DonB wrote:Thank you for your kind words.
I wondered more than once what could have been if recording technology was more advanced during Furtwängler's lifetime.
DonB, you might find some answers in the following words of Celibidache - who succeeded him at the Berliner in '45, then shared the
baton between '49 and '54, who knew and appreciated Furtwängler:
On recordings:
“The desire to make recordings, to fixate what cannot be fixated, is a false one, it is the source of an utter misunderstanding of the musical phenomenon. What we preserve [on a recording] is not the same as what our spirit preserves […].
According to the technology used, the results are different, but [in substance] there are no differences.
Listening to recorded music, people form a general impression about music which, first and foremost, is not a real one, because all sound data is completely different on a disc with respect to what it is like in reality.”
“Recordings have levelled down everything and made it mediocre. They degraded everything down to photography. There are doubtlessly beautiful photographs, but just imagine that, instead of spending a week in the Alps, somebody chooses to stay at home and browse a photo album, trying at the same time to taste the sweetness of the water around Basel. Some don’t have the possibility to go and they put up with as little as this. But the disc cannot replace music, because it is a copy of its tomb. For a sensitive person, listening to a disc would mean attending a funeral. What is being burried? The very possibility to live the real sound, what is irreplaceable and indescribable. Recordings have lead to the extinction of good directors!”
On Furtwängler
“He had a
sui generis manner of gesturing, he was not at all a tecnical orchestra director. He was not good at the technique of directing. Though he made use of other things, he managed to express something that became, for the orchestra, univocal. Thanks to him, I managed to achieve accomplishments that have remained unique throughout my life, and shall remain unique and unrepeatable. Thanks to him I had the grand revelation of what music can mean.”
“He refused to record because he was not a very precise director, his technique left a lot to be desired and, from several points of view, whatever he accomplished [in recordings], others could do much better. The physical effort to direct, to hold everyone together, was not his strong point. But everything that belongs to the indeterminate, the indeterminable, the unperceivable, beyond the moment’s passion, all this was his. As he did not master a clear technique, a technique that can make itself felt in any circumstance, he did not make the same kind of carreer as those who expressed themselves directly, who had nothing else but the direct expression. The sound, like – for instance – the one found in nature was not his forte! But the most profound explanations given by a man who had nothing of the pretentiousness of an intellectual, the only true things about music, I heard them from him. “
Later on Celibidache explained how the more recent, digital technology, goes even further robbing sound of its actual life, decomposing it (into digits) and recomposing it in the disc players at home or in the car. The acoustics are different in the place where the music was recorded and in the place where the recording is played (in the bathroom?). But the very way of making music, the tempo, depends on the acoustics, on how music sounds in the place where the live concert takes place. One adjusts the tempo according to this - it is one of the greatest lessons learned by Celibidache from Furtwängler: he asked Furtwängler once how fast he should direct a passage from a symphony, to which Furtwängler replied "What a silly question, you have to listen to it and decide based on how it sounds". But, besides what is lost of the sound through the use of microphones, what is the relation of the tempo to the acoustics of your bathroom, where the recording may be played?! That explains the shock of Furtwängler when he listened to his own recording and could not believe it was so slow - it
felt "slow" because the complexity of the harmonics and the acoustic rapports of the place of recording were not present on the disc.
(I don't trust this whisky too much...)