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Books

The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing

30 June 2018

9:00 AM

30 June 2018

9:00 AM

The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been well served by their biographers, with Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times as the ideal. Wilhelm Furtwängler, by far the greatest of them all in my and many other people’s opinion, has not been nearly so fortunate.

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