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The Role of Wilhelm Furtwängler
In the New Paradigm for Peace:
The New Eurasian Landbridge

by Mindy Pechenuk with Megan Beets
September 2015

A PDF of this article, published in the September 18, 2015 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, is re-published here with permission.

Megan Beets.

Mindy Pechenuk

The creative universal principle which is generative throughout our universe is a dynamic of physical space-time, not that of the commonly understood and dominating popular idea of clock-time. Even as this article is being written, the universe we live in has been undergoing fundamental changes due to that creative principle, which we cannot see with our senses. It is this same creative process which governs our mind, and it is only mankind’s mind (no animal has this capability) which has the power to transform our universe, our galaxy, and our society in a principled upward development. The creative human mind has the capacity to create, from living in the future, new developments of both culture and science, which develop new relations among people and nations—a new paradigm of peace.

"But, at the end of this week and the beginning of next week, one of the most momentous developments in all modern history is about to unfold. It’s going to unfold underneath this new assembly of the international movement of peace, which is the best term to call it. And so from that point on, we have to realize that that’s the case. We are at the threshold of thermonuclear war. . . ."

Lyndon LaRouche
Schiller Institute Conference
New York City, September 12, 2015

By the time you read this article, many more momentous developments will have happened, transformed by the highly-successful Schiller Institute Conference in New York City on September 12, 20151: the press conference of former Senator Mike Gravel at the United Nations on Monday, September 14, 20152; and the organizing of the U.S. population by the LaRouche PAC, centered in Manhattan; as well as the crucial roles that President Putin, President Xi Jinping, and other international friends are playing, as in the case of Germany today.

Both President Putin and President Xi Jinping have made offers to the United States to join this new development for peace; and both the LaRouche Movement led by Lyndon LaRouche, and the Schiller Institute led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, have reached out to the people of the United States to join this new paradigm of peace. This is our last chance, and at the same time, the moment of greatest potential to succeed, so the challenge to all the readers of this article is to find the quality of thinking of a truly human identity in yourself, which will allow you to find the courage to fight now; to make sure that our immortal species goes forward, and is not exterminated in the British Empire/President Obama-led thermonuclear war! We must continue to create removal of Obama with the power of the 25th Amendment.

The Case of Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954):
The Bridge from Brahms to Today

c1-Furtwangler_1925_Carnegie%20Hall.jpg
Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1925.

The crimes unleashed by the British Empire at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, are the cause of the mess which mankind finds itself in today. In the realm of music, this took the form of the horrors of irrationalism, sensuality, and the mathematical mind in so-called musical composers. At the same time, many orchestral conductors reduced conducting to the twin evils of literal or sensual interpretations of the score. In science and general education, the British Empire unleashed the satanic Bertrand Russell, whose imprisoning of physical science within the shackles of mathematics and logic has held back scientific breakthroughs up to the present day.3

This is the condition of the world that Furtwängler took on beginning from his early years, up until his death in 1954. As will be seen in the passages from his writings below, Furtwängler was firm in his understanding of the governing universal principle of the future, and that acts of creation, whether in science or art, are living, organic wholes—not built up piecemeal part by part, or note by note. Accordingly, Furtwängler’s approach to a musical composition was never in the notes, but, what he called “between the notes.” This is what separated him from the cult of popular conducting, typified by such as Arturo Toscanini, who believed in strict, literal reading of the notes. Toscanini was not alone; you can include Bruno Walter, Herbert von Karajan, and many others who hated Furtwängler for setting the universal standard, by the power of his performances, that music was not in the notes.

I ask you: Did you ever see a note compose? To believe that music is a predetermined series of relationships, or non-relationships—a collection or succession of notes—is like believing that money makes money, and that that is called economy. Did you ever see a dollar bill create a discovery?

Every time Furtwängler conducted, he rediscovered the discovery of the creative passion of the composers. When he performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he knew that the subject for both Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller (whose beautiful poetry was set by Beethoven in the fourth movement “Ode to Joy”) was to bring about a world in which brother could love brother, across all nations. In the hands of Furtwängler, the soul of Beethoven’s mind and genius is brought alive to create a new culture for mankind.

Take what he wrote in an essay on Beethoven from 1918:

Not only is this tempestuous Titan also the source of the profoundest, most blissful serenity of the profoundest spiritual experience, most inspiring sense of peace and harmony that has ever been conveyed in music. In the midst of the tempest, held in the grip of a raging passion, he retains his steely control, his singularity of purpose, his unshakeable determination to shape and master his material down to the very last detail with a self-discipline unparalleled in the history of art. . . .

