Furtwängler

Summary

Dominique Pagani quotes Furtwängler mainly from his conversations on music. Because their title was already taken, he chose the name "Musicosophie"1. He takes several theses from them. Rhythm is never an independent element, a formula he attributes sometimes to Beethoven and sometimes to Bach2. In Beethoven, the themes clash like the characters in a drama3. Haydn, who embodies the joy of living, is the author of the break before Beethoven. Every masterpiece has one face turned toward its time and the other toward eternity. On interpretation, he stresses Furtwängler's element of spontaneity, which depends on the acoustics, the mood and the audience, and he contrasts him with Toscanini4. He presents him as a "demonic" conductor and as the greatest Wagnerian conductor, who stayed in Germany to carry on German humanism5. He mentions the 1951 Bayreuth Ninth and the Emperor Concerto with Edwin Fischer. He also reports Furtwängler's reading of Nietzsche's overman as a way of warding off the trauma of the new physics6.

1. 1#5 Happiness versus the death drive in music11 Dec 2020 · 0:27
2. 2#4 Sound ghettos3 Dec 2020 · 48:06
3. 3#10.4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics3 Nov 2021 · 26:47
4. 4#17 Interpretation25 Mar 2021 · 1:15:00
5. 5Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?31 Mar 2021 · 33:09
6. 6#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music3 Dec 2020 · 43:14

Summary produced automatically from 22 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.