BOOK REVIEW : In Defense of Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler : THE DEVIL’S MUSIC MASTER; The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler, <i> by Sam H. Shirakawa</i> , Oxford University Press $27.95; 432 pages

Was German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler the “devil’s music master”? Did he, as the Berlin Philharmonic’s music director during the Nazi Era, allow himself and his musical genius to be used as a tool of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich?

Biographer Sam Shirakawa thinks not. In these admiring pages, he devotes much effort and energy convincing us that Furtwangler was, in fact, a principled artist whose “peculiar spark of hubris drove him into resistance, rebellion and sedition” against the Nazi regime.

“When thousands of intellectuals and artists joined the exodus of Jews from Germany after the Nazis seized power,” Shirakawa writes, “Furtwangler remained behind with the naive but overwhelming conviction that he could save the culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and other great composers from annihilation by the Third Reich.”

A self-described “writer and filmmaker” with a background in TV news, Shirakawa approaches his subject with the patience and care of an academic biographer but also the zeal of a true believer. The book is framed in discerning historical narrative, buttressed with scholarly footnotes and decorated with rich biographical detail, much of which appears to come from Shirakawa’s own interviews with various men and women who knew Furtwangler.

While Shirakawa concedes that Furtwangler was locked inside a “complicated matrix of wholesale suspicion that became a mild form of paranoia,” generally he paints him as yet another one of those temperamental geniuses who seem to proliferate in the world of classical music. Shirakawa insists that Furtwangler was guileless, even child-like in his dealings with the bloodthirsty men who came to rule Germany--and he characterizes the conductor’s stubbornness as a kind of heroism.

Much of Shirakawa’s book is given over to a meticulous description of how Furtwangler coped with the weird and treacherous cultural politics of the Third Reich, which was as maniacal about music as it was about any other aspect of its demonic enterprise. For the reader who is not an aficionado of classical music, “The Devil’s Music Master” may be approached as a fascinating case study of an artist who found himself the subject of a turf war among mass murderers and professional torturers who fancied themselves to be men of high culture.

Shirakawa is reluctant to leave out anything that he discovered in the course of his prodigious research into the life of Furtwangler, but he manages to liven up the lengthy proceedings with an abundance of charming and whimsical stories that emphasize Furtwangler’s charisma and genius.

At 14, for example, young Wilhelm used musical notations rather than mere words to describe his impressions of Michelangelo’s chapel of the Medicis in Florence. A year later, he courted the daughter of sculptor Adolf Hildebrand--the first of “literally hundreds of women whom Furtwangler loved”--by comparing her in a love letter to “the scherzo of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.” Early on, the handsome young man was befriended by various wealthy benefactors, including a number of titled and powerful women, and he led an undeniably charmed life as an aesthete at the heart of a holocaust.

Shirakawa is fascinated by the subtleties and nuances of Furtwangler’s taste in music and by his style of conducting, but the real subject of his book is a moral query of transcendent and enduring importance: What is the relationship between art and politics, or--more accurately--between art and genocide?

“Everyone who conducts in the Third Reich is a Nazi!” is how Toscanini put it when he encountered Furtwangler on the streets of New York in 1938.

“No, a thousand times, no!” replied Furtwangler. “Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played. . . . Music transports them to regions where the Gestapo can do them no harm.”

Neither Toscanini nor Furtwangler could have appreciated the irony of his words: As it turned out, of course, the victims of the Holocaust were herded to the gas chambers to the strains of classical music. And when compared to the crimes against humanity of Nazi Germany, Furtwangler’s “resistance” to the New Order does seem feeble. It was mostly a matter of discreetly putting in a good word for a few of his musical colleagues, or evading Nazi protocol, as when he carried his baton to the podium at a concert in order to avoid giving the customary Nazi salute.

Still, one need not be impressed with Furtwangler’s supposed acts of defiance--or Shirakawa’s elaborate apologia--in order to be impressed with the candor, the intellectual honesty and the provocative moral argument of “The Devil’s Music Master.”