The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: For openers, who is the author. I've never heard of Sam H. Shirakawa and I would like to know what are his credentials for commenting on the music made by Furtwangler and his life. Any temptation to give the author the benefit of any doubt, given the high reputation of publisher Oxford University Press, is eradicated by the howler of an error on page 177. In an aside, Shirakawa tells us that Theodore Roosevelt was Franklin Roosevelt's grandfather. I would have thought every schoolchild knows that Teddy was the fifth (!!!) cousin of FDR. (How could the prestigious publisher let this error slip by??) After reading that, it is very difficult to accept at face value what Shirakawa asks us to accept regarding his scholarship and expertise. More generally, and a further criticism of the publisher, the book is too long and mmmuch too repetitive. All in all, a disappointing read about a genius music maker.

Rating:
Summary: entertaining, informative and well balanced
Review: This is an in-depth analysis of a musical genius, with all the warts showing. It is highly entertaining, informative and objective, with no ax to grind. Rather, an attempt to set a warped record straight as to F's alleged Nazi collaboration - quite the opposite being true.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but lots of flaws in the writing
Review: Wilhelm Furtwangler is mostly served well in this biography by Sam Shirakawa, but the author has real problems with his prose. It's good that he wants to make his book as accessable to the general public as possible, but too often it leads him to sentences which are unintentionally deprecating and, well, trite. An example: "The unimpugned lootings of Jewish-owned property and businesses had already begun, and the move to examine everybody's family tree for signs of Jewish blood became the deadly Trivial Pursuit of the time." I don't think it's being oversensitive to be offended by having Hitler's despicable racial policies compared to a popular board game from the 1980s, but quite apart from that, sentences like this one put things in simplistic ways more appropriate for a high school term paper than for a scholarly work.

Nonetheless, Shirakawa has done a scrupulous job of examining Furtwangler's life and career. The evidence he puts forward that Furtwangler was not a Nazi is well-documented and compelling, even if there are remaining doubts (which there probably always will be). He also does a very credible job at detailing the conductor's work habits, his thoughts on his craft, his dalliances (which were considerable), his relations with other composers, conducters and musicians, and his frequent battles of wills with the leaders of the Third Reich. You may still feel no pity for Furtwangler's dilemmas at the end of the book, but it's not because the author hasn't been thorough in examining his subject's life. I hope Shirakawa might consider a revision this book at some later date; there's too much that's good about this book to let it be undermined by what's bad.