"Before performing the Third Symphony on television with the Vienna Philharmonic during a cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies, Leonard Bernstein asked his viewing audience if it could `imgine what it's like to stand on the podium about to conduct the Eroica Symphony? One is at last face-to-face with Beethoven the giant, Zeus with his thunderbold, Thor with his hammer.' The same sense of an epic encounter marked Furtwangler's fierce conducting of this work as well. With him, as with Bernstein, realizing the Eroica was not merely a matter of a performance, but of an odyssey, a struggle."----excerpt from "Furtwangler Record" by John Ardoin.
