While Furtwängler was bewildered about what had happened in
America, he had no time to worry about it. There were enough diffi-
culties at home. Throughout the three years of his American seasons,
his energies in Europe were fully taken up with shuttling among Ber-
lin, Leipzig, and Vienna and taking the Berlin Philharmonic on several
tours. In 1926 he entered a brave new world that would both frustrate
and immortalize him. He made his first gramophone recordings for
Polydor (later to become Deutsche Grammophon) with the Berlin
Philharmonic. Furtwängler's life-long antipathy toward the recording
studio is well known, but some listeners have concluded that he was
not interested in recording at all. To the contrary, he saw the value of
recordings as a way to bring music to more people than ever before:

The practical significance of radio and recordings cannot be overesti-
mated. Their time has come. For music, they possess the possibility of
popularizing music enormously. They also have further importance as
teaching aids. Ton und Wort, p. 34

But the medium discomfited him personally and interfered with
his own concept of performing as a continuous flow. He loathed being
forced to record a piece or a movement lasting, say, 12 minutes in
three spurts of four-minute takes -- the maximum length of a shellac
78-rpm record. One of the stipulations in his recording contracts

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