The Devil's Music Master Quotes

“This is an age of science and technology, and to oversimplify a little, you can’t have an Einstein and a Bach at the same time. People are far more interested in technology than they are in the arts. The Himalayas of arts lie in the past … at least at the moment. The coming generations are interested in other things. Music now is the most endangered of all the arts because it doesn’t exist as a painting, a book, or even a film exists. You can’t touch it, and people are interested in tangible things these days. Strauss himself once said that he was the last chapter in the greatness of German music, and he added modestly that it was, for whatever it was worth, a short chapter.18”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“(He frequently said that performing his own works made him feel like a virgin doing a strip-tease before a horde of lascivious men.)”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“Part of the problem inherent in the sonata as a viable form for all composers after Beethoven was the issue of tonality, which declined as the central feature of music after Wagner.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“[The sonata and fugue] are forms which possess depth of proportion. Something happens, something is transformed, something manifests itself; the music is plastic—it is not a mood but an event… Aufzeichnungen, 1939, p. 182”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“One should not present faults as though they were virtues, and Bruckner has faults. It is a piece of philistinism to believe that the absence of faults (i.e., unevenness and rough patches) produces greatness. On the contrary, the greatness of Bruckner is all the more impressive by virtue of the fact that it overcomes his faults and makes them important.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“Brahms is the first great musician in whom historical significance and artistic significance no longer converge as one and the same. He was not to blame for this. Rather it was the fault of his times. Even Beethoven’s most abnormal conceptions were born of the demands of his time and derived from the linguistic and expressive possibilities of that time. Although Beethoven’s will, a creative will so timeless and touched with insight into the future, was somehow in complete accordance with the will of his time; Beethoven was “sustained” by his time. Wagner’s boldest and most coherent works not only articulated the powerful personality of their creator, they revealed the will and possibilities of his time. There is a consonance between personal will and the general will of the time in Beethoven and Wagner, and later in Strauss, Reger, Debussy and Stravinsky. In Brahms, for the first time, these wills become separated; not because Brahms was most profoundly a man of his time, but because the musical possibilities of his time had taken a different direction from his own inclinations, and did not satisfy him. He is the first artist and creator who transcends his historical and musical function.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“I have always regarded him as a descendant of those old German and Dutch painters, such as Van Dyck and Rembrandt, etc., whose works combine profound feeling, imagination, and persuasive power that is often impetuous, and are united with a wonderful sense of form. In certain works by Brahms, in the great cycles of variations, for instance, his relationship to the sensibility of the old German artists is particularly evident. His exceptional capacity to realize form expresses itself in everything he has left, from his most modest correspondence to his symphonies and lieder. The form Brahms possesses is a peculiarly German species, a form that never appears to be an end in itself, but is merely a function of “content” which is integrated with harmony of proportion and graceful clarity. “Brahms,” Ton und Wort, p. 48”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“All classifications, all attempts at typification break down in the face of a work like The Magic Flute. It is neither one thing nor the other, neither light nor serious, neither tragedy nor comedy, it is—so to speak—all these things at once, all these things in one. Our urge to classify might have tried to recognize a new ‘type’ here, if the work had not remained on its own entirely sui generis as a type and work of art in the history of the opera. The Magic Flute is life itself; all classification breaks down here. Notebooks, 1950,”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“One version of the story has it that Furtwängler went to Toscanini’s dressing room after a concert in the large Festival Theater. Toscanini was curt. “Go away. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” “Why?” asked Furtwängler. “Because you area Nazi.” “That is a lie!” “That is no lie. I am well aware that you do not belong to the Party. I also know you have helped your Jewish friends. You even meet them outside Germany. But all that is unimportant after the fact that you work for Hitler. Now get out.” 5”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“Hitler had all the answers the majority of Germans needed at the time, and he looked like he could carry them through. What is more, he appealed to the darker, angry side of his supporters. He gambled losing everything in a possible scandal when he used his power as party leader to get five storm troopers acquitted of sadistically murdering a communist in August, 1932. When no audible alarm was raised in the wake of his abusive use of power, he knew the dawn of the Third Reich was virtually on the horizon.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“The view, previously held unconsciously in Germany, that inspiration and understanding in art are more important than discipline and autocratic behavior, is still correct.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“One can say with certainty that if he were a greater artist, if he had deeper insights, a livelier imagination, greater warmth and devotion to the work, he would not have become so disciplined. And this is why his success is disastrous.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“Expressionism delved into the inner world, communicating the twilight area of experience. The essence of Expressionism is man adrift in a rootless world, alienated, and defenseless before potentially hostile forces. Such an individual is prone to psychological conflict, trauma, anxiety. He or she is at the mercy of both internal and external irrational drives and conditions. Such persons can feel instinctively suspicious of societal mores and even behave defiantly against them.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“if we let ourselves be guided by the atonal musician we walk as it were through a dense forest. The strangest flowers and plants attract our attention by the side of the path. But we do not know where we are going nor whence we have come. The listener is seized by a feeling of being lost, of being at the mercy of the forces of primeval existence. It seems as though the atonal musician had not paid attention to the listener as an independent personality: the listener is faced with an all-powerful world of chaos. But of course it must be admitted that this strikes a chord in the apprehensions of modern man!”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler

“Midcult pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”
― Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler