Bruno Walter, a Conductor Who Found Truth Through Beauty

“Truth can be repulsive,” Bruno Walter, a conductor whose life had taught him that fact all too well, once said. “But Mozart has the power to speak truth with beauty.”

If there was one composer that Walter, who was able to make beauty from truth like few others until his death in Beverly Hills in 1962, was most associated with during his career, it was that Viennese master; the story of Walter’s life, the conductor said, could be told as “the history of the development of a love for Mozart.”

Listen to any of the famous stereo recordings Walter made in the twilight of his life with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and it is easy to understand why. Take just the introduction to the E flat symphony, No. 39, from 1960. Stately, mellow, warm, it sings with contentment, backed with a faith strong enough that when troubles darken the scene, you can practically hear Walter transfigure them with an understanding smile. It’s a gesture of benevolence, yet he makes it sound glowingly apt, even characteristic of Mozart. Not for nothing did the critic Neville Cardus once suggest that to witness Walter conduct was to be “visited by an act of grace.”

Writers often dignified Walter with spiritual metaphors — the author Stefan Zweig compared the beam on his face while conducting to “the countenance of the angels when they look upon God” — and it is revealing of his artistry that they were exactly what Walter aspired to achieve. For him, the Germanic music from Bach to Strauss was pure, uplifting, redemptive. It offered an “unchanging message of comfort,” he wrote in his memoir “Theme and Variations”; its “wordless gospel proclaims in a universal language what the thirsting soul of man is seeking beyond this life.”

His authority, lightly worn, came not from technique or intellectual heft, but from “his love and his faith,” the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote after a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1946. “Love, and not merely interpretive comprehension of what he is playing. Abiding faith in the music he represents.”

More than that, Walter seemed after World War II to restore the luster of a vanished, even discredited tradition. He spoke like a German Romantic, and he conducted like one, too, tracing his influences back through the Vienna of Gustav Mahler and on to Richard Wagner, whose writings read during secret trips to a Berlin library as a boy.

Wilhelm Furtwängler forced that shared heritage through his intense and idiosyncratic style, and his association with Nazism. Walter, though, had the moral stature of an exile from the Third Reich, and he presented his inheritance unsullied, with an irresistible eloquence that made the classics sound “as natural as breathing,” the Virgil Thomson wrote in 1954.

Part of the fascination of listening to Walter’s conducting now — coupling an exceptionally worthwhile 77-disc Sony box set, capturing his American career after he took refuge in California in 1939, with older and live material available on labels including Pristine — lies in hearing him reinvent the traditions he was seen to embody.

There is the antique charm of Walter’s prewar activity, above all in Vienna; the remarkable and somewhat surprising solidity and strength that marked his interpretations during his collaboration with the New York Philharmonic; the radiance of his late, stereo recordings, serene but spry. Yet throughout there is a constant, distinctive search for a simple, singing sense of expression, for a pliancy of line, for a sophistication and sensitivity that lay in more than technical precision.

“There is a German verb, musizieren, which means to make music,” Thomson wrote in a review of one of Walter’s Philharmonic concerts in 1941, suggesting that the word applied more to him than to those, like Artur Rodzinski and Dimitri Mitropoulos, who had also conducted that orchestra. “Walter musiziert,” Thomson went on. “And that is a pleasure for those who like music with their concerts.”

WALTER WAS NOT ALWAYS the dignified protector of Germanic music that he fashioned himself as after World War II, as his excellent biographers Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky have shown.

Born Bruno Schlesinger to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1876 — he changed his name to take an early job in Breslau (modern-day Wroclaw, Poland) and later converted to Christianity — he had youthful success as a pianist, deciding to become a conductor only after seeing Hans von Bülow in the flesh.

Much of his career was spent in the opera pit, from his debut in Cologne, Germany, in 1894 through his tenure from 1913 to 1922 as general music director of Munich, where Nazis demanded his ouster, and his expulsion in 1938 from the Vienna State Opera, where he had assisted Mahler at the start of the century and learned that he could never be the tyrant that his mentor had become.

