Word: ngler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Before the rehearsal, the musicians were tense and worried; no one knew what kind of reception Wilhelm Furtwängler would get, even though he had been cleared of all charges of friendship and collaboration with the Nazis. "Politics somehow always get mixed up with these things," said one of the Berlin Philharmonic's violinists. But when their old maestro walked in, with the dignified and austere manner the oldtimers knew so well, the tension disappeared. Every man in the orchestra got to his feet; the violinists tapped their bows on the instrument stands in tribute...
Tall, gaunt Wilhelm Furtwä1;ngler, in his shirtsleeves, rehearsed the orchestra with patience and exactitude. In the first half-hour he had shaped only four bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to his satisfaction. One-third of the orchestra was new, and he had only two days to rehearse it. He had arrived from Switzerland to find that his annotated scores had disappeared from his Potsdam home. But the concert had been postponed once and the Titania Palast was nearly sold out. He decided to go on with...
...small, bare, stuffy room in Berlin, a 60-year-old man sat nervously in a straight-backed chair, facing an eight-man tribunal. He was a famous man, a great conductor-Wilhelm Furtwängler. With a nervous stammer he groped for words...
...witness testified that, although Furtwängler was the Nazi-appointed Staatsrat (state councilor) of Prussia, he had conducted only four times at Nazi Party affairs, had turned down 60 invitations. Another witness, a Jew, said that Furtwängler had saved his life,' and the lives of other Jews. For nearly two hours last week the Germans on the tribunal, three of whom had been in concentration camps, deliberated. Their verdict: Wilhelm Furtwängler was not guilty of collaboration...
...Russians had already reached the same conclusion. It remained only for the U.S. members of the Allied Denazification Committee to change their minds (they were expected to) and Wilhelm Furtwängler could once again conduct his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra...