¹ Wilhelm Furtwängler, Aufzeichnungen 1924-54 (Wiesbaden, F.A. Brockhaus, 1980), p. 201. Tanner’s remarks are taken from an English edition – Notebooks 1924-54, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited and introduced by Michael Tanner (London, Quartet Books Ltd., 1995), p. 123. The English translation and Tanner’s contributions first appeared in 1989.

² The premiere, however, was by Gotthold E. Lessing and the Städt. Orchester Baden-Baden at the 1938 International Music Festival in Baden-Baden.

³ Letter of May 21, 1944, written at Achleiten, Oberdonau.

⁴ Prominent artists were exempt from serving in the German military. Hessenberg, however, had originally received a conscription notice. (From an interview with Hessenberg’s widow Frau Gisela.)

⁵ Fred K. Prieberg recounts that this was one of a series of six Berlin and five Vienna concerts that Furtwängler selected for the radio ministry to record for broadcast. The Hessenberg Symphony opened the program, which continued after the intermission with the Brahms Violin Concerto with Wolfgang Schneiderhan as soloist and concluded with the 3rd Leonora Overture of Beethoven. The Hessenberg premiere was recorded using the Magnetophon technology; however, no copy of the transcription tapes has surfaced over the years, and none is found in either the Hessenberg or the Furtwängler archive. Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler in the Third Reich, translated by C. Dolan (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1994), p. 319-321. Originally published in German as Kraftprobe: Wilhelm Furtwängler im Dritten Reich (Wiesbaden, F.A. Brockhaus, 1986).

⁶ Most of the reviews spoke intelligently on the music and some were quite insightful about a work that had just been heard for the first time. Heinrich Hofer wrote in Das 12-Uhr-Blatt, Berlin (Dec. 12, 1944), “The tonal freedom of the subjects and the resulting rigor of their combination are new…. He is contemporary through the seriousness and the grandeur of his view, which is nowhere simplified and yet reaches the effect of the organically evolved.” Lothar Band wrote in the Preußische Zeitung, Königsberg (Dec. 14, 1944), “Developed from the small forms, the virtues of the Hessenbergian style: precise subject matter, clear construction, a colorful and in spite of the economy an expressive orchestration are exemplary also in the new work…. Each movement reveals a certain expertise and strong personal impulses. The classic form is preserved and is expanded only out of artistic necessity.”

⁷ Salomon became a folk hero of sorts for his book entitled “Der Fragebogen” (Rowohlt-Verlag, 1951), which intellectually destroyed the notorious questionnaire. The English edition is known as “Fragebogen (The Questionnaire)” (Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955).

⁸ In spite of the countless number of testimonials in his defense, many of which were from Jewish musicians whom Furtwängler had helped during the War, the prosecution was relentless in its pursuit of humiliating the great musical icon, if nothing else. A play in the English language by Ronald Harwood entitled “Taking Sides”, though somewhat fictionalized, brought an awareness of the Furtwängler case to a new generation of music lovers in the final decade of the twentieth century.

⁹ Furtwängler, Aufzeichnungen, p. 303. Whiteside’s variant translation of this passage is found on p. 187 of Notebooks.

¹⁰ Ibid, p. 299; p. 185 in the Whiteside translation.

¹¹ In protest of the ban on Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler in particular and on the policies that were driving artists away from Germany in general, Furtwängler resigned from all conducting functions on Dec. 4, 1934 and did not resume conducting until April of the following year.

