Volume 49, Number 2 · February 14, 2002
The Modest Maestro
By Allan Keiler
Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere
by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky
Yale University Press, 487 pp., $35.00
Bruno Walter, born in Berlin in 1876, had one of the longest and most distinguished careers of any conductor who became prominent in the period between the two world wars. Before he was forty, he was entrusted with the posthumous premières of both Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and his Ninth Symphony, his last completed works, having been close to the composer personally and artistically for nearly two decades. By the time Walter settled in America, in 1939—because he was Jewish he had been driven out of Germany and finally Austria—he had been principal conductor at virtually all of the important musical centers of the German-speaking world, Munich, Dresden, Berlin, and Vienna among them. During the early Forties at New York's Metropolitan Opera he conducted memorable performances of operas by Beethoven, Verdi, and Mozart. In 1947, already seventy-one, he became the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Although he suffered several heart attacks late in life, he continued to conduct, in Europe as well as America, and to make recordings until his eighty-fifth year. He died in 1962.
Review, 4319 words
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