由 Patrick 發表於 週二 5月 21, 2002 7:49 am
標 題:THE BERLIN CONCERTS OF 1942-44 by Elisabeth Furtwängle
發 表 人:blue97(blue97.tw)
發表時間:2001/10/08 14:31:56
THE BERLIN CONCERTS OF 1942-44
Elisabeth Furtwängler
Thinking back, as a German, to the years 1942-44 is to relive the tragic situation of wishing that the war would be lost, linked with the hope that it would happen as quickly as possible; it was something one could only think, but never, ever, say. Concerts went on being given, but in steadily worsening conditions. Nevertheless, the damned for seats was so great that - from 1943 onwards - each of Furtwängler's concerts had to be repeated four times, and sometimes two took place on one day (for example, on 8 February 1944, at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and on 21 March 1944, at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.). The old Philharmonie - originally a roller-skating rink - with its wonderful acoustic for both the orchestra and the audience was flattened by bombing during the night of 29/30 January 1944. At first the orchestra played in the rebuilt opera house; when that was destroyed for the second time, they moved into the Admiralspalast. The orchestra and their conductor accomplished miracles. Something about the concerts took your breath away, raising you up into a world of splendor which allowed you to forget everything mean, everything that made you despair. There is no comparison between those concerts and festival events nowadays, "five-star" though they may be.
For me personally there was something extra; I got to know Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1941, and we were married quietly in 1943.
When I visited Sender Freies Berlin in January 1988 to hear some of the tapes that had come back from Moscow, the past suddenly stood vividly before me again. I was deeply moved. The orchestra had played with total dedication: after all, every concert might have been the last. The audience, too, was unusual. Its members had often had to clamber over piles of rubble to get there at all, and from 1943 onwards the concerts were frequently interrupted by air-raid warnings. I met a friend on one occasion, who I had heard had been bombed the night before, and greeted him with the hope that the news, as it appeared, had been wrong. "No, I was bombed last night all right, but in the circumstances what could I do that would be more worthwhile than coming to a Furtwängler concert?" The journalist Rudolf Pechel, one of the few people to survive the concentration camps, said later that the Resistance went to the Furtwängler concerts. Certainly there were many who did, who lost their lives or went into hiding after the failed at tempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944; Furtwängler was a personal friend of some of them, like Ulrich von Hassell and Count Bernsdorf, who was shot in the neck in 1945.
I should like to quote Boleslav Barilog here, later intendance of the Berlin theatres: "A Furtwängler concert every week or two weeks was a reason for staying alive." How quickly those days were forgotten was brought home to me by an article published in Die Zeit on 14 October 1988, under the headline "The Last Tape". After hearing the broadcast of the concert of 12 January 1944 - that is, the last before the bombing of the old Philharmonie - the journalist wrote: "What sort of music is this? Beautiful, fantastic in a way I've never heard before … and full of horror", and then he let his imagination run riot, and painted a picture of the elegant audience, ladies in evening dress, lots of uniforms and swastikas. Grotesque and ill informed! He recognized the uncommon effect of these concerts, certainly, but he drew the wrong conclusion.
Soething survived: those dark days gave birth to an artistic achievement of the highest order…