¹² Daniel Gillis documents the various affairs in his book Furtwängler and America (New York, Manyland Books, Inc., 1970). The most notorious of these was the furor that pressured the board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to cancel Furtwängler’s engagement as guest conductor for the 1949-50 season. (The orchestra sought after Furtwängler as its music director, and he was willing to give them as many as 12 weeks in the season.  Unlike conductors nowadays who snatch up music directorship titles for much less involvement, Furtwängler still considered that a guest duration and accepted the engagement only as such.) A group of musicians that included Toscanini, Horowitz, Rubinstein, and Issac Stern threatened to withdraw from performing with the Chicago Symphony should Furtwängler’s invitation be honored. It turned out that many of the other musicians whose names were used in the protests against Furtwängler had never consented to lending their names to the plot - Nathan Milstein, Gregor Piategorsky, and Fritz Busch, for instance, categorically denied any involvement. Arnold Schönberg and Bruno Walter were amongst those pressured to join the protests but would not have anything to do with it, causing Walter to break relations with his agent Hurok permanently. Other musicians received anonymous phone calls that threatened blacklisting if they did not take-part in the protests. There were also musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin and Ernest Ansermet who actively defended Furtwängler from the beginning. Furtwängler placed his hopes in the public for his vindication, provided he could somehow present his case in front of them. Whatever public support that had been rallied, it was too slow in gaining momentum and the Orchestra Association was forced to cancel Furtwängler’s engagement in order to proceed with planning the coming season. After all, it was not known until later that only a small handful of ringleaders were responsible for the muckraking. [Gillis, p. 126:] “An epilogue to the Chicago affair was the article Claudia Cassidy published in the Tribune on September 4, 1949, based on an interview held in Salzburg that summer, and placing Furtwängler’s role in Nazi Germany in its correct light. The Orchestral Association, encouraged by the popular support evident in the later stages of the controversy, had planned to invite Furtwängler in the following seasons as Guest Conductor; but once Rafael Kubelik had been engaged as Musical Director, it preferred not to subject him to comparison with an older colleague. Furtwängler understood this view, and wished Kubelik well.”

Less publicized was the withdrawal of Rudolf Bing’s invitation for Furtwängler to open the 1952 Metropolitan Opera season with a new production of Lohengrin and also to conduct a revival of his choice of Meistersinger or Tristan. Another incidence was the attempt of Sol Hurok to engage the Vienna Philharmonic for a tour of the U.S but specifically to exclude its principal conductor. (The Vienna Philharmoonic, however, would tour with Furtwängler or not at all.) The efforts to keep Furtwängler out of America also extended to the realm of phonograph records. Although RCA Victor was under contract with His Master’s Voice to release Furtwängler’s recordings in the U.S., Victor blocked these issues, due to the pressure exerted by the same protesting artists. Consequently, Furtwängler records were very difficult to come-by in the U.S.

Furtwängler died in November 1954, as much from a loss of the will to live as from a case of pneumonia. [Both his widow Elisabeth and the then Intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Gerhart von Westermann have reported that Furtwängler told them that he was tired and did not intend to get well.] At the time, he was scheduled finally to return to the U.S., with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1955 and with Vienna Philharmonics in 1956.

¹³ As guest conductor in 1925, and as co-principal conductor with Mengelberg in 1926 and 1927.

¹⁴ H.-H. Schönzeler, editor (London, Oswald Wolff Ltd., 1976). Although Schönzeler considered the diversity of musical utterance after 1933 to be too chaotic to draw any valid conclusions, he nevertheless covers some ground in the modern era, presenting, for example, Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-63) as a composer who during the Nazi era “knew that there would have to be a change of the tide before his compositions would be heard by any but his inner ear….” (p. 319)

¹⁵ Kurt Hessenberg, “Kleine Selbstbiographie”, in the monograph Kurt Hessenberg: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk (Peter Cahn, editor;  Mainz, B. Schott’s Söhne, 1990), p. 26. [Click here for the complete text of the brief autobiography.]

¹⁶ In Of German Music, Schönzeler characterized the modernist movement in post-war Germany as an extreme pendulum swing, such that the young German composers “promptly became more avant-garde than the avant-garde of the rest of the world”. (p. 320)

¹⁷ Hessenberg, op. cit., p. 33.

¹⁸ Hessenberg, op. cit., pp. 19, 21, and 25, respectively.

¹⁹ Hessenberg, op. cit., p. 33.

²⁰ Furtwängler, op. cit., p. 200; p. 123 in the Whiteside translation. Here we return to the same section, under the heading “My reply to the moderns”, from which the Hessenberg reference was cited earlier. Furtwängler further speaks of an “isolation of the individual work”, namely that which Beethoven was the first to accomplish, by breaking established molds but in ways as to remain natural, evolved, and organic. Although Furtwängler has introduced yet another term – “seriousness” – by the time he mentions Hessenberg, he is still elaborating on the same point, and the reference is best understood in the framework of the broader context.

²¹ Furtwängler himself had intended for a long time on revising the youthful work but did not have the time for it. This was the only instance where Hessenberg adapted the work of another’s, and he undertook the charge with loving care and always mindful, as far as he can infer, of the intention of the composer.

²² Furtwängler, op. cit., p. 303; p. 187 in Whiteside.