Wilhelm Furtwangler (January 25, 1886 – November 30, 1954) was a German conductor and composer.

By the time of Furtwängler's conducting debut at the age of twenty, he had written several pieces of music. However, they were not well received, and that combined with the financial insecurity a career as a composer would provide led him to concentrate on conducting. At his first concert, he led the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra) in Anton Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. He subsequently held posts at Munich, Lübeck, Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Vienna, before securing a job at the Berlin Staatskapelle in 1920, and, in 1922, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (where he succeeded Arthur Nikisch) and concurrently at the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Later he became music director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Salzburg Festival and the Bayreuth Festival, which was regarded as the greatest post a conductor could hold in Germany at the time.

Towards the end of the war, under extreme pressure from the Nazi Party, Furtwängler fled to Switzerland. He resumed performing and recording following the war and remained a popular conductor in Europe, although he was always under somewhat of a shadow. He died in 1954 in Ebersteinburg close to Baden-Baden. He is buried in Heidelberg's Bergfriedhof.

Furtwängler is most famous for his performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner. However, he was also a champion of modern music, and was known to give performances of thoroughly modern works, such as Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

Furtwängler's relationship with and attitude towards Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was a matter of much controversy. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Furtwängler was highly critical of them. In 1934, he was banned from conducting the premiere of Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, and Furtwängler resigned from his post at the Berlin Opera in protest. In 1936, with Furtwängler becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the regime, there were signs that he might follow Erich Kleiber's footsteps into exile, when he was offered the principal conductor's post at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, where he would succeed Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini's biographer Harvey Sachs wrote that Toscanini recommended Furtwängler for the position, one of the few times Toscanini expressed admiration for a fellow conductor. There is every possibility that Furtwängler would have accepted the post, but a report from the Berlin branch of the Associated Press, possibly ordered by Hermann Göring, said that he was willing to take up his post at the Berlin Opera once more. This caused the mood in New York to turn against him; from their point of view, it seemed that Furtwängler was now a full supporter of the Nazi Party. Although it is now widely accepted that this was not the case (Furtwängler always refused to give the Nazi salute, for instance, and there is even footage of Furtwängler wiping his hand after shaking the hand of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels), it was a view which prevailed until his death.

Furtwängler was by far the most prominent conductor to choose to remain in Nazi Germany. Most other well-known conductors working in Germany and Austria left after the Nazi takeover of those countries, either because they were themselves Jewish, or because they disagreed with Nazi policies. Among the conductors who left were Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, Fritz Busch, Fritz Stiedry and Jascha Horenstein.

Furtwängler was treated relatively well by the Nazis; he had a high profile, and was an important cultural figure. His concerts were often broadcast to German troops to raise morale, though he was limited in what he was allowed to perform by the authorities. His attitude towards Jews remains controversial today. On the one hand, he often lauded Jewish artists such as Artur Schnabel, and apparently saved some Jews—members of the Berlin Philharmonic—from concentration camps, but on the other he supported boycotts of Jewish goods and was critical of what he saw as Jewish domination of newspapers.

Albert Speer claimed that in December 1944 Furtwängler asked whether Germany had any chance of winning the war. Speer replied in the negative, and advised the conductor to flee to Switzerland from possible Nazi retribution. Furtwängler did in fact escape to Switzerland shortly after a concert in Vienna with the Vienna Philharmonic on 28 January 1945. At that concert he conducted an account of Brahms's Second Symphony that was caught on tape and is considered one of his greatest recordings.

At his denazification trial, Furtwängler was charged with supporting Nazism by remaining in Germany, performing at Nazi party functions and with making an anti-Semitic remark against the part-Jewish conductor Victor de Sabata. However, he was eventually cleared on all these counts.

Violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin was among the few people in the Jewish music community and the United States to have a positive view of Furtwängler. In 1933 he had refused to play with him, but in the late 1940s after a personal investigation about Furtwängler, he became supportive of him, and performed alongside him.

British playwright Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides (1995), set in 1946 in the American zone of occupied, is about U.S. accusations against Furtwängler of having served the Nazi regime. In 2001 the play was made into a motion picture starring Harvey Keitel and featuring Stellan Skarsgård in the role of Furtwängler.