Bruno Walter (Ca

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky Yale University Press New Haven and London Frontispiece: Bruno Walter (ca. ). Courtesy of Österreichisches Theatermuseum. Copyright © by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sonia L. Shannon Set in Bulmer type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Grand Rapids, Mich. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley,Harrisonburg, Va. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ryding, Erik S., – Bruno Walter : a world elsewhere / by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references, filmography,and indexes. ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Walter, Bruno, ‒. Conductors (Music)— Biography. I. Pechefsky,Rebecca. II. Title. ML.W R .Ј—dc [B] - A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. For Emily, Mary, and William In memoriam Rachel Kemper and Howard Pechefsky Contents Illustrations follow pages and Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Bruno Schlesinger Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg,– Kapellmeister Walter Breslau, Pressburg, Riga, Berlin,‒ Mahler’s Second-in-Command Vienna, ‒ Composer and Conductor Vienna, ‒ Premiere Performances Vienna and Munich, ‒ Generalmusikdirektor Munich, ‒ Delia Munich, ‒ New and Old Worlds USA and Berlin, ‒ A New Opera Company Berlin, ‒ Gewandhauskapellmeister Leipzig, ‒ Nomad Again ‒ Dies Irae Vienna and Paris, ‒ Guest Conductor on Two Coasts New York and Los Angeles, ‒ Musical Adviser New York, ‒ Gains and Losses Los Angeles, New York, Europe,‒ Mostly Mozart ‒ C viii Columbia Symphony Orchestra Los Angeles, ‒ Recommended Discographies Filmography by Charles Barber Notes Index C ix Preface During his sixty-seven years at the podium, Bruno Walter touched a huge number of listeners. At their greatest, his interpretations were revelatory,as audiences and critics acknowledged throughout his career. He succeeded again and again in discovering the essence of a musical composition and af- fording his listeners a passage to its inward panorama. He could make the opening theme of Beethoven’s Fifth sound as fresh as a newly composed work, and he could galvanize Wagner and Verdi with an unsurpassed dra- matic electricity.In doing so,he not only revealed the soul of the music he in- terpreted but also brought his listeners, through art, nearer to the passions and ecstasies and tragedies of life—all of which he knew from firsthand ex- perience. Walter’s story constantly skirts tragedy yet finds a comparatively happy ending. An impassioned devotee of German art, he found himself perse- cuted by German nationalists as the Nazi Party gained momentum. He held key musical positions in Austria and Germany during the first two decades of the twentieth century and was friendly with some of the leading composers and authors of his day.Then the troubles began. Expelled first from Munich, then from Germany, then from Austria, and finally from Europe, Walter settled in the United States, where he would successfully reestablish his career. In this regard (though in few others) he somewhat resembled the ancient Roman war hero Coriolanus, who fought for his country but, through the political maneuverings of others, found himself an exile and ul- timately joined the enemy forces. In Shakespeare’s version of the story, as Coriolanus leaves Rome, he utters the famous line “There is a world elsewhere,” from which we have taken our subtitle. The words, however, also seem appropriate for Walter if taken in a different sense, for throughout his mature life he was committed to the spiritual world, which had greater im- portance to him than anything on this temporal globe. In his final years he became a devoted student of the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and thought continually about the “higher spheres” and the dangers of materialism. Assessments of Walter have varied over the years. Many have praised him for his sincerity, warmth, and musical genius, though in recent times some have been quick to characterize him as a sentimental, ambitious hyp- ocrite. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere between the extremes. He was not a saint and had no desire to be treated as such. One can cite instances of backbiting,narrow-mindedness,and prevarication—which point to a distinctly unattractive side of his personality—but these were the excep- tion rather than the rule. We have followed almost every day of his long career from about to ,scouring thousands of letters to and from Wal- ter, and have interviewed over sixty people who had known him personally or worked with him professionally.The picture that emerges is of a man who was for the most part generous, open-minded, forgiving, and loyal to his friends. He could be evasive, especially when the feelings of others might be hurt, but he could also be brutally honest if a