More than any other composer he seeks to uncover the laws of nature, the eternal verities—hence the extraordinary clarity of his music. The simplicity that dominates his work is not that of a naive or primitive artist, nor does it aim at achieving an immediate sensory effect, like modern popular music. Yet no music makes its approach to the listener so directly, so openly—so nakedly, one might dare to say.

In an essay entitled “Thoughts for All Seasons,” Furtwängler expresses in words the principle he knows so intimately in musical performance, and of which people like Toscanini remained entirely ignorant:

Let us consider the activity of artistic creation. One might fairly describe it as a struggle. The conflicts that provoke this struggle have their roots in the substance, the material (in the broadest sense) of the art in question—its forms, colors, harmonies and so on. The artist’s task is to harness the forces inherent in this substance to a single common purpose.

When we look more closely at this process, we find we can distinguish two levels. On the first, each individual element combines with those adjacent to it to form larger elements, these larger elements then combining with others and so on, a logical outwards growth from the part to the whole. On the other level, the situation is the reverse: the given unity of the whole controls the behavior of the individual elements within it, down to the smallest detail. The essential thing to observe is that in any genuine work of art these two levels complement each other, so that the one only becomes effective when put together with the other.

In another essay discussing the genius of J.S. Bach, Furtwängler again elaborates the principle of the absolute coherence and unity of the moment “in time,” and the whole “above time”:

[In Bach] we find concentration on the moment in time united with the unheard expanse; the immediate realization of the part paired with the truly sovereign overall vision of the whole. With its ever-conscious feeling for the near and the far at the same time; with its unconstrained fulfillment of the here-and-now joined with an ever-present subconscious feeling for the structure, the current of the whole; its ‘near-experience’ (Nah-Erleben) with its ‘distance-hearing’ (Fernhören), Bach’s music is a greater example of biological certainty of purpose and natural power than we will find anywhere else in Music. Precisely this is what makes Bach’s music so truly unique. . . .

Furtwängler to America (1925-1927): The Battle for Our Soul

Upon arriving in the United States, Furtwängler was an immediate success. His first performance at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on January 3, 1925 sparked a ferment which stretched to his last performance in New York in 1927, and it was warfare all the way through with the British Empire agents in New York City. They had another agenda: to control Alexander Hamilton’s New York, and the rest of the United States, and to deliver it back into the hands of Wall Street and the Confederacy. The policy of these British Empire-allied forces was to bring in the literalist, mechanical Arthur Toscanini to replace Furtwängler.4

Even while Furtwängler was in New York for the first time, conducting the New York Philharmonic in January of 1925, Clarence H. Mackay and the Philharmonic Board were making plans to bring in Toscanini, which plan was announced in June of that year. Appropriately, the lead music critic for the New York Times wrote the following for the occasion:

c1-toscannini_arturo_1944.jpg
U.S. Office of War Information
Furtwängler’s opponent Arturo Toscanini, in 1944.

If ever there was a man who justified the theory of aristocracy built upon the fundamental conception that men are not born free and equal, that some are immeasurably superior to others, and that their superiority is justification for their control of others’ acts and destinies, that man is Arturo Toscanini. Outside of his art we need not question or discuss him, nor make a matter for academic argument the question of the attitude of the individual toward his fellows. In that sphere, which is the freest and highest playground for the human spirit, he stands as a hero and a master; one who has never yielded an inch to self-interest or expediency; who is completely and unmistakably contemptuous of such matters as public praise or financial gain, and who has kept the flame of his art through every fact of existence clear and bright and intense. It is with something more than the curiosity that awaits the appearance of a famous guest conductor that the Philharmonic audiences will gather to meet Mr. Toscanini.5

This warfare continued throughout 1925-27 (the latter the year of Furtwängler’s third and last trip to America), and was run primarily via British Empire-directed operations involving department store executive and State Department agent Ira Hirschmann. Ira Hirschmann became the upfront “do it” person for this policy. He set up one of the first radio stations to bring Classical music to the American people, WOR-710 AM, and naturally only allowed the American people to hear his favorites: “Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and my special hero, Maestro Arturo Toscanini.”6 It is no accident that their so-called “educational policy” never played Furtwängler for the population at large!

