Bruno Walter on Columbia: Mozart and Haydn

Photograph of conductor Bruno Walter on the cover of an earlier Sony Classical release of Mozart’s music

A little over a month ago, Sony Classical released its latest major anthology collection: Bruno Walter: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. Walter was about sixteen years younger than Gustav Mahler, but he worked closely with Mahler as both assistant and advocate. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, which meant that political conditions obliged him to pull up roots several times. In 1939 he made the United States his permanent home, living in Beverly Hills and becoming part of the “Weimar on the Pacific” community of Germans forced into exile by the rise of the Nazis.

Toward the end of his life, Mahler had conducting engagements with both the Metropolitan Opera and the ensemble now known as the New York Philharmonic. However, this was when recording technology was still in its infancy; so the closest thing we have to an audio legacy is a set of interviews with Philharmonic musicians about performing under Mahler. By the time that Walter came to the United States, on the other hand, recording classical music had become part of the “business;” and, in some respects, Walter’s role as “Columbia property” served to complement the similar role that Arturo Toscanini was playing for RCA. “By the numbers” the CD count of the new Walter anthology is roughly the same as that of the Toscanini anthology. However, while Toscanini served as a direct connection with Italian opera traditions, Walter’s connection was to Mahler as both composer and conductor.

My plan for this new Walter collection is to begin with the recordings of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn. This will be followed by examining the recorded performances of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. At the other end of the historical chronology, the music of Anton Bruckner will be joined with the Mahler recordings. That leaves a relatively large but diverse collection of those composers following Beethoven and preceding Bruckner.

Many of the recordings account for Walter’s tenure with the New York Philharmonic, which lasted from February