, precise sketches of ideas from the late 19th century to digital systems for sound and image recording after the turn of the millennium - became soon a standard work among experts, archives, as well as music enthusiasts and collectors of magnetic tape equipment. "Zeitschichten" was published when the era of magnetic tape storage was by and large over. Thus, a technology that dominated radio and television stations, film and record studios from 1950 to 2000 and was indispensable in scientific expeditions fell into disuse - the symbiosis of information carriers originating from chemical production lines with precision-engineered transport and drive systems. Hard disks, solid state disks (SSD) or USB sticks have taken over these tasks. In half a century, a considerable part of our cultural heritage has been stored on magnetic tapes. History and technical details should not be lost.
Thirteen years after the first publication of the book, the authors presented an expanded and revised fourth edition of "Zeitschichten" in 2020. In the process, little-known facts came to light - including the fact that Wilhelm Furtwängler became the first beneficiary of high-frequency premagnetisation (the first and altogether most successful method of dynamic expansion in tape technology). The 771 page book in DIN A4 format is now available for download. We thank Friedrich Engel and the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Geschichte des Funkwesens e.V. (GFGF, www.gfgf.org) for making the book available here as a pdf. Unfortunately, translation into English is excluded. The demands for a translator or better editor, last but not least the consultation and professional examination of the translated text by the authors, make such a project seem illusory.