Unknown to most Americans today, there were the fortunate Americans who did hear Furtwängler during his concert tours, and who were not able to be silenced about his not being granted the conductorship of the New York Philharmonic:

The fact that Mr. Furtwängler is not returning next season has little or nothing to do with his ability or his obvious popularity with his audiences, and with the all too little considered minority—the Philharmonic Orchestra. Why, then, are we about to lose the services of this man who is surely one of the world’s greatest conductors and is appreciated as such in every musical community but this? . . . Among the Philharmonic directors, who we must admire for their sacrifice of time and money to art, there are not those in any way qualified to pass judgment on the musical qualities of a great composer, a great conductor, or a great soloist. Their judgment of artists is largely influenced by the latter’s capability of producing the sensational. Art is the outcome of sincerity, understanding and repose. Sensationalism is an artificial hypodermic. . . .7

Another American patriot fighting for the soul of America also wrote to the New York Times:

Is there a conspiracy against Wilhelm Furtwängler? . . . Why all of a sudden, when Toscanini conducts, forget everyone, and knock Furtwängler especially? It isn’t fair play, and it is with profound regret that I look upon the absence of this sincere artist who consistently refuses to prostitute his art for applause and the favor of critics.8

Now let the music speak for itself.

The reader should access the following two examples of performances of the second movement, the “Funeral March,” of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony (“Eroica”). The first is a performance of the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Furtwängler in December of 1944, a time when Furtwängler was becoming increasingly clear that he was going to have leave Germany, as the madman Hitler, sitting in his bunker, had put Furtwängler on his hit list.9

• The second movement, the “Funeral March” of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony (“Eroica”)

• A 1953 performance, conducted by Toscanini, of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (an orchestra created in 1937 specifically to bring Toscanini into New York City).

Think about what each of the two different performances of the same composition do to your mind and soul.

As Furtwängler himself wrote in his notebooks in 193610:

Modern conducting: originating in the audience’s instinct for actors and virtuosos, but above all its slave instinct. The authority of a Toscanini, say, could be contrasted with the truly natural authority of the piece! Truthfulness can only be attained through the soul. And one might say: truthfulness is the first and the most beautiful sign of noble humanity.

Again, in his notebooks of 1940, Furtwängler writes11:

Universal things can only be said in a universal language. Because this language is universal, because the things to be said in it are meant to be universal, it does not follow that they must have appeared before. The mark of all truly great work, whether that of yesterday or tomorrow, is that it is both old and new, that it has never existed before and yet one has the feeling of having known it for ages. But everything else, everything that does not in its own way strive for universality, is subjectivism, and only this is subjectivism. Which is, today, as it always has been and always will be—superficial.

Here are two conflicting worldviews: that of Furtwängler, who truly lives and creates from the true human identity, as he would say, “between the notes,” where the soul and mind unite with the higher principle of creation. Between the notes—where great paradoxes occur which have no literal rendering, but only a higher order resolution, creating a new gestalt or discovery.

On the other hand, there is that of Toscanini, and the others like him, who carry the banner for the deconstruction of the human mind and soul. This is why Toscanini was brought into New York against Furtwängler by the British Empire and its satanic helpers, like the New York Times and people such as Olin Downs, Clarence Mackay, and Ira Hirschmann, to name a few. Toscanini’s conducting could make the notes play in time, but he could not create real Classical music.

Furtwängler makes this clear with the visit of Toscanini to Germany. He writes in his notebook of 193012 where he stands concerning Toscanini’s performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that year in Germany:

. . .The exaggeratedly sluggish tempo of the death-march—what about literalness?—could also be explained by peculiar needs. The march-like aspect was completely unrecognizable even in the realistic first bars, and Beethoven’s gloomy, tearless and wordless mourning is dissolved into beautiful-sounding sentimentality. . . .

The World After the Death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Furtwängler’s Nemesis Supported Bertrand Russell

Ira Hirschmann was the decisive vote on Bertrand Russell’s appointment as special guest lecturer at the New York City College System at Hunter College.

“Immediately after Russell had announced his acceptance of the school’s invitation, the Board was besieged by protests. . . .As the latest appointee to the board, my turn came last. Keeping count of the yeas and nays, I knew the vote was going to be close, but I had not expected to find myself in the unenviable position of facing a tie. Mine was to be the deciding vote.