Conducting Mahler’s scores with angstless classicism, Walter took them as his own, likely at the expense of creative energies that had once had Viennese critics writing about his own compositions in the same breath as those of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. If his focus in the opera house was on Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, he nevertheless did his part for contemporaries, including Schreker, Korngold, Pfitzner and Smyth. His essentially conservative tastes — atonality for him was close to immorality — had freer rein over time; the Sony box contains just one work, Barber’s First Symphony, that was written after Mahler’s death in 1911.

If anything, Walter’s fate at the hands of Nazism encouraged him still more strongly to shine the light of the canon against “the dark powers of hell,” as he called them. He had become the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1929, but was forced to leave because of threats against his concerts early in 1933. He went to Austria, where he was greeted as a hero.

The recordings he made with the Vienna Philharmonic then, with their portamento and their way of easing lyrically into the beat, have a tragic quality, and some of them — a mournful Brahms First; the turbulent Mahler Ninth captured live weeks before the Anschluss in 1938 — seem understandably burdened with the outside world. But rarely has there been such repose as in the slow movement of his “Jupiter” Symphony, such drama as in his excerpts from “Die Walküre,” such delight as in his Beethoven Sixth.

VIENNA FELL, and, after a year or so in Paris, Walter settled in Los Angeles. The prospect of working in the United States had been attractive since at least World War I, and he had made his New York debut in 1923, when The Times admired “a sensitive musician, forceful without violence.” Over time, he became deeply respected, seen as the grand old man of the Germanic canon, though he was never a box office draw.

Having declined the leadership of the New York Philharmonic in 1942, he agreed to it for two seasons in 1947, serving humbly as the musical adviser rather than music director of the orchestra Mahler had once headed. Although he played his part in postwar reconciliation in Europe after 1946 — taping “Das Lied von der Erde,” definitively, with Kathleen Ferrier in Vienna in 1952 — his musical home would remain New York, and his family home, Hollywood.

There is an absorbing collision of traditions in the recordings that Walter made after 1941 with the Philharmonic, an ensemble whose manner could be as mighty as his was mild; it is a testament to his powers that the compound was alchemical rather than destructive.

Reared on the perfectionism of Arturo Toscanini, New York critics habitually accused Walter of a carelessness with details that was fundamental to his style.

“This idea of precision in orchestral playing is very recent,” Walter told an interviewer in 1960. “It was a necessary reaction to a certain lackadaisical way of attacking tasks, and Toscanini in forwarding it did a wonderful service. But now precision has become an ideal, which is wrong.”

The hours of politely insistent rehearsal tapes in Sony’s box go some way to refuting the charge, and if some of the recordings do the opposite, many nevertheless reveal the happy confluence of Walter’s elegance and the Philharmonic’s thrust, albeit in a repertoire narrower than he presented in concert. His most dramatic liberties were reined in; tempo fluctuations became slighter. The warmth remained, as a wartime Beethoven “Eroica” and Fifth demonstrate, but there could also be a firmness in attack, even in Haydn and Mozart; a sensational Brahms cycle from the early 1950s studio is shockingly fiery, and still more so in live accounts from the same time that are preserved on Pristine.

Fiery is not a word one could use to describe Walter’s last recordings, made after a heart attack in March 1957 all but ended his concert career. He had worked with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in New York, a freelance group that was cheaper for his record company, Columbia, to hire than the full Philharmonic; the ensemble’s Californian namesake was formed specifically for him to reprise the standard repertoire in stereo, despite his fears (for a while proven correct) that to do so “condemned our whole former work to obsolescence,” as he wrote to his producer.

The results, which perhaps betray the inexperience of the ensemble too often, represent less a reversion to Walter’s prewar type than a rarefied era of their own; they exude luminosity. He remade his Beethoven and Brahms in majestic fashion, dwelled admiringly on Bruckner, and added to his earlier Mahler, not least with a touching Ninth and a vast First that astounded Leonard Bernstein. His final session, in March 1961, preserved Mozart overtures that bubble with vitality; that of “Der Schauspieldirektor” positively bursts with the joy of a man of the theater, rejoicing, once again, in finding truth through beauty.

“What I want from music is happiness,” Walter had said in an interview with The Times in 1956 that celebrated his 80th birthday and his 63rd year on the podium. “People want happiness — why should we give them unhappiness? When the pursuit of happiness finds its satisfaction in music it is the highest possible satisfaction in man.”