The Devil's Music Master. The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler

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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Author: Sam H. Shirakawa
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: 1992-07-02
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Pages: 544

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Editorial Review
From 1922 until his death in 1954, Wilhelm Furtwangler was the foremost cultural music figure of the German-speaking world, conductor of both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. But a cloud still hangs over his reputation, despite his undeniable brilliance as a musician, because of a fatal and tragic decision. Wilhelm Furtwangler remained in Germany when thousands of intellectuals and artists fled after the Nazis seized power in 1933. His decision to stay behind earned him lasting condemnation as a Nazi collaborator--"The Devil's Music Master." Decades after his death, Furtwangler remains for many not only the greatest but also the most controversial musical personality of our time.
In The Devil's Music Master, Sam H. Shirakawa forges the first full-length and comprehensive biography of Furtwangler. He surveys Furtwangler's formative years as a difficult but brilliant prodigy, his rise to pre-eminence as Germany's leading conductor, and his development as a musician, composer, and thinker. Shirakawa also reviews the rich recorded legacy Furtwangler documented throughout his forty-year career--such as the legendary Tristan with Kirsten Flagstad and the famous performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1942 and 1951.
Equally important, Shirakawa goes backstage and behind the lines to explore how the Nazis seized control of the arts and how Furtwangler single-handedly tried to prevent evil characters as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goring from annihilating Germany's musical life. He shows how Furtwangler, far from being a toady to the Nazis, stood up openly against Hitler and Himmler--at enormous personal risk--to salvage the musical traditions of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Shirakawa also presents moving and overwhelming evidence of Furtwangler's astonishing efforts to save the lives of Jews and other persecuted individuals trapped in Nazi Germany--only to be proscribed at the end of the war and nearly framed as a war criminal.
But there was more to Furtwangler than his politics, or even his music, and we come to know this extraordinary man as a reluctant composer, a prolific essayist and diary keeper, a loyal friend, a formidable enemy when crossed, and an incorrigible philanderer. Numerous musical luminaries share their memories of Furtwangler to round out this vivid portrait.
Based on dozens of interviews and research in numerous documents, letters, and diaries, many of them previously unpublished, The Devil's Music Master is an in-depth look at the life and times of a unique personality whose fatal flaw lay in his uncompromising belief that music and art must be kept apart from politics, a conviction that transformed him into a tragic figure.
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Customer Reviews

Good, but lots of flaws in the writing

2000-08-19
Wilhelm Furtwangler is mostly served well in this biography by Sam Shirakawa, but the author has real problems with his prose. It's good that he wants to make his book as accessable to the general public as possible, but too often it leads him to sentences which are unintentionally deprecating and, well, trite. An example: "The unimpugned lootings of Jewish-owned property and businesses had already begun, and the move to examine everybody's family tree for signs of Jewish blood became the deadly Trivial Pursuit of the time." I don't think it's being oversensitive to be offended by having Hitler's despicable racial policies compared to a popular board game from the 1980s, but quite apart from that, sentences like this one put things in simplistic ways more appropriate for a high school term paper than for a scholarly work.

Nonetheless, Shirakawa has done a scrupulous job of examining Furtwangler's life and career. The evidence he puts forward that Furtwangler was not a Nazi is well-documented and compelling, even if there are remaining doubts (which there probably always will be). He also does a very credible job at detailing the conductor's work habits, his thoughts on his craft, his dalliances (which were considerable), his relations with other composers, conducters and musicians, and his frequent battles of wills with the leaders of the Third Reich. You may still feel no pity for Furtwangler's dilemmas at the end of the book, but it's not because the author hasn't been thorough in examining his subject's life. I hope Shirakawa might consider a revision this book at some later date; there's too much that's good about this book to let it be undermined by what's bad.

entertaining, informative and well balanced 1999-05-30
This is an in-depth analysis of a musical genius, with all the warts showing. It is highly entertaining, informative and objective, with no ax to grind. Rather, an attempt to set a warped record straight as to F's alleged Nazi collaboration - quite the opposite being true.

Disappointing 1999-04-12
For openers, who is the author. I've never heard of Sam H. Shirakawa and I would like to know what are his credentials for commenting on the music made by Furtwangler and his life. Any temptation to give the author the benefit of any doubt, given the high reputation of publisher Oxford University Press, is eradicated by the howler of an error on page 177. In an aside, Shirakawa tells us that Theodore Roosevelt was Franklin Roosevelt's grandfather. I would have thought every schoolchild knows that Teddy was the fifth (!!!) cousin of FDR. (How could the prestigious publisher let this error slip by??) After reading that, it is very difficult to accept at face value what Shirakawa asks us to accept regarding his scholarship and expertise. More generally, and a further criticism of the publisher, the book is too long and mmmuch too repetitive. All in all, a disappointing read about a genius music maker.