This Week in Classical Music: March 2, 2026.  Chopin, the Calendar, Vivaldi.  Were we to follow the American tradition, our week would start on a Sunday, which this week was March 1st, Frederic Chopin’s birthday.  But we follow the “scientific” practice (yes, there’s even an international standard for it!), and start our weeks on Mondays, and because of that, we just missed Chopin’s birthday by a day.  But he’s too great a composer to be missed, isn’t he?  We wanted to find a performance by a pianist (as Chopin was first and foremost a piano composer), also born this week, but, alas, came up empty-handed: not a single significant pianist has an anniversary this week.  So we went back a month to Arthur Rubinstein, in our opinion, the greatest Chopinist of all time, who was born on February 28^th of 1887.   We missed his birthday as well, being preoccupied with Furtwängler (we also skipped several other wonderful pianists, from Leopold Godowsky (b. 2/13/1870) and Josef Hoffman (b. 1/20/1876) to Yuja Want (b. 2/10/1987).  Hoffman was an unfortunate omission, as it was his 150^th anniversary. 

But back to Chopin and Rubinstein.  Rubinstein loved his countryman’s music so much that one could assume that he recorded all of it, as did, for example, Nikita Magaloff, who not only recorded all of Chopin’s piano works but also played them all in public, in a series of six concerts.  (We missed Magaloff’s birthday too: this wonderful Russian-Georgian-Swiss pianist was born on February 21^st of 1912).  Rubinstein was more selective.  There were pieces that he recorded several times, for example, the Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44, which he did three times, in 1935, 1951, and 1964.  On the other hand, he recorded only three Etudes from op. 10 (nos. 4, 5, and 12), and four from the Etudes op. 25 (nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5).  It’s a mystery to us why Rubinstein didn’t record the rest of them: he obviously had the technique (his recordings of the challenging Scherzos are brilliant), and musically Chopin’s etudes are marvelous short pieces, not just exercises for beginners, like Carl Czerny’s.  We love practically all of Rubinstein’s Chopin, including the Ballades.  Here’s no 3, recorded in 1959. 

This week is unusually rich in talent.  Antonio Vivaldi, Carlo Gesualdo, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Bedřich Smetana, Maurice Ravel, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Kurt Weill were all born this week: two Italians, two Germans, one Czech, one Frenchman, and one Brazilian, a wonderful constellation.  To celebrate these composers, we’ll play some of their music.  Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (I die, alas, in my suffering) is a fantastical chromatic madrigal by Gesualdo, published in 1611 (here).  It sounds original and fresh today; it shocked listeners when it was first performed, and even a century later, Charles Burney, the British musicologist and historian, called it “shocking and disgusting.”   

Sometimes one gets the impression that all Vivaldi wrote was the Four Seasons.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Tremendously prolific, Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concertos for different instruments, operas, sacred music, and much more.  Here’s an example of Vivaldi’s church music, Introduzione al Miserere “Filiæ Mæstæ Jerusalem” (The mournful daughters of Jerusalem) for the alto, strings, and basso continuo.  The Miserere itself, to which this was an introduction, has been lost. 

And finally, C.P.E. Bach’s late Fantasia in F-Sharp Minor, Wq. 67 (here).  It’s performed by Ana-Marija Markovina, a Croatian pianist who recorded all C.P.E.’s piano works. 

This Week in Classical Music: February 23, 2026.  Kurtág and the skipped Big Names. György Kurtág turned 100 on February 19^th!  We hope he’s doing well; we can think of only two composers who lived longer than that, Elliott Carter and Leo Ornstein.  By an amazing coincidence, not only were Carter and Ornstein centenarians, but they were also born on the same day, December 11^th – Ornstein in 1893 and Carter in 1908.  And both were modernist composers...  But back to Kurtág.  Last year, on his 99^th birthday, we posted an entry, not being sure if he would make it to 100.  We’re very happy he did, and will elaborate on our previous post.

