This is a loving and meticulous biography of one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. It is sceptical of much received opinion, generally avoids one-sided judgments and carefully builds up, from many thousands of documents, a detailed account of Bruno Walter's career, moving from imperial Prussia and Vienna to the US of Nixon and juvenile delinquency. In between, there is a great deal of fascinating detail. It also includes a separate discussion of Walter's appearances on film (whatever was he thinking of when he agreed to a part in Edgar G. Ulmer's ineffably ditzy Carnegie Hall?) and readers are referred to a website (www.bwdiscography.com) which gives an extremely thorough list-in-progress of all of Walter's recorded performances, including a number of Japanese bootlegs. From this point of view, it will be the authoritative reference book for all Walter enthusiasts.
But the book's subtitle hints at a problem which confronts every would-be biographer of a professional musician - how to avoid the appearance of an appointments calendar laced with press clippings - and here the authors have been less successful. Peter Heyworth managed to escape it in his unputdownable Werner Klemperer biography, but Klemperer's personality was larger than life.
Walter, on the other hand, could have given Monsieur de Norpois lessons in discretion. He avoided discussing his private feelings and hated polemics - refusing, for example, to take part in the various condemnations of those musicians, such as Richard Strauss and Wilhelm FurtwΣngler, who had remained in Germany under Hitler, when he was forced to leave. As a result, there are aspects that can only be guessed at, and we should probably not expect much insight into such matters as his long-standing extramarital relationship with the soprano, Delia Reinhardt - even in the chapter that bears her name, Delia takes second place to a discussion of Pfitzner's Palestrina.
At times the authors seem to be as reticent as their subject, particularly in the chapters dealing with Walter in the US. The fearsome conservative forces governing music in New York have proved the undoing of many an adventurous conductor, from Gustav Mahler to Pierre Boulez, but we hear little about them here. It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise to find Walter warning Rudolf Bing, who is about to become manager of the Met, not to touch it ("Without doubt you are aware that not one, but whole hordes of dragons spitting fire and belching fumes are waiting for you"), so muted is the account of his own dealings with that tricky institution.
The most decisive period in his life was clearly working under Mahler, who immediately recognised Walter's talent and did everything he could to help him. Walter, for his part, made a close study of Mahler's fluid baton techniques; he also learned to admire his music, and his championing of Mahler and Anton Bruckner would be significant at a time when Mahler's Ninth was described by one critic as "funny if it were not so vulgar", and when the performance of a Bruckner symphony could result in many of the audience leaving before it was finished.
But Walter's approach to managing the orchestra was very different from Mahler's. Mahler got his results by terrorising his orchestra, and there are many stories of humiliated players fleeing rehearsals in tears. Walter's manner was persuasively urbane. Georg Solti criticised him for spending too much time expounding the philosophy of a piece and too little discussing the 16th notes (allegedly a similar tendency of Klemperer's once drove an oboeist to shout: "Klemp, you talka too much!"), yet there is nothing of this kind in the film of Walter rehearsing Brahms in Vancouver, which is a master class in assured and tactful control.
He lacked Mahler's openness to new music, choosing to ally himself with the arch-conservative Pfitzner, to whom he wrote at length deploring "these wretched times" which made possible the success of such works as Strauss's SalomΘ. Yet a performance of Stravinsky's Piano Concerto under Walter was described by the composer with uncharacteristic generosity:
"The performance was a pleasure altogether unanticipated. I expected a 'Romantiker', from such a different and vergangen generation, to lack the technique for this kind of music, but my scrambled metres gave him no trouble at all and he conducted the Concerto as well as any conductor with whom I played it. (I, on the other hand, would never have the technique to do 'his' music; I sorely envied his rubato.)"
We can still judge Walter for ourselves from the extensive legacy of recordings. The iconic pieces - the 1935 Walkⁿre Act One and the 1952 Das Lied von der Erde - sound wonderful on CD (praising the performances is superfluous). That Walter was also a great Mozart opera conductor can be heard on the Naxos release (far from hi-fi, but dramatic and clear) of the 1942 Met broadcast of Don Giovanni with Ezio Pinza. Now we have a definitive study which puts these recordings in context, even if Walter himself remains somewhat elusive.
Vincent Deane writes and broadcasts on 20th-century literature and opera