Walter [Schlesinger], Bruno

(b Berlin, 15 Sept 1876; d Beverly Hills, CA, 17 Feb 1962). American conductor and composer of German birth. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Walter attended the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, initially planning to become a concert pianist. Around 1889, however, he resolved to pursue a conducting career after hearing Hans von Bülow direct an orchestra. He obtained a position as vocal coach in Cologne, making his conducting début there in 1894 in a performance of Lortzing's Der Waffenschmied. From 1894 to 1896 he worked in Hamburg under Mahler, who profoundly influenced Walter's artistic development. Impressed by his protégé, Mahler found employment for him in Breslau in 1896, though the director there requested that Bruno Schlesinger change his name, ostensibly because Schlesinger was too common a name in Breslau, the capital of Silesia.

After appointments in Pressburg, 1897–8, Riga, 1898–1900 (where he met the soprano Elsa Korneck, his future wife), and Berlin, 1900–01, Walter accepted an invitation to come to Vienna as Mahler's assistant. From 1901 to 1912 he worked at the Vienna Hofoper, eventually acquiring Austrian citizenship, and made guest appearances in Prague, Rome, Munich and elsewhere. In 1909 he conducted a performance of his own First Symphony in Vienna and enjoyed a successful London concert début, followed in 1910 by performances of Tristan und Isolde and Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers at Covent Garden. After Mahler's death, Walter gave the première of his mentor's Das Lied von der Erde (1911) and Ninth Symphony (1912); as director of the Singakademie (1911–13), he also introduced Mahler's Eighth Symphony to Vienna (1912).

Appointed Royal Bavarian Generalmusikdirektor in 1913, Walter spent nearly a decade in Munich. There he conducted tirelessly in three opera houses and again gave important first performances, among them Korngold's Violanta and Der Ring des Polykrates (presented together in 1916) and, the following year, Pfitzner's Palestrina, which featured the soprano Delia Reinhardt, who became a lifelong friend. He also regularly led the Musikalische Akademie in symphonic concerts. Although Walter considered his years in Munich ‘the most important epoch’ of his career, for personal reasons he left his position there in 1922. From 1919 to 1932 he appeared yearly as guest conductor of the Berlin PO, once sharing the podium with Ethel Smyth in a concert of her music (1928). His New York début in 1923 initiated a long and cordial relationship with America. In 1925 Walter began conducting at the Salzburg Festival and became Generalmusikdirektor of the Städtische Oper in Berlin; he introduced Puccini’s Turandot to that city in 1926 and retained his post there until 1929. Parisian audiences enthusiastically received his Mozart opera cycle in 1928. He also worked with several British orchestras, and between 1924 and 1931 scored notable successes at Covent Garden. Walter's last position in Germany was that of Gewandhauskapellmeister in Leipzig (1929–33).

When Germany fell to the Nazis in 1933, Walter returned to Austria. He again travelled widely, performing in New York, Amsterdam, Florence and elsewhere. At Salzburg he accompanied Lotte Lehmann at the piano in annual recitals (1933–7) and won high praise for productions of Tristan, Don Giovanni (with Pinza), Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and other operas. From 1936 to 1938 he was artistic director of the Vienna Staatsoper. He also made a number of superb discs with the Vienna PO in the 1930s; those of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and the first act of Die Walküre with Melchior and Lehmann rank among his finest recordings. With the Anschluss, however, Walter once more found himself an exile. Although he gratefully accepted the French government's offer of citizenship, from 1939 onwards he made the USA his home, becoming an American citizen in 1946.

During the 1940s and 50s Walter's principal orchestra was the New York PO, for which he served as musical adviser (1947–9); he also conducted other major orchestras throughout the USA, including those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. His programmes with the New York PO offered, in addition to the established symphonic repertory, uncut performances of the St Matthew Passion and new works by Barber, Moore and other American composers. His New York PO recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies (1941–53) show him at his most forceful and dynamic. A memorable Fidelio, with Flagstad and Kipnis, marked his début at the Metropolitan Opera (1941), where he conducted sporadically until 1959. After the war he returned to Europe on several occasions, participating in the early Edinburgh Festivals and taking particular pleasure in his collaborations with Kathleen Ferrier, who sang with Patzak on an acclaimed recording of Das Lied von der Erde under Walter. Although a heart attack in 1957 forced him to lighten his conducting schedule, Walter frequently recorded with the Columbia SO in his final years; these recordings offer gentler, broader readings of the standard repertory – notably the last six symphonies of Mozart and the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms – than those preserved on his earlier recordings.

A man of wide reading, Walter counted among his friends Thomas Mann and other prominent authors. After 1947 he developed a keen interest in the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. Celebrated as an outstanding conductor in an era of great conducting, Walter favoured the Austro-German repertory but by no means confined himself to it. While he championed the works of Mahler and actively sought new music for much of his life, he flatly rejected atonality and serialism, and confessed an aversion to jazz. Treating his players as colleagues, he drew a sensuous tone from the orchestra, employing rubato with consummate skill, juxtaposing fierce drama and warm lyricism. His sensitivity to contrapuntal texture and overall structure allowed him to bring out fine details without damaging a work's integrity. He sought to penetrate ‘to the core’ of a composition and, detesting ‘routine’ performances, continually endeavoured to present a piece ‘as if it were receiving its world première’.

WORKS

(selective list)

WRITINGS

‘Gustav Mahler's III. Symphonie’, Der Merker, i (1909), 9–11

‘Mahlers Weg: ein Erinnerungsblatt’, Der Merker, iii (1912), 166–71

‘Über Ethel Smyth: ein Brief von Bruno Walter’, Der Merker, iii (1912), 897–8

‘Kunst und Öffentlichkeit’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte (Oct 1916), 95–110

‘Beethovens Missa solemnis’, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (30 Oct 1920), Beethoven suppl., 3–5

Von den moralischen Kräften der Musik (Vienna, 1935, 2/1987)

Gustav Mahler (Vienna, 1936, 3/1981/R; Eng. trans., 1937, 4/1990)

‘Bruckner and Mahler’, Chord and Discord, ii 2 (1940), 3–12

Theme and Variations: an Autobiography (New York,1946/R; Ger. orig., 1947/R)

Von der Musik und vom Musizieren (Frankfurt, 1957/R; Eng. trans., 1961)

‘Mein Weg zur Anthroposophie’, Das Goetheanum, lii (1961), 418–21

Briefe 1894–1962, ed. L.W. Lindt (Frankfurt, 1969)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Komorn-Rebhan: Was wir von Bruno Walter lernten (Vienna, c1913)

P. Stefan: Bruno Walter (Vienna, 1936)

T. Mann: ‘To Bruno Walter on his Seventieth Birthday’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 503–8

B. Gavoty: Bruno Walter (Geneva, 1956)

J. McClure: ‘The Making of a Legacy’, Gramophone, xxxix (1961–2), 490–91

E. Wellesz: ‘Bruno Walter (1876–1962)’, ML, xliii (1962), 201–5

T. Frost: ‘Bruno Walter's Last Recording Sessions’, Hi Fi/Stereo Review, xi/6 (1963), 50–54

A. Boult: ‘Bruno Walter’, Recorded Sound, no.40 (1970), 668–71

D. Rooney: ‘Bruno Walter: a Reassessment’, Keynote: a Magazine for the Musical Arts, xi/3 (1987), 14–21

R. Louis: ‘Bruno Walter au disque’, Diapason, no.415 (1995), suppl. [discography]

E. Ryding and R. Pechefsky: Bruno Walter: a World Elsewhere (forthcoming)

ERIK RYDING, REBECCA PECHEFSKY