. . . Before my turn to vote came up, I had written out a statement on the reason for my decision. . . . This is a reasonably close recollection:

The issue here is not Bertrand Russell, but academic freedom. Too little respect for this hallmark of our democratic process, so hard won, has been manifested in recent times in our country. It is being flouted in Germany. My convictions on this subject are strong and unequivocal. I vote ‘Yes.’ ”1

While Ira Hirschmann, the spokesman for the policy of the British Empire, tried to thrust the evil of Bertrand Russell on the future minds of our nation, at the same time that he was running every possible operation he could to destroy and silence the genius of Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Fortunately, in spite of Ira Hirschmann’s vote, the people of New York City spoke out, and the appointment of Bertrand Russell was revoked.

1. Ira Hirschmann, Caution to the Wind, pp. 120-122.

Unfortunately for humanity, the great President Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945. Had he lived, the British Empire would have been defeated then, in the period after World War II, and the millions of human lives that have been lost since, those many generations of precious human souls, would have been able to contribute to the future of humanity.

Lyndon LaRouche has often spoken to us of this moment in history, when he was a young soldier in World War II, stationed in the India-Burma theater. The night President Roosevelt died, the young men who were serving with Lyndon asked him to meet with them, and asked him what he thought about the death of President Roosevelt, and the new President Truman. Lyndon LaRouche’s prescient voice was clear: “We have lost a great President, and now we have a little man.”

The Presidency of Harry S Truman ushered in an era of the destruction of our nation and mankind. This destruction has only been furthered by fifteen years of the presidencies of the Bush family, and now Obama.

Under the British Empire agent Harry S Truman, hell was unleashed in the United States. Witch hunts were begun through FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, his assets such as Roy Cohn, General Robert McClure, State Department agents (as in the case of Ira Hirschmann), and the whole project of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which interfaced many CIA and British Intelligence capabilities. Like FDR, and LaRouche today, Furtwängler was subject to many of these operations. In the case of Furtwängler, they branded him a Nazi, and forced him to go through the de-nazification process. To be blunt, the British Empire and everyone else involved knew full well that Furtwängler was not a Nazi, and that he stayed in his country, Germany, to defend it against Hitler.13 However, the accusation against him was used to keep Furtwängler away from the American population, and the world.

Furtwängler vs. the Congress for Cultural Freedom

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View full size
Encounter magazine was the organ for the post-war Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was determined to crush the Classical idea represented by the likes of Furtwängler.

Throughout the end of the 1940s into the 1950s, the intensity of the cultural battle for the soul of mankind was escalated by many different factions, all under the skirts of the British Empire. There was the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom,14 the operations run by the crowd around Ira Hirschmann; and there were other conductors of evil who were promoted instead of Furtwängler, such as von Karajan (who was a card-carrying Nazi) and Bruno Walter (who also led attacks against Furtwängler).

For our purposes in this short article, I will highlight the fight around Furtwängler’s proposed appointment to the Chicago Symphony in 1948. Furtwängler’s own statement from his Notebook in 1949 makes the issue quite clear:

. . . A number of celebrated American artists have protested at my proposed visit to America. They do not even want me to be allowed to stay there for a few weeks as a guest. This protest by artists against another artist is something completely new, a monstrosity in the history of music, a slap in the face to all previous concepts of ideal solidarity among artists, of the function of art in uniting peoples and serving the cause of peace. They have acted in a personal way against me, so I too shall become somewhat personal.

At the head of list I see the illustrious name of A. Toscanini. What can have caused him, the great man, who stands above oppositions, to take part in this short-sighted and ill-founded protest? Was he not the one who, in 1936, invited me to New York as his successor, and a few months later in Paris hurled reproaches at me for not accepting this post despite overwhelming opposition? And at that time it had long been clear that despite resigning from my official posts I would remain in Germany. Certainly he suddenly said a year later, when I successfully conducted along with him in Salzburg, that one could not perform Beethoven in an oppressed and a free country at the same time, while I was of the opinion that Beethoven makes his audiences ‘free’ wherever he is played. But what is the reason for his refusal to let me conduct today, in free and democratic America? Four years after the war? I am faced with a puzzle! There is also Arthur Rubinstein, whom I do not know, but who plainly does not know me either, for he should know that I was the one artist who remained in Germany and emphatically intervened on behalf of Jews until the very end. Then I see Herr Brailowsky and Herr Isaac Stern. Have these two not condescended to play, in the past year, at the celebration concerts in Lucerne, although they must have known that I am definitively employed here as a conductor? Then I see my old friend Gregor Piatigorsky, the long-haired solo cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic. I watched the beginnings of his rise with my own eyes, and even shortly before the war, when it had been long clear that I was staying in Germany, we associated in a most friendly manner in Paris.

When they are in Europe, do they have a different conscience from the one they have in America, which permits them to do in Lucerne what they have to refuse in Chicago?

