V-2 - Chapter 9 - Sferic Music

[rich]

Robin--

you should check out some of Frederick Spott's Hitler and the Power of
Aesthetics which discusses Furtwangler at some length.

rich

> Furtwängler should have been in Gravity's Rainbow, he would have fit in so
> perfectly. He thought somehow that there was an essential Greatness in the
> German spirit that communicates via the Greatest music the world has ever
> heard. Furtwängler was mesmerized by grandiosity as much as Furtwängler
> hypnotized via the grandiosity of the music he loved. As far as Furtwängler
> was concerned, that music was Beethoven, Wagner and above all Bruckner, who
> just happened to be a favorite of Adolf Hitler. Betcha that saved Willie's
> ass. And all the music that Furtwängler really loved contains that spirit
> that Säure Bummer complains about when he states his preference for Rossini.
> There's nothing more warlike in all of Classical music than Bruckner's
> distended finales, full of old Nordic battle-cries, switching between fff &
> ppp 'til we arrive at an ending where the heavens open up and all is
> resolved. It's as if the urge to fight and win is memetically passed along
> in this music, in one of those odd conspiracies of history.
>
> I've listened to Furtwängler's wartime Bruckner a lot, in particular his
> October 7, 1944 taping of the Ninth, Bruckner's final, incomplete symphony.
> Bruckner's Ninth has no finale -- the score of the sketches for the finale
> we handed out as souvenirs at his funeral.  Fortunately,  Bruckner's Ninth
> ends on a beautiful note of transcendence, a vision of the heavens opening
> up in his "Farewell to Life."
>
> I recall speaking to an older gentleman who worked at a fine used book store
> in Glendale California. This was back back in 1983, I was becoming active
> with Reclaiming folks in the anti-nuclear movement. I really can't recall
> why the subject came up, but he told me that survived the Holocaust and he
> mentioned that those incredible Furtwängler Bruckner recordings were piped
> into the showers at Auschwitz along with the Zyklon B.