The Enduring Magic of Bruno Walter

Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky have penned the first biography of one of the most beloved conductors of the 20th century, Bruno Walter, 40 years after his death. Though neither as colorful professionally as Arturo Toscanini nor as colorful personally as Leonard Bernstein, Walter had a career that spanned 67 years and two continents, with nefarious thanks to the diaspora of World War II. His repertoire ranged from the (then) modern Gustav Mahler (he was Mahler’s assistant, first in Hamburg and then in Vienna) to Mozart and Wagner; from symphony to opera; and like all true musicians until the jet age, he also composed, performed and wrote on aesthetics.

Yet in an age fascinated with “sensational” biographies that highlight revelations of sexual proclivity or hidden tragedies, the life of Walter perhaps took so long to be recounted because it seemed too tame. After all, his Jewish family survived the Holocaust with careers truncated and hearts broken but intact in Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. An affair in his 30s with a middling mezzo named Delia Reinhardt remained discreet until after the death of his wife, when Reinhardt joined him in California for the remaining 13 years of his life. (Apparently Walter wanted to marry her, but after his daughter fainted one morning upon hearing the news, he thought it best not to bring up the topic again). Nor are there any accounts of blow-ups with orchestras, backstabbing of colleagues (in fact, Walter was accused of being too kind to colleagues who continued to work during the Nazi regime) or skeletons found in his closet.

Walter was simply the most wonderful conductor and, by all contemporaneous accounts, the loveliest man of his musical generation. One look at his impish grin, the irregular bow-tie, the courtly tilt of the head and the twinkling eyes in the photograph of him with mezzo Kathleen Ferrier and you know he’s a gentleman. You can hear the gentleman in action on the Sony CD of an actual rehearsal of the “Siegfried-Idyll” with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Though hats on the gentlemen and gloves for the ladies were already on their way out, Walter maintains an Old World dignity, addressing his players by their last name, preceded by a “Mister,” and he gently asks for a correction by saying, “My friends, I am not quite happy. Please, once again.” As autocratic as Toscanini, he was always courtly. Bernstein, who was his assistant, recalled making his professional debut at 25 when he replaced Walter at the New York Philharmonic. “He was so kind, so gentle and so authoritative at the same time,” Bernstein said. “I couldn’t believe that a conductor could combine those qualities of warmth, tenderness and absolute authority to this degree.”

These personal traits are what you hear in his music. Walter’s interpretations are invariably sweet, loving, warm, gracious and intelligent. His recording of “Siegfried-Idyll” could melt the most ardent hater of Wagner. The intimacy and love of Wagner’s finally united family (with the just-born Siegfried) doesn’t make one think of family values or of Kirche und Kche but rather the gentler vision of a Mary Cassatt mother holding the small hand of her baby.

A conductor who could re-create such beauty for so many decades and in so many styles deserves to have his recordings released so that future generations might have the privilege and pleasure of sharing his vision. But “Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere,” less a biography and more an exhaustive chronicling of his career, probably should be read only by scholars. The authors combed through 20,000 reviews and 7,000 letters (which are quoted too extensively and cataloged in 49 pages of notes) and list what feels like every program he ever conducted. They gather information and tell us about Walter, but it would take not only an excellent researcher but a better writer to make us truly feel him.

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1876, Bruno Schlesinger (his real name) began his musical education early; one of his first music teachers noted that “[e]very inch of this boy is music.” To get a better understanding of how music was put together, Bruno took it upon himself to copy pictures of instruments he saw in library books and to synthesize a symphonic score to a piano reduction. He was heading toward a career as a concert pianist until he heard the famous interpreter of Wagner, Hans von Bulow, conduct, and this changed the course of his life.

In his autobiography, Walter wisely advises aspiring conductors how to overcome the conundrum of learning to become a conductor without actually having an orchestra to conduct: You must “coach singers, attend concerts, observe other conductors, study scores and read works of great minds

Early in his career, Walter decided to change his name from Schlesinger; having been told that there were too many Schlesingers in Breslau, where he had his first post. He chose Walter because he liked the association with the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide and with Walther von Stolzing in “Die Meistersinger.” He also converted to Christianity, claiming that otherwise he couldn’t get a visa to travel. Though many letters are quoted, we never hear, for example, a word about his family’s reactions to either changing his name and religion or to his decision to marry an aspiring soprano named Elsa Korneck.

One benefit, however, of Ryding and Pechefsky’s exhaustive research is to see the long list of modern works that Walter conducted by composers such as Bittner, Trapp, Braunfels, Gal, Mason and Smyth, among many, many others, who are nearly unknown today. Though nearly none of their compositions are performed today, Walter felt that one of his responsibilities as a conductor was to champion new works. Though it is questionable that the greatest German opera of his day was Hans Pfitzner’s “Palestrina,” as he argued, the importance of his “discovery” of Shostakovich when traveling to Leningrad in 1928 is indisputable.

In addition to the new works Walter championed, he composed seriously until he reluctantly conceded that his talent lay in conducting, not composing. In his autobiography, he concedes he “made only the music of others sound forth,” that he was “a re-creator.” Throughout his career, Walter performed extensively as a pianist in chamber works and as an accompanist for singers and instrumentalists. (Walter was introduced to music by hearing his mother sing and accompany herself on the piano.) Though today James Levine and Daniel Barenboim give occasional performances as pianists (and Lorin Maazel has less success as a violinist) and Esa-Pekka Salonen is a composer, these are the exceptions. Most conductors today confine their music-making to the podium.

As early as 1921, Walter was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks in the Munich press, being referred to as the “Hebrew” or that “Jew conductor Isador Schlesinger, alias Walter.” In an ironic twist, Walter lobbied at that time and in vain for the unification of Berlin’s opera houses, whereas today’s attempt to unite the operas in Berlin is opposed by Barenboim, the head of the Staatsoper. Unfortunately, the name-calling hasn’t changed much, as he has been called by a Berlin statesman “the Jew, Barenboim.”

As the German troops advanced on Austria and Chancellor Schuschnigg made his farewell speech, Walter, ever the romantic artist, didn’t reel from the rape but wrote poetically, “If you think of the most beautiful woman, whose beauty has been destroyed by smallpox and now she wanders about like a caricature of herself, resembling herself but giving horror at the same time--this is the fate of Austria and Vienna in particular.”

A great personal tragedy occurred when Walter’s daughter Gretel, though married, began a romantic liaison with the handsome bass Ezio Pinza, whom her father was conducting, in the fateful role of “Don Giovanni” at the Salzburg Festival. As an example of when life can be more operatic (tragic) than the opera itself, Gretel’s husband shot and killed her in her sleep, presumably from jealousy. Walter continued to work with Pinza for many more years but without apparent rancor.

When Walter left his post as the head of the Munich Opera, it was front-page news, but when he died in 1962 in Beverly Hills, he received only a small notice in The Times. Los Angeles, however, benefited from Walter’s legacy not only because he lived there, but because his assistant in Berlin, Fritz Zweig, moved to Los Angeles and taught the last generation of aspiring conductors in Southern California.

Yehudi Menuhin, who worked with Walter when he was a boy, once said of the master that he was “always trying to look for that first moment of rapture ... when you listen or meet or find something that you’ve never seen before and which reveals some magic ... and he was trying to look for that magic each time he made music.” *