METAMORPHOSEN - Alessandro Zignani

METAMORPHOSEN – Wilhelm Furtwängler: the unarmed prophet

Nearly seventy years after his death, the figure of Wilhelm Furtwängler, beyond the fleeting political debates, remains the very symbol of a now vanished interpretative tradition, where the surrender of the structural organism, the renewed expression of the potential locked within the density of Form, became empathy with the author, the resurrection of his living voice. In the name of that legacy to which he was the last heir, the Maestro refused to flee the Nazi regime, becoming the object of Goebbels's propaganda, but an emblem of intact German civilization to those who watched it decay under Hitler's bestiality. Today, meditating on the legacy of the conductor and composer who embodied a period in Europe—when nature dictated to man the laws of its own becoming, and music was the bridge between ephemeral time and the architecture of eternity—becomes more than ever a reason for survival, a warning for the future. This book, exploring the significant intertwining of art and life, creation and interpretation, delves into the inner workings of the Master's personality; and, therefore, into his art, which was its expression and fulfillment. For him, to exist was to become what one is.

Alessandro Zignani, born in Rimini in 1961, has published more than forty books, including essays, novels, and plays performed by his company, Il teatro delle ombre . A German scholar, he has translated Nietzsche, Trakl, Schopenhauer, and the Nibelungslied. He teaches History of Music.