György Kurtág (his first name is pronounced closer to Dyerd rather than George) was born on February 19^th of 1926, in Lugoj, Banat.  Most of the historical Banat now belongs to Romania, but before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the majority of its inhabitants were Hungarian speakers.  It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág himself is half-Jewish.  He spoke Hungarian at home and Romanian at school.  As a child, he studied the piano on and off, first with his mother and then with professional teachers.  After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year-old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano lessons, eventually entering the Franz Liszt Music Academy.  There he met György Ligeti, and they became friends for life (Ligeti, who died in 2006, was also of Hungarian-Jewish descent and also born in a part of Austria-Hungary that now lies in Romania; he rivals Kurtág as one of the most important classical composers of the second half of the 20^th century).  After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris.  There, he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.  He returned to Hungary in 1959 and remained there for the duration of the Communist regime – the only Hungarian composer of international renown to do so (and here we are thinking of Furtwängler’s decision to stay in Germany in the 1930s).  Ligeti, for example, fled to Vienna immediately after the failed 1956 revolution and stayed in the West for the rest of his life.  At that time, Kurtág became influential as a teacher.  Surprisingly, he didn’t teach composition but rather interpretation: pianists Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, and the first Takács String Quartet were among his students.  Kurtág resumed traveling only after the fall of communism in 1989, moving first to Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), then Vienna, the Netherlands, and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain.  In 2002, the Kurtágs settled in Bordeaux, but in 2015, he and his wife returned to Budapest (Kurtág’s wife, Márta, a pianist, died in 2019).

Here, from 1978, is Kurtág’s piece called 12 Microludes for String Quartet.  It does contain 12 different musical “sentences” (or tiny plays: “ludus” is “play” in Latin) altogether lasting less than 10 minutes.   It’s performed by the Keller String Quartet.

George Frideric Handel, Gioachino Rossini, and Frederic Chopin were all born this week.  As great as they are (and as much as we love them), we’ll have to leave them for another time.

This Week in Classical Music: February 16, 2026.  Post-Furtwängler, catching up.  During the previous four weeks, we were preoccupied with the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.  We think it was worth it, as his personal story, while being fascinating on its own, also poses many important questions.  What is the role of music in modern society?  Is there one?  Is there an ethical component to it?  Does music “elevate” us?  How can it flourish under a murderous regime, and why would such a regime promote it?  Can a musician remain politically neutral in a totalitarian society, or is it a pretense?  Can we judge actions and decisions made under extreme duress, and why does our judgment vary so much (Furtwängler vs. Karajan)?  There are many more questions, and we don’t have many answers, but we do believe these issues are still relevant, even if in our time, the place of classical music has greatly diminished.

So, while we were dealing with Furtwängler, we missed a whole lot of interesting dates, the most important of which was the 270^th anniversary of Mozart’s birthday, January 27^th of 1756.  Another one was Franz Schubert’s: he was born on January 31^st of 1797.  And we also missed Felix Mendelssohn’s anniversary: he was born on February 3^rd of 1809.  Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina was probably born on January 3^rd of 1525, although we don’t know for sure.  One of the pioneers of opera, Francesco Cavalli, was born on February 14^th of 1602.

Several important modern composers also had their anniversaries during the period of our inattention, Alban Berg being the most influential of the group; he was born on February 9^th of 1885.  Witold Lutosławski, a wonderful Polish composer (and the only non-Italian or non-German speaker on our list), was born on January 25^th of 1913.  Back to the Italians: a very important modernist composer, Luigi Nono, was born on January 17^th of 1924.  And another, Luigi Dallapiccola, on February 3^rd of 1904.

Even though there are many other names of note, we’ll make a full circle and return to Wilhelm Furtwängler.  As we mentioned in the first entry about him, Furtwängler started as a composer and turned to conducting when it occurred to him that nobody wanted to play his music.  Furtwängler wrote several pieces in his youth, but as his conducting career took off, he stopped composing for about 20 years.  He then wrote three symphonies in the 1940s and the 50s.  Symphony no. 2, completed in 1945, is considered his best.  Eugen Johum liked and recorded it, and so did Barenboim with the Chicago Symphony.  We gave it a listen and, unfortunately, cannot recommend it: it’s long, about 80 minutes, Brucknerian in tone but completely lacking the spark of the great Austrian.  In a cruel comment, it was called “musical graphomania.”  We thought of presenting a movement as a sample, but then decided not to.  It’s a pity it turned out he didn’t have a talent for composing, but in no way does it diminish Furtwängler’s conducting genius. 

