Lacking a Key Note of Complexity

Wilhelm Furtwangler--the central figure in Ronald Harwood’s play “Taking Sides,” which opened Thursday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre--was one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Few objective experts would contest that judgment.

Nevertheless, in some crucial quarters his name has been chronically besmirched, his reputation cruelly distorted. Furtwangler, after all, was guilty of guilt by association with the Third Reich.

The conductor sealed his fate simply by deciding to stay in his beloved Germany during World War II. He was not a Nazi. He never joined the party. He challenged political authority in dangerous ways. He refused to conduct the national anthem and insisted on programming music of Mendelssohn, a banned non-Aryan. He used his money and his sociopolitical powers to save the lives of many German Jews. All too proudly, perhaps, he regarded himself as a German first and foremost, just as he regarded his persecuted colleagues as Germans first and Jews second.

Although he was cleared by two Denazification Tribunals, many observers could not forgive him for staying in Germany and thus, by superficial default, lending his prestige and the appearance of his approval to the enemy. Naively, perhaps, Furtwangler felt that art transcended politics, and that he could do more good in beleaguered Berlin than in a distant exile. If the Nazis seized upon his presence as a propaganda advantage, he felt that he must help the Germany of Beethoven triumph over the Germany of Hitler.

Other German musicians of the time--Herbert von Karajan, Karl Bohm and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, for instance--lent enthusiastic support to the Nazi regime and suffered few postwar consequences. But Furtwangler remained a shadowy figure, a potential martyr vacillating between adulation and derision until his death, attributed to bronchial pneumonia, in 1954.

“He did not want to live anymore,” his widow, Elisabeth Furtwangler, told me in an interview 24 years ago. “ ‘I am going to die now,’ he said. ‘It is good this way.’ He was a tortured man. He was filled with shame for Germany and what it had done. He had a tremendous capacity for suffering.”

There is, no doubt, a good play in the Furtwangler tragedy. Unfortunately, Harwood hasn’t written it. For all his noble intentions, the author of “The Dresser” has cranked out a simplistic melodrama about complex ideas, a low-brow treatise with high-brow pretensions.

“Taking Sides” claims rather disingenuously not to take sides. Essentially, it presents the Furtwangler dilemma as a confrontation between opposites. In one corner: the brilliant, defensive, idealistic maestro; in the other corner: an all-American tough-guy soldier who serves as the artist’s judge and admits that he wants “to nail him.”

Harwood portrays Furtwangler as a gigantic, long-suffering genius whose worst defects involve passing pride, inflated ego and, perhaps, a certain degree of convenient cowardice. The playwright makes his antagonist a callous boor, a uniformed lout who calls Furtwangler “a band-leader” and, like certain Nazis, belittles anything even faintly cultural.

Just in time for the final curtain, the stagy Furtwangler does show a little remorse for having made some necessary compromises, and the fictional major does suggest that his prejudice may be colored by memories of liberating a concentration camp. The psychological adjustments emerge blunt and feeble, however, and they arrive too late for compensatory comfort.

“Taking Sides” was first performed in England in May 1995, in a production staged by Harold Pinter. The Broadway version, directed by David Jones, encourages the hard-working actors to do a lot of hawking and spitting, settling in the process for cartoon histrionics in lieu of poignancy. Daniel Massey, the only import from the West End, seems to be hiding behind an odd Furtwangler mask. He musters a neat semblance of crusty authority but cannot always resist the lure of hammy grandstanding (not to mention some odd gymnastics). Ed Harris tries desperately, occasionally successfully, to flesh out the caricature of the Ugly American.

The uneven supporting cast includes Elizabeth Marvel as the major’s enlightened secretary, Norbert Weisser as a duplicitous second-fiddler and Ann Dowd as a victim’s hysterical widow. All vaunt atrocious German accents. Michael Stuhlberg mouths sporadic platitudes of reason as the bad major’s good lieutenant. David Jenkins designed the symbolic set--a barren office representing an island of peace amid the rubble of war. Like the play, it isn’t exactly subtle.

* “Taking Sides,” Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St., New York City, (800) 755-4000.