Bruno Walter

Internationally renowned conductor and composer, Bruno Walter, made his way to the stage of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was 1953, and this German-born icon of music, an expert on Brahms, had fled Germany and eventually Europe in the 1930’s, dropping his Jewish family name of Schlesinger when the anti-Semitic climate became dangerous.

Some 200 young men and women, students at the Northwestern University School of Music, watched in awe of their leader as he approached. Inside the mind of each college music student swirled notions of the accomplishments of the great conductor who had begun his musical education at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin in 1884, making his first concert appearance at the age of nine. Some had read of his leaving Germany in 1933, when the Nazi party boycotted his musical appointments, affecting his return to the Vienna Opera in Austria. They had heard of the harsh conditions for Jews in Europe at that time, and that Walter soon had to leave Austria for France, and then to the United States, which became his eventual permanent home. They thought about how Bruno Walter and many, many more were very fortunate to be able to get out of Europe just before World War II broke out in full.

Some of them were thinking of his many highly acclaimed recordings of other great Germanic composers, such as Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Johann Strauss Jr., Anton Bruckner, Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Dvorak, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Smetana. Others were envisioning the great conductor in the famous opera houses of Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Moscow, Milano, Salzberg, and later in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York’s Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Opera House. And now here he was, in Chicago!

Excitement, respect, and anticipation engulfed the members of Northwestern University’s Glee Club. They had been invited to sing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a concert of Brahms Requiem, conducted by Bruno Walter. Four accomplished soloists from the Chicago Symphony would provide the lead voices while those chosen from among the most proficient music majors, admitted to the club by the Dean of Music after successful audition, would provide the chorus.

They had studied and rehearsed extensively at the university until they knew the piece well – it was a very long one, close to an hour in length. A requiem is a funeral piece with different movements and different emotions. After many rehearsals at the university, the Glee Club was granted one rehearsal with a staff conductor at Orchestra Hall. They would not see the famous conductor until the day of the performance. In his 70’s then, he did nothing but Brahms concerts, as there existed such a demand for his exquisite interpretation of Brahms. Imagine what must have been going through their heads as they were about to sing under the direction of the greatest living conductor of Brahms.

One member of the Glee Club, who had herself been singing publicly since the age of eight, remembers vividly the experience which left an indelible mark on her.

“The best part of the orchestra performance was had from the other side because to watch the face of the conductor as he extracts the performance from the participants is to witness rare, romantic art. As the emotions of the different movements arrived, his manner totally changed as he coaxed the music out of the various sections of chorus and orchestra. He never looked at the score, although it was in front of him, but he knew that music so well. When there was a part of great force and strength, his fists showed the emotion, his arms in jerky movements of strength; then the music would become emotionally sweet, and he just looked like he was going to cry. He stretched out his arms in a pleading manner, pleading the music out, and you went into a zone, another place, because it was like personal communication with each person – he made eye contact. When it was your turn to produce a tone that contributes to the whole, you felt with his eye contact that he was saying, ‘This is your time to produce what you came to contribute.’ You couldn’t be part of that and not feel it. His body language and hand movements were so expressive: loud, slow, fast, calm, exciting, hand and finger movements and positions. All the emotional ingredients are in the music and his facial expressions and arms and hands made them clear. You knew the note, you knew the word, he was after that something underneath it and he could pull it right out of you. He manufactured the performance from a lot of moving parts. I was thrilled to be one of those moving parts of his finished product.”

I thought that was a great description, so I asked her for more.

She answered, “When you see the back of the conductor, it’s not the same. It’s a transporting experience when you’re on the other side. When a person gets a chance to be around someone who excels in their field, there is just a special aura about them. I just know the one time I had the chance to sing under the direction of such a great conductor, it was absolutely magnificent. He’s not a mayor or president, just a man who loved Brahms, and did it very well.”

Thanks, Mom, for that wonderful description of your experience.


I copied some comments from a couple of other websites. You can see pictures of Walter if you click on these sites.

“Bruno Walter was a distinguished conductor of music from the classical period, and his recorded performances of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven are well loved. He revived the long neglected operas of Mozart and attracted worldwide attention for his careful handling of the operas by Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. His performances had technical accuracy, controlled balance and inner details, expressive phrasing, rhetorical emphasis, and contrasting power and lyricism. Walter was renowned as an interpreter of the German and Austrian classics. His conducting is often distinguished by a Viennese-like warmth and humanity which he extracted from his orchestra. His conducting reputation soared as he was invited to conduct throughout Europe, in Prague, London and in Rome. His star continued to rise after he conducted a series of "Bruno Walter Concerts" with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. While conductor of the Gewandhaus Concerts in Leipzig, he was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany.” http://www.maurice-abravanel.com/walter.html


Wikipedia says, “Walter was a leading conductor of opera … of great interest are recordings from the 1950s of his rehearsals of Mozart, Mahler, and Brahms, which give insight into his musical priorities and into the warm and non-tyrannical manner (as contrasted with some of his colleagues) with which he related to orchestras.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Walter/Bruno_Walter