This Week in Classical Music: February 9, 2026.  Furtwängler, Part IV.  This is our fourth and final entry on Wilhelm Furtwängler; you can read previous entries below (here, here, and here).  Furtwängler met the end of WWII in Switzerland.  From early 1944 on, with the permission of the Nazi regime, he visited the country for extended periods.   He was also added to the list of “God-gifted artists” in the special Section A.  There were only three musicians in that section: two composers, Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner, and Furtwängler.  In December of 1944, his name was removed from the list, as authorities suspected him of being close to some of the participants of the July ’44 attempt to assassinate Hitler (he wasn’t close to the real events).  With the war over, Furtwängler returned to the American-occupied part of Germany.  Like so many prominent Germans, he underwent the “denazification” process.  The charges, conducting two official concerts, were minor, but it was a real trial, led by General Robert McClure.  Furtwängler was supported by the testimony of two Jews, Berta Geissmar, his secretary and business manager, and Curt Riess, a journalist.  For a long time, Riess was Furtwängler’s critic (he thought him a Nazi collaborator) but changed his mind as he learned about the work Furtwängler did on behalf of Jewish musicians.  Geissmar compiled a long list of people whom Furtwängler helped; it was sent to McClure but disappeared.  Still, Furtwängler was cleared after three other Jewish musicians testified on his behalf.

But being formally cleared of the Nazi collaborator charge didn’t end the controversy surrounding Furtwängler; he was too large a figure and too prominent during the regime.  A number of musicians, many of them Jewish, were supportive of Furtwängler.  Among them were Arnold Schoenberg and the violinists Yehudi Menuhin, Bronisław Huberman, and Nathan Milstein.  Menuhin sent a letter to General McClure, in which he wrote: “The man never was a Party member. Upon numerous occasions, he risked his own safety and reputation to protect friends and colleagues. Do not believe that the fact of remaining in one's own country is alone sufficient to condemn a man.”  But Furtwängler did stay in Germany, and whether he wanted to be or not, he was used by the Nazis as a propaganda tool.  Thomas Mann, who in the early 30s called upon him to leave, praised Furtwängler after the war for helping the Jews, but still denounced his "lack of understanding and lack of desire to understand what had seized power in Germany" (emphasis is ours). 

Things came to a head in 1949, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offered Furtwängler the position of music director.  Furtwängler accepted, but that prompted a strong reaction from several prominent US-based musicians.  Arturo Toscanini, a genuine anti-fascist but also musically Furtwängler’s opposite, was critical of him for many years; he once said that “everyone who conducts in the Third Reich is a Nazi!”  Toscanini was joined by George Szell, Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, and Alexander Brailowsky.  They said that they would boycott the orchestra if it were led by Furtwängler.  Their main point was that, were Furtwängler a “small fry,” as Horowitz put it, they would understand his decision to stay in Germany, but he was outside the country many times and always chose to return.  Under pressure, the CSO rescinded the offer.  What his critics ignored (or were not aware of) was that in addition to saving lives (first, by helping people to emigrate, and then saving the “half-Jews” or musicians with Jewish wives, even if he could not save the “full-blooded” Jews remaining in Germany or Austria; those perished in the extermination camps), Furtwängler saved the independence of the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Opera, which Goebbels wanted to turn into subsidiaries of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bayreuth Festival.  And he forced the authorities to take the Nazi flag off the wall of the Musikverein, refusing to perform while it was hanging there, a small but unheard-of act of defiance.

