Reading Wilhelm Furtwängler Jurisprudentially: Furtwängler’s Music Making in the Light of Legal Philosophy

Abstract

This article examines the work of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler through legal philosophy by applying recent scholarship in the intersection of law and music and a method which MacNeil describes as ‘reading jurisprudentially.’ Furtwängler saw himself as a custodian of a great German cultural tradition, a tradition which included not only German musicians but German jurists such as Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Carl Schmitt. Due to this shared German tradition, concepts in Furtwängler’s philosophy of music shares parallels with these German philosophers of law. Furtwängler, much like Savigny, attempted to protect law and music from modern trends which they saw as reducing law and music to a pure philosophical abstraction and in the process severing the organic links between the people and their law and music. Furtwängler also tried to protect music from the Nazis who attempted to have sovereign control over all Germany, including its music. Applying Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty as ‘he who decides on the exception’ to Furtwängler’s 1942 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin, Germany, I will argue that Furtwängler protects the love and humanism of the music by suspending it and by doing so preventing it from being associated with Nazism.