Jochum vs. Furtwangler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWbybozvpQ

Long as (the royal) we are going though another bout of Wagner fever, let me just sing the praises for a moment of another musical figure who is only relatively underrated.

Eugen Jochum is a better conductor than Wilhelm Furtwangler. Period. I'll stay on this hill however many decades I have to until the opinion of the dozen remaining people who care comes around to me. Furtwangler's music making is without light or joy, without fun or good humor. Music under Furtwangler is a thing of awe, often revelatory, often spiritual, but anti-humanist. It is music making for those who want music imposed upon them so they can worship at its altar, not for those who view music as something here to be partaken by us on earth to increase the quality of our lives.

Like Furtwangler, Jochum is full of the sublimity of German romanticism, but it is 'lower-case r' romanticism. A romanticism for humans like us rather than gods. Jochum is nearly everything Furtwangler is, but along with storming the heavens comes the beauties of life on earth. All the same rubato and imposing dynamism, in all the same places, but not as excessive, and with room left over for other qualities than metaphyisical vision: beauty, fun, serenity.

To take perhaps the most obvious example to my mind: In an opera like The Marriage of Figaro, Furtwangler's performance is an embarrassment - Teutonic banging in a table full of delicate classical antiques. Jochum, on the other hand, gave us one of the very great Cosi fan Tutte's, not just beautiful like Böhm but fun, funny, and unafraid to be indelicate where appropriate.

Furtwangler's Ring is magnificent, particularly in La Scala, but I have always found that famous Tristan to be one of the most infuriatingly overvalued recordings of all time. Perhaps the problem is me, but the problem's very simple: Furtwangler takes Tristan so much more seriously than I do. It's just an opera... It has a masterpiece of a score, but as philosophy it is garbage, and evil garbage to boot - even when talking about love, Wagner advocates a philosophy that is totalitarian to the marrow in which love can only be proven through the worship of death. When a conductor lingers on every single note of Tristan for maximum ethereality and pomp, you know this musician believes in its philosophy very very deeply.

Is Jochum's Tristan one of the greatest Tristan readings? I have no idea... Being a Tristan skeptic, I suppose I don't even have much right to declare what a great Tristan is, but on its own terms it is a thing of true beauty. Like Furtwangler, Jochum takes an approach that is certainly romantic and metaphysical; he lingers on every diminished chord with hushed, reverent pianissimos, but then, to an extent Furtwangler does not in the studio, he presses forward with enormous energy expended in the extraverted noise between verklarungs. Because Jochum is not so married to the great metaphysics of Tristan's odious ideas about love, he makes me believe in the opera's mystical qualities to an extent Furtwangler never could.