We mark the death on November 30, 1954 – 66 years ago today – of the German conductor and composer Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was one of the most important and controversial musicians of the twentieth century. Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on January 25, 1886, in the German municipality of Schöneberg, which is today a district within the city of Berlin. He came from a highly respected, intellectually accomplished family: his father Adolf was an archaeologist and his mother a painter.…