¿Por qué Furtwängler nos conmueve aún hoy? por Daniel Barenboim

Why Wilhelm Furtwängler Still Moves Us Today

 Furtwängler was unconventional. In the case of his successor, Herbert von Karajan, for example, the musicians always understood quite quickly what he wanted, and they carried it out. In the case of Furtwängler, everything was always different. He was unpredictable, and thus followed his own inner necessity. He took musical liberties and spontaneities not because of some kind of personal preference, but because the musical structures required it. Furtwängler never calculated the "how" in a score, but the "where." He would say to himself, here there has to be a stress, and here there can by no means be a stress. Without this scaffolding, without this analysis, he could never have been as free as he was. To this extent, Furtwängler was far more than the "master of the moment" that he is so often called. That is what most impresses me about him: his extraordinary freedom in his responsibility before the work. Wilhelm Furtwängler wasn't the Lord Byron of the twentieth century: he very much tried to integrate his subjectivity into the whole.