A 1935 photograph shows Wilhelm Furtwängler shaking Adolf Hitler's hand on a concert stage. What it does not show is that minutes earlier, ordered to give the Nazi salute, he had torn a panel off his dressing room radiator in rage and walked out gripping his baton in his right hand so he could not raise it. This episode uses biographies and post-war denazification transcripts to explore what resistance looks like from inside a gilded cage. We begin with his rise to the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus, his famously fluid beat, and the influence of Jewish theorist Heinrich Schenker on his approach to long-range harmonic tension.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Furtwängler dismissed Hitler as a hissing street peddler, then confronted him in a screaming match over Jewish musicians, published an open letter to Goebbels, and refused ...