Taking Sides
Harwood’s recent drama Taking Sides, now receiving its Chicago premiere by the Organic Touchstone Company, explores The Dresser’s theme from another angle. Once again Harwood’s hero is an elderly artist convinced that his art is ammunition against Hitler’s horrors. But where Sir was a fictional character loosely modeled on a real-life figure (the actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit, for whom the young Harwood worked as backstage assistant), Taking Sides focuses on a historical personage of considerable significance: Wilhelm FurtwŠngler, the great symphonic conductor who, as maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic, stayed in Germany after the Nazis came to power while other artists–among them his fellow musicians Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Kurt Weill–went into exile. FurtwŠngler’s decision to remain in Germany brought him much criticism both during and after the war; even though postwar inquiries cleared him of any complicity in Nazi crimes, he remained under a cloud of suspicion until his death in 1954, at the age of 68. His defenders pointed to his role in saving lives, using his influence with Hitler and his henchmen to arrange for Jewish musicians to emigrate to safety. Yet his postwar concerts were frequently picketed by concentration camp survivors, and an offer to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1948 was rescinded under pressure from the musicians’ union. Even if he was never a Nazi, the detractors declared, he flourished under Hitler’s regime and lent it credibility with his renditions of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner.
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Arnold’s raucous, sometimes obscene attacks on FurtwŠngler as a disingenuous opportunist, meanwhile, evoke an all-too-recognizable culture of crudity determined to tear down the best along with the worst: if Hitler liked the way FurtwŠngler conducted Beethoven, the argument goes, then FurtwŠngler and Beethoven belong with Hitler, in the trash heap of history. The play’s climax finds the conductor literally nauseated by the recognition of his own political naivete while Arnold crows in self-justification, having dismissed mere facts in pursuit of what he thinks is a higher truth. (“Whose truth?” asks one character. “The victors’? The vanquished’s? The victims’?”) FurtwŠngler’s horrified realization that he may indeed have been a propaganda tool for a murderous tyrant is more than just a failed idealist’s tragic defeat: it’s a harbinger of the new order, obsessed with decay and ugliness in the name of reality–a culture of tough pragmatism that demonizes an artist like FurtwŠngler while recruiting Nazi scientists for its rocket programs.
