ABSTRACT
But by this time he had become a controversial figure in the United States. His appointment was opposed by a vociferous lobby which regarded him as a ‘prominent and active Nazi’ and therefore unwelcome in a city full of German exiles. So Furtwängler stayed in Germany. Indeed, he remained there as a major cultural figure right up to 1945. He was filmed conducting a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on Hitler’s birthday in 1942, and shaking Goebbels’s congratulatory hand. When German radio announced the dictator’s death, it was Furtwängler’s recording of the slow movement of Bruckner’s Seventh that accompanied the news. All this made the conductor even more controversial outside Germany. Jewish hostility was particularly pronounced; when Furtwängler died in 1954, an obituary in a Jewish newspaper described him as ‘the chosen Staatskapellmeister of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels…the idol of Nazi arsonists and murderers, the musical henchman of their blood-justice’.