The episode with the CSO hurt Furtwängler, but that was not the end of his career.  In 1952, the Berlin Philharmonic reappointed Furtwängler as the music director; he stayed there for the last four years of his life.  During that time, he made several magnificent recordings with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras.  We’ll hear two, one from the war years, another from 1949. Here’s the famous Vienna recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” from December 19, 1944, with the Vienna Philharmonic (Furtwängler escaped Austria right after that performance).  And here’s another Third Symphony, the one by Brahms, from 1949.  Furtwängler conducts the Berlin Philharmonic.

This Week in Classical Music: February 1, 2026.  Furtwängler, Part III.  This is our third entry on Wilhelm Furtwängler, a great German conductor of the first half of the 20^th century. In the first two, we talked about Furtwängler’s career up to 1933 and Germany’s cultural milieu under the Nazis (here and here).  When the Nazis came to power in January of 1933, Furtwängler was the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Germany’s most prestigious music institution.  Furtwängler despised Hitler, which in part reflected their different class statuses: Furtwängler was from the professorial upper-middle class, while Hitler came from a poor and poorly educated Austrian family.  And while Furtwängler was a conservative, a German nationalist (especially in musical matters), and clearly not a philosemite, he strongly opposed the antisemitic policies of the Nazi state.  Furtwängler was in a difficult position; some opponents of the regime, like Thomas Mann, advised him to leave Germany, but Furtwängler, rightly or wrongly, felt that by staying, he upheld German music and culture.  He regretted this decision later.  He also wanted to protect the Jewish musicians of his orchestra, of which there were many.  And he did: he helped several prominent Jewish members of the Berlin Philharmonic and scores of other Jewish musicians and composers emigrate.  He intervened on behalf of many, not just musicians, when doing so was dangerous even for him (Goebbels directly warned him to stop).  There were other outward signs of his opposition to the regime: for example, not a single time did Furtwängler offer the Nazi salute, even when meeting Hitler in person, while that was how Karl Böhm started all his concerts. 

But Furtwängler had to walk a fine line, realizing that if, on occasion, he had to act against the wishes of the regime, he would have to cooperate with it at other times.   As we mentioned earlier, the top Nazi leaders were intimately involved in the music scene and regularly attended his concerts.  Furtwängler had to deal directly with both Hitler, the supreme leader (Führer) of Germany, and Goebbels, who was responsible for cultural life, at least as far as the Berlin Philharmonic was concerned (Rosenberg shared some responsibilities).  Furtwängler was the favorite of Hitler and Goebbels (Göring preferred the young Karajan).  Furtwängler’s relationship with Hitler was volatile; on several occasions, Hitler forbade Furtwängler from performing, only to rescind the ban months later.  And it was on Hitler’s orders that during the war, Furtwängler directed the Bayreuth Festival, the Führer’s favorite musical institution. 

Furtwängler tried to avoid playing special concerts on Hitler’s birthdays, but on at least one occasion, he couldn’t escape it.  He refused to display swastikas in the Philharmonic Hall, but couldn’t control it in other places.  When, following the demands of Nazi leaders, the Berlin Philharmonic performed in a factory in a concert that was supposed to raise the morale of the German people, the place was adorned with the symbols of the regime.  Some of these concerts were caught on newsreels.   

In 1933, when Goebbels established the Reichsmusikkammer that controlled much of the musical activity in the country, Furtwängler became the vice-president (Richard Strauss was the President).  He resigned a year later, during the “Hindemith Case,” when he wrote an article in defense of the composer and conducted several of his pieces; Hitler hated Hindemith’s music and removed Furtwängler from the Berlin Philharmonic.  The situation was resolved months later when Goebbels forced Furtwängler to declare that his statements about Hindemith were artistic and not political, and that Hitler was in charge of the cultural policy, which stated the obvious.  Goebbels made a public statement on Furtwängler’s behalf, who was then allowed to rejoin the Philharmonic.  

But more important than anything was Furtwängler’s mere presence in Germany, which seemed to legitimize Nazism.  Parallels with today are inescapable, even if the scale of evil is incomparable: Putin needs Gergiev and Netrebko; Hitler needed Furtwängler and Schwarzkopf (on the other hand, Gergiev is actively pro-Putin).  

