These are extraordinary performances, the Third and Fourth Symphonies especially. In the Fourth it is almost as though Furtwangler, to a Berlin audience in 1948, were saying “You still don’t believe that this symphony is an appalling tragedy? Listen!” It is desperately serious from the very beginning: austere, big-phrased, with sober grace amidst the intensity, but also suspense, troubled anxiety. The coda is wildly turbulent, and ends in blackness. The slow movement begins in an unearthly hush, soon giving way to expressive warmth, but the rejoinder of the strings is unutterably poignant: the movement is a mourning procession, relieved only by vain defiance. And the scherzo, which Brahms marked giocoso? More like grim determination, and although there are moments of relaxation the very fast tempo maintains uneasy tension through them. The finale is baleful, the strings returning to their intense eloquence, the chorale subdued and prayer-like, the fierce conflict terribly urgent, ending in bleak despair.
You might find the Third Symphony, often portrayed as Brahms’s most genial, even more disturbing. Furtwangler notices all the music’s hushed shadows; he explores them, lingers in them, and on emerging you realize that the Andante’s serenity is not untroubled, that clouds are often apt to fall across the music’s warm colours. The finale has a funereal tread, the noble string theme is determined, not relaxed or exuberant; there is a feverish quality that leaves the coda hushed, haunted.
In the First Symphony there is a palpable sense of Brahms confronting the shade of Beethoven. The theme of the finale is not radiant at its first appearance: after an almost distraught slow movement and a strangely unstable scherzo (the whole symphony takes up where the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth left off, not its fourth) that theme will have to struggle for its victory. And thus, Furtwangler seems to say, the forest horns at the outset of the Second Symphony, the huge energy of its first movement, the intense, impulsive romanticism of its Adagio; hence the exuberant robustness of the finale: Brahms has earned this romantic richness by what he achieved in the First Symphony.
Subjective? Of course, and anyone who objects to interpretations so subjective that they can rule out alternative views may dislike them very much indeed. But if one of a conductor’s functions is to reveal the composer’s intentions, another is to convince you that those intentions matter. Furtwangler’s Third has the power to make you question whether it is as ripely autumnal as most commentators seem to think; his Fourth could keep you awake at night; all four symphonies have a visionary urgency that can sweep you along with it.
They are all live recordings, with some audience noise; the strings are a bit acid at times, the climaxes occasionally dense (not often: the clarity of detail is extraordinary), but I would gladly put up with far worse for performances as toweringly eloquent as these.
Although Furtwangler was convinced that only in Leonore No. 3 did Beethoven find a satisfactory form for his material, he fully convinces you that Leonore No. 2 is its equal, and in Coriolan that he has read both Collin and Shakespeare.'