Half a century after Wilhelm Furtwängler's death at the age of 68, on November 30 1954, the claim that he was the most influential and important orchestral conductor of the recorded era (a claim he never made himself) has never been stronger.
Daniel Barenboim, who played for Furtwängler in Salzburg in the summer of 1954 at the age of 11 and who was allowed to attend his Don Giovanni rehearsals, must be among the youngest of those who heard Furtwängler play live. Bernard Haitink, 75 now, also recalls the special intensity of hearing Furtwängler five years earlier.
"I went to Fidelio in Salzburg in 1949 with tremendous expectations. I was trembling with excitement. It was in the old Festspielhaus. And into the pit comes this strange-looking man who started the overture, and it was not entirely together, and I thought, 'Well, is that the great Furtwängler?' Then, all of a sudden, with the start of the quartet Mir Ist so Wunderbar, something happened, and it was as if there was suddenly electricity throughout the auditorium, and it stayed, and it just built up. The next morning there was a Furtwängler concert of the Bruckner Eighth and again I had this same fantastic experience, and I walked along the Salzach afterwards feeling totally emotional."
Furtwängler was overshadowed by the reputation of his older contemporary, the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. This was partly for historical reasons. Seen from the standpoint of the 1950s, a great German inevitably carried more baggage than a great Italian, especially one who had remained in his country throughout the Third Reich (though, unlike Herbert von Karajan and others, Furtwängler refused to join the Nazi party). Toscanini, meanwhile, was one of the most implacable of anti-fascist exiles.
The comparison went to the heart of their music-making too. It is hard today, now that Toscanini's reputation is slightly eclipsed, to realise just how pre-eminent he was considered to be during his lifetime. So it is all the more to his credit that Neville Cardus, writing in the Manchester Guardian two days after Furtwängler's death, took Toscanini's reputation head-on. "Furtwängler conducted in a manner exactly opposed to the Toscanini objectivity," Cardus wrote. "He did not regard the printed notes of the score as a final statement, but rather as so many symbols of an imaginative conception, ever changing and always to be felt and realised subjectively . . . Not since Nikisch, of whom he was a disciple, has a greater personal interpreter of orchestral and opera music than Furtwängler been heard."
But Cardus was something of a lone voice in 1950s Britain, and certainly in 1950s America, where Furtwängler was in effect blacklisted in the postwar years. (A Berlin Philharmonic tour of the US, under Furtwängler, was planned for 1955; ultimately it went ahead under Karajan, a curious irony). For a decade after his death, Furtwängler's reputation was in eclipse, preserved on the relatively small number of recordings then still surviving in the catalogue, and sustained by enthusiasts, of whom Yehudi Menuhin - not least because of his Jewishness - was by far the most important.
As a teenage Furtwängler enthusiast in the mid-1960s, I occasionally wondered whether there were other sad cases like me, scouring the record stores in search of LP rarities such as Furtwängler's Tchaikovsky Sixth or Mozart's Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments (both of which are among his finest performances), or sitting mesmerised at home listening to his Tristan, his Bruckner Seventh or his Schubert Ninth.
In 1967, it transpired that there were. The formation of the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society, modelled on its equally reverential but much more fanatical - and still existing - American equivalent, marked a significant upturn in the conductor's wider reputation. The society had gained access to previously unavailable tapes, which they began to issue on LP, notably the first issue in this country of the most dramatic of all Furtwängler's Beethoven Ninths, recorded in Berlin in 1942 (Furtwängler gave 103 performances of the Ninth during his career; nine either are or have been available on record.)
But it took the emergence of a new generation of musicians in the 1960s to reclaim Furtwängler's reputation. In this process, no one was as important as Barenboim, who not only spoke and wrote a lot about Furtwängler but even performed his own music (Furtwängler's second symphony is genuinely worth listening to, and not merely as a curiosity). The young Zubin Mehta also played a part, although his musicianship was never on a par with Barenboim's, let alone Furtwängler's own.
Such championship came at the right time. The individualism of the 1960s was more at ease with Furtwängler's subjective approach to the art of interpretation than the more disciplined eras of the past had been. The upsurge of interest encouraged a more rigorous search for Furtwängler tapes in the radio archives and others. As a result, many more examples of the conductor's work began to emerge - chief among them two complete Furtwängler Rings, both recorded in Italy in the postwar years.
The greater availability of his work fed fresh interest in his life. Books about him proliferated as fresh generations became interested in the central public failing of the great musician's life: his decision to remain in Germany and his willingness to perform at official functions attended by Hitler and other leading Nazis. At its worst, this interest degenerated into excessive special pleading by uncritical Furtwängler admirers. At its best it produced Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides, a gripping chronicle of Furtwängler's questioning by an Allied denazification tribunal in 1945-46, which was made into a movie by Istvan Szabo in 2001. It also revealed Furtwängler the man in some very new lights. He was, the biographers revealed, a philanderer on an epic scale, with a trail of illegitimate children - "Man spricht von dreizehn [They say it is 13]," one author wrote.
In the end, though, Furtwängler's importance lies in the impulsive, subjective but almost never self-indulgent way that he made orchestral music. In his greatest recordings - and almost all of them were live performances - there is a sense of space and occasion that no recorded conductor, before or since, has matched. Most of these recordings were made with the Berlin Philharmonic, of which he was chief conductor from 1922 (the death of Nikisch) to 1934 (when he resigned all his official posts), and again from 1952 to his death.
Yet if I were compelled to choose just one Furtwängler recording with which to defy the sceptics, it would be a performance he gave in December 1944 with the Vienna Philharmonic of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. That is a yardstick by which all subsequent performances must still be judged - and in most cases be found wanting.
