Triumphing Over the Time-Spirit

...Triumphing over the timespirit, he made Mahler, the last great composer of the 19th century, a classic of our concert hall...

...Under his baton that company of cranky careerists, generally so tense and strident, gradually relaxed and mellowed, until the playing assumed a tone of baroque sumptuousness...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Triumphing Over the Time-Spirit Save for his early association with Gustav Mahler, an episode that has assumed for some critics an importance far greater than the facts would seem to warrant, there was nothing in the life of the late Bruno Walter that should have set him apart from his famous contemporaries and make him pursue a course directly contrary to theirs...

...Walter's principal glory was his sense of eternity—the sublime timelessness of his playing at the grand climaxes of Romantic music...

...We shall sorely miss Bruno Walter...

...He altered his style so that every trace of Viennese parochialism vanished, and, at the same time, he coaxed his American musicians into a manner thoroughly congenial to his own sense of the classics...

...Yet throughout his career he was continually adapting his art to the changing conditions of time and place, while always taking care that the essence was preserved unchanged...

...The difference, it should be said, certainly favored Walter and his notions of tradition...

...I should have liked to have heard him attempt a composition like the "Sanctus" of the ? minor Mass, one of those moments when Bach seems to stand amid the cherubim swinging a smoking censer...

...When Bruno Walter came to America in 1937, he made a completely successful adjustment to the cultural conditions of this country...

...But in those compositions that speak in the pure idiom of Vienna, in the symphonies of Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler, Walter was supreme among the conductors of our time...

...It must be conceded, however, that Walter's calm and gracious manner was not always appropriate, even, in some instances, to the masters of the Viennese school...

...he preserved the beauty of Viennese culture beyond its time and place...

...At one time it was possible to hear the New York Philharmonic play one night in Walter's grand manner and the following night, under another conductor, in its customary style...

...One can easily imagine the effect of that early progressivism on such a man as Bruno Walter...

...But within the conventional framework of this typical career, there was a life in art totally dissimilar to any of the other great musicians of the time...

...His contribution to our musical culture was unique and irreplaceable...

...His Mozart lacked the energy, elegance and wit of Sir Thomas Beecham...

...or, rather, their style is simply perfection as instruments...

...Bom in 19th century Berlin of lower-middle-class Jewish parents (the family name was Schlesinger), Walter's ambitious mother saw to it that he was devoted to the service of music at an early age...

...his Beethoven had neither the elan of Felix Weingartner nor the tough moral fibre of Arturo Toscanini...

...In time, he became a skillful as well as tactful advocate of those 19th century values which seem so implausible to the modem world...

...U.S...

...He was temperamentally conservative...

...It is gratifying to think that in his extreme old age Walter could regard his work as done...

...But to those to whom the past is most real and most precious there eventually comes the recognition that only by adjusting it to the present can the past be preserved...

...He was brought up slowly and cautiously through the hierarchy of central European opera houses until at last he attained the coveted position of director of the Vienna Staatsoper...

...He alone had the ability to render sentiment fully without arousing the suspicion that it was really sentimentality...

...While his contemporaries were eagerly pressing forward into the 20th century, Walter developed along lines that gradually led back into the 19th...

...he revered tradition...

...Walter, despite his conservative nature, was fully aware of this lesson of history, and he was far from thinking that tradition consisted merely of the perpetuation of an established order...

...And one must not fail to note appreciatively Walter's thoroughly Viennese urbanity and sophistication — the sophistication of Mahler and Richard Strauss, a whimsical Mannigfaltigkeit that abounds in kaleidiscopic metamorphoses, ironic insinuations, and grotesque quips and pranks...

...With consumate art, he expressed the entire range of Viennese sensibility: the buoyant lyricism of Schubert, the nostalgic melancholy of Brahms, the mystic raptures of Bruckner...

...American orchestras are more aptly described as "instruments" than any other orchestras in the world because they are composed of musicians from every land who, consequently, are bound together only by their skill as musicians...

...A new generation was arising in the musical world that would revolutionize taste and establish for years to come the character of modern musical culture...

...Fortunately, by the time of his death on February 17, he had recorded practically all of his celebrated interpretations of the classics, including several unsurpassable performances of the Mahler symphonies...

...Arriving in Vienna at about the same time to serve as Mahler's assistant at the Opera, Walter was completely enchanted by the character of the city and determined at once to make it his home...

...and he felt most at home in that retarded old city on the Danube where, as one wit put it, the grand ideal was to put the whole town under a preservative glass...

...His evocation of the pomp and magnificence of Vienna's festal moods was superb in its conjunction of power with joy...

...For Walter the principal achievement of the performing musician was not the advancement of the art but rather its preservation in a condition of the most perfect beauty...

...The great pianist had the same sort of family background, the same youthful dedication to music and the same technical education...

...But having grown up in Vienna, Schnabel left that city as a young man, disgusted with what he called "Viennese schlamperei," the lax and negligent manner of old Vienna...

...Of the two, it was Schnabel who had the more representative attitude, for in the early decades of the century the idea of progress was strong and universal...

...Walter's response to this circumstance was characteristic...

...The contrast can be seen quite distinctly when Walter is compared with a man like Artur Schnabel...

...He found, for example, that the American symphony orchestra was a much different instrument than, say, the Vienna Philharmonic...

...Our orchestras have no national character, no local style...

...Generally speaking, the ideal for the performing musician was to establish a repertoire of timeless classics and to interpret these works literally, without concern for historical and cultural traditions...

...The temperaments of the two men were radically different, and their ideals and achievements as they grew to be great musicians were always completely disparate...

...What had disgusted the dynamic and aggressive Schnabel, delighted the reticent and sentimental Walter...

...orchestras, though remarkably plastic, were constitutionally incapable of the expressive nuances of the Viennese orchestra, just as they were more capable of keeping time and playing on pitch...

...His history reads like a model of its kind, the typical career of a highly successful German-Jewish musician of the older generation...