Furtwängler knew several people involved in the 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler and was close to being arrested when he fled to Switzerland in January of 1945.  After the war, prominent Germans underwent the denazification trials; Furtwängler’s took place in 1946.  We’ll return to that next week.  Here’s Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4.  The recording was made live on June 30^th of 1943 in Alte Philharmonie Berlin; the hall was destroyed in an Allied bombing several months later. 

This Week in Classical Music: January 26, 2026.  Furtwängler, Part II.  Last week, we wrote about Wilhelm Furtwängler, a great German conductor of the first half of the 20^th century. We’ll continue here.  As we mentioned, by 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Furtwängler was acknowledged as the leading German conductor, even though his competition was incredibly strong: Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Hans Knappertsbusch, Erich Kleiber, Karl Böhm, George Szell, Eugen Jochum, and, eventually, Herbert von Karajan.  And then there was Richard Strauss, acknowledged as the greatest German composer of the era; he was also a conductor, but belonged to a different category. 

Klemperer, Szell, and Walter were Jewish.  Klemperer emigrated to the US early in 1933; Szell also left Germany in 1933: he worked in Europe till 1939, and as the war broke out, he moved to the US.  Walter, the oldest in the group, Mahler’s assistant and friend, was banned from Germany, worked in Austria till the Anschluss, and then also moved to the US.  Of those who stayed in Germany, two were supporters of the Nazi regime, and one was a member of the Nazi party.  The supporters were Knappertsbusch and Böhm, who started every concert with a Hitler salute; the Nazi party member was Karajan (he joined the party not once but twice, but that’s for another entry). 

Furtwängler was different.  Coming from an upper-middle-class family, he was a nationalist, a firm believer in the superiority of German culture, especially German music, and, rather likely, as many of his class, a casual antisemite.  But he despised Hitler, in his eyes an uncultured upstart, “hissing street peddler,” as he called him, in private, of course.  And he abhorred the antisemitic policies of the Nazi regime.  These policies affected him directly, as many musicians of “his” Berlin Philharmonic were Jewish. 

The attitudes and cultural policies of the Nazi leaders were far from uniform.  Many of the regime leaders, including Hitler himself, loved music, thought it important, and, regarding key figures, often made personnel decisions themselves.  At the same time, heads of different fiefs had their own favorites.  Goebbels, as the Reich Minister of Propaganda, was a key person in setting cultural policies, while Alfred Rosenberg, who led the Militant League for German Culture and was probably the most virulent antisemite of them all, vied for the same role and, for a while, was very influential.  Both had their own favorites.  Other key leaders were also involved: Hermann Göring, in his role as Prime Minister of Prussia, was in charge of the Berlin State Opera, as Berlin was the capital of Prussia, while Goebbels had to settle for the Deutsche Oper, a far less prestigious theater.  Hitler himself was enamored with the music of Richard Wagner, and his favorite cultural institution was the Bayreuth Festival, where the theater, the Festspielhaus, was designed by Wagner himself, and where his operas were staged.  

In this rather chaotic environment, if one was top in his field (whether a composer, an artist, or a poet) and was a supporter of the regime, he (and sometimes she, as was the case with pianist Elly Ney) was pretty much guaranteed backing and assistance from the state.  There were exceptions: Hans Knappertsbusch, an ultra-nationalist, was personally disliked by Hitler, and his career went nowhere.  If one was exceptionally good but not an active supporter of the regime, one could still have a big career, especially if the artist was favored by a leader; Furtwängler is a prime example.  An ardent but talentless Nazi wouldn’t get any support.  And being Jewish made it hell.   

Furtwängler occupied a very unique position: both Hitler and Goebbels valued him, even though they knew that he wasn’t a follower, and acknowledged him as the greatest German conductor.  Furtwängler was in charge of Germany’s most important musical institution, the Berlin Philharmonic, and, as the Nazi leaders saw it, bestowed prestige on their regime. 

We’ll finish our take on Furtwängler next week; in the meantime, here’s Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major, "Romantic." In this live 1951 recording, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.