What is the reason for all this? The whole thing is organized. This is a boycott which has been introduced with a particular aim in mind. Individuals, I have been told, received anonymous telephone calls threatening to make their lives in America ‘impossible’ if they did not take part in the Furtwängler boycott. And this also explains why the refusals of all the conductors and soloists invited by the orchestra in Chicago all arrived on the same day. The orchestra was simply placed in a difficult position.

If one considers that this boycott is based entirely on accusations which were thoroughly refuted in a one-and-a-half-year trial against me, which was certainly not organized and carried out by my friends, one involuntarily wonders: So what are the real reasons for this trial, for this kangaroo court, this calumny against an artist respected in the whole rest of the world? Might it have something to do with my being a German? Is it not the task of art and artists to unite peoples and serve peace, not to perpetuate hatred yet again, four years after the end of the war?

I shall save myself the answer.15

The Call to the Future

On Saturday, September 12, 2015, Helga Zepp-LaRouche extended the hand of Furtwängler when she called on the American population to become more creative and more active, to make this moment in history live up to the creative process that Furtwängler, Schiller, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Einstein, Riemann and others before us had made in their contributions to the future of humanity!

At that meeting in New York, Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche sounded the trumpet to all of us:

So, what I’m really doing is I’m calling upon you to become even more active than you are already. We have the United Nations General Assembly, and I wrote an appeal to this effect, and in my view, maybe, and Lyn said the same thing, it may really be the last chance for humanity to change course.

. . .Enough is enough! We want the United States to join with these countries to build the world, and stop wars based on lies and support of terrorists, one organization after the other!

And I think if we get enough motion of people who say, it is really time for the United States to be a republic again, and not try to be an empire, and have a unipolar world, based on the Project for a New American Century, which is really what is at work here still; that the United States will not allow any country or a number of countries to come up and be superior or even equal, that policy has to stop! The United States must accept they are not the only superpower anymore.

This is the time to end hate, and take the lesson from the lives and work of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Helga and Lyndon LaRouche. Let us be each other’s brother, and take this moment to remove Obama with the powers of the 25th Amendment, and open the door to bring all of humanity into the higher powers of the creative mind. I believe this is what Furtwängler had in mind when he conducted the most extraordinary performance of his life, in 1951, a performance of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. Let us today grab the baton from Furtwängler and answer the call to create the most incredible breakthrough, that expresses true humanity!

 

Footnotes

1. See the video of the September 12, 2015 Schiller Institute Conference: “Creating A Peace Paradigm, A New Era For Mankind Where We All Become Truly Human”.

2. Video and audio of Sen. Mike Gravel speaking to UN correspondents, Monday, September 14, 2015 is available on the LaRouche PAC website.

3. See Jason Ross, “The Failures (and Evil) of Logic: A Particularly Evil Aspect Of Bertrand Russell,” EIR, April 4, 2014.

4. I want to put in a note of caution, from this point on, that when I name certain individuals, I am doing so from the standard that Lyndon LaRouche raised at the September 12, 2015 Schiller Institute Conference:

“You see it on people who don’t know that they are evil, and doing evil things. They have evil ideas; their religious beliefs, or similar things. No, the corruption is not the individuals. The corruption lies in the process. That’s been the history. And our history of the United States, particularly with Alexander Hamilton’s study, and what he did, as opposed to what his opponents did. And that’s the real story.

“The idea that there are particular bad people running loose, Yes, I know about the mafia. They’re bad people. I know that. But that’s not,— the mafia is not the instrument of evil. It is merely the errand boys of local evil. So, the issues have to go deeper. They go to matters of principle, not to gossip.”

5. Daniel Gillis, Furtwängler and America, pp. 14-18.

6. Ira Hirschmann, Obligato, pp. 5-9.

7. Gillis, op. cit, p. 20.

8. Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master, p. 84.

9. Renée Sigerson, “Furtwängler: The Baton Raised to Silence Tyranny,” EIR, August 28, 2015.

10. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Notebooks, 1924-54,” translated by Shaun Whiteside, Quartet Books, 1995, p. 83.

11. Furtwängler, op. cit., p. 123.

12. Furtwängler, op. cit., pp. 44-45.

13. For more details on the attacks against Furtwängler see Renée Sigerson, Daniel Gillis, and Sam Shirakawa, op. cit.

14. See: “Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism.” in the archives of the LaRouche PAC website.

15. Furtwängler, op. cit., pp. 190-191.