Partisans on the Podium

Audiences can let a conductor know, any night in the week, what they think of him and his music. Last week, in separate essays, two great conductors told what they think of audience tastes, and of composers whose works they have performed.

In his 139-page Dialogues on Music, published in Zurich, Germany's Wilhelm Furtwangler, now shelved in the U.S. because of his Nazi leanings (TIME, Jan. 17), admitted to a gnawing distrust of the tastes of audiences in general. An audience, he wrote, is "a mass without a will of its own . . . which reacts automatically to any stimulus. Its first reaction is frequently right, but very often it is thoroughly wrong. How could we otherwise explain that operas like Carmen, A'ida and La Boheme, today among the most durable successes, flopped* completely when performed for the first time?"

Pain & Pleasure. Both Furtwaengler and his fellow essayist, Swiss Conductor Ertiest Ansermet (who called his 34-page opus Musical Experience and the Modern World), had played their share of contemporary music, Furtwaengler dutifully, Ansermet enthusiastically. Yet both found that conducting it, like listening to it, had sometimes been more pain than pleasure.

Bearded Conductor Ansermet, who had introduced and championed much of the music of his friend Igor Stravinsky, seemed to agree on some of it with an early Stravinsky critic, Claude Debussy, who had said to Ansermet years ago: "You know how much I admire Petrouchka, but The Rite of Spring disturbs me. It seems to me that Stravinsky is trying to make music out of something that is not music, just like the Germans . . . tried to make breakfasts out of sawdust . . ."

Beautiful Promise. But, wrote Ansermet, Stravinsky and Twelve-Toner Arnold Schoenberg had added two bands of color to the spectrum of western music, "ultraviolet and infra-red." Among other hopefuls, "Alban Berg [TIME, May 31] has written pages of overwhelming beauty. The hour of Berg will come . . . Bartok is a symbol of our times. He is one of those who search groaningly, even though he may appear to be smiling. His last works are the most beautiful promise that modern music has offered so far."

On atonality, both conductors were in fundamental, if coincidental, agreement. Wrote Ansermet: "Tonal music is an expression of clear sentiments, Schoenbergi-an music seems to cultivate the obscure."

Furtwaengler hit harder: "Each great work of tonal music radiates deep, unshakable peace, like the majesty of God. This peace is lacking in atonal music [which] has grown restless. There is a lot of intellect and combination, there is plenty of intelligence, but aengler, listening to atonal music is like "walking through a dense forest; strange flowers are lining the path; you don't know whence you come and you don't know whither you go . . ."

Concluded 63-year-old Wilhelm Furtwaengler: "Tonality is the last, sweetest flower of European culture ... As a musician, I remain a partisan of tonality."

*Furtwangler's memory was musty: A'ida was a hit from the first, Carmen and La Boheme only middling flops compared with La Traviata and The Barber of Seville, which were at first all but hooted off the stage.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.