Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler (25 January 1886, Schöneberg - 30 November 1954, Baden-Baden, Baden-Württemberg) was a German conductor and composer. One of the greatest conductors of the first half of the 20th century.
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born in Berlin into a prominent family. His father Adolf was an archaeologist, his mother a painter and his brother Philipp a mathematician. Furtwängler spent most of his childhood in Munich, where his father taught at the Ludwig-Maximilian University. At an early age he began to study music (among his mentors was, among others, Max von Schillings), at the same time he showed his devotion to Beethoven, with whose work Furtwängler's name was associated throughout his life.
At the age of twenty Wilhelm Furtwängler made his debut as a conductor: the programme for the concert in which he conducted the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra) included Anton Bruckner's Ninth Symphony as well as a work by Furtwängler himself, the Largo h-moll (later reworked and included in his Symphony No 1). Furtwängler's journey as a performing musician began as choirmaster in Zurich. By this time he had already written several pieces of music, but they received a cool reception, and this circumstance, as well as the awareness of the financial instability of a composer's career, prompted him to concentrate on conducting. From 1909 he worked in Strasbourg, Lübeck, Mannheim, Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna. In 1920 he was appointed conductor of the Berliner Kapelle, succeeding Richard Strauss, in 1922 of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig (where he succeeded Arthur Nikisch) and at the same time of the famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He went on to become music director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Salzburg Festival and the Bayreuth Festival, considered the highest position a conductor could hold in Germany at the time.
In 1944, near the end of the Second World War, Furtwängler left for Switzerland. There he completed his most famous and widely performed work, his Symphony No 2 in E minor (among its performers were such conductors as Eugen Jochum, Daniel Barenboim and Takashi Asahina). In 1945 he returned to Berlin, where he gave a concert in which Yehudi Menuhin soloised. Perhaps this public support from an American violinist helped Furtwängler to avoid any responsibility due to the denazification process.
After the war he was active as a conductor and made numerous recordings. He died in 1954 in Ebersteinburg near Baden-Baden and is buried in Heidelberg in the Nagorny Cemetery.
Furtwängler is best known for his interpretations of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner. At the same time, he promoted contemporary music; among the modern works in his repertoire is Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.
