In the summer of 2009, Valery Gergiev organized an exhibition in St. Petersburg called “Wilhelm Furtwängler: Maestro, Man, and Myth” as part of the White Nights Festival. At the opening, Gergiev gave a speech noting that Furtwängler had been attacked all his life because of his biography, yet “he served a great cause with all his creative energy and an unbelievable emotional intensity; namely the preservation of the German musical tradition.”
Gergiev may well have been describing himself while honoring his greatest role model. His speech adopts the narrative that Furtwängler used after 1945 to legitimize his alignment with National Socialism.
Over the last two months, there’s been a renewed debate over how to deal with Gergiev’s own closeness to Vladimir Putin and his criminal policies. The Furtwängler comparison has been made often. But how closely linked are the two scenarios? I posed this question to Friedrich Geiger, Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Music and Theater in Munich. One of Geiger’s main areas of work is comparative research on the role of music in dictatorships. His 2003 postdoctoral thesis at the University of Hamburg was titled Music in Two Dictatorships: Persecution of Composers under Hitler and Stalin.
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