situation called for bluntness. In searching for news of Walter’s activities, we have combed through well over , reviews—most of them in German and Austrian newspapers—and there is no question that positive accounts of Walter’s contribu- tion to music have far outweighed negative ones, though certainly a chorus hostile to Walter existed almost from the beginning of his career. Without overloading the reader with passages from contemporary journals and newspapers, we have tried to give a balanced picture of Walter’s critical re- ception, offering a somewhat greater percentage of negative reviews than we actually encountered—partly in an attempt to be even-handed, partly be- cause critical reviews are often more revealing (both of Walter’s stylistic manner and of his critics’ prejudices) than sterling reports. The most frequently cited grievances against Walter as a conductor are that he was “too sentimental” and that his “beat was unclear.” Here it’s surely best to turn to Walter’s recordings and draw one’s own conclusions. What seems sentimental to some might strike others as deeply sensitive; an unclear beat to one listener might sound like subtle rhythmic flexibility to another. While the relaxed tempi in some of Walter’s later recordings seem flabby, unadventurous, and too gemütlich to some ears, those very recordings offer a mature, unhurried beauty,wedded to an almost erotic caressing of the lines,that few Walterians would be without.Even the most committed enthusiasts, however, will allow that some of Walter’s stylistic peculiarities could be unfortunate; his tendency, especially in the earlier recordings, to slow down for the lyrical themes in works by classical composers like Mozart, even when the execution is skillfully carried off, can be disruptive and disconcerting.(This was,of course,a characteristic not of Walter alone, but of several generations of post-Wagnerian conductors; it is almost absent P xii in his last recordings.) And his aversion to repeating the exposition in sonata form sometimes resulted in lopsided structure.But many will gladly tolerate such idiosyncrasies in return for the sumptuous musical banquet that Walter served. Complaints of another kind dogged Walter for decades—indeed,when- ever he performed before anti-Semitic critics. In some cases, the racial mo- tives for a critic’s animosity are made abundantly clear throughout a review, but in many instances the tastes of the critics could not obviously be attrib- uted to racial bias. There are, for example, devastating reviews of Walter’s original compositions that trounce him for lacking a genuinely creative gift— a line of attack often leveled at Mahler by those who believed that Jews were incapable of originality and higher creativity. It’s tempting to see such attacks on Walter as part of the general propaganda against Jewish composers; yet one of the loudest critics in this vein was the Jewish reviewer Julius Korn- gold (father of the wunderkind composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold),whose attacks were hardly likely to have been prompted by a political or racial aversion to music composed by Jews. On the other hand,the Munich critic Paul Ehlers, who supported the Nazi Party early on, rarely wrote a harsh word about Walter over the course of several years. Walter’s style has often been characterized as “lyrical,”but perhaps “vocal”would be a more accurate term.To be sure,Walter continually urged his players to sing, but singing is not just lyricism. “Sing out,” yes, but always with different inflections; sing recitativo as well as arioso. In Walter’s interpretations, we are often aware of intense drama; it is most obvious in the realm of opera, but the purely symphonic works are also often charged with feral energy.Even when his readings reach a frenzied pitch, however, the in- struments are allowed to breathe, to create resonant tones that fit into deftly shaped lines; in prestissimo passages, one almost never feels that the instru- ments are gasping for breath. And the vocal model no doubt provided the textural ideal that Walter strove to achieve: the polyphonic fabric of his orchestral timbres surely owes a debt to the harmonies of human voices,where a subordinate line rarely serves as mere accompaniment but almost always has its own identity. In his relations with orchestral musicians, Walter was perhaps the first world-renowned conductor to achieve a reputation for treating his players with courtesy rather than roughness, putting himself forward as primus inter pares. His disapproval was often expressed with the genial formula: “My friends, I am not quite happy.Please, once again.” But this is not to say that P xiii he was a pushover; in fact, for all his courtliness, he could be quite firm with his players, until they gave him what he felt they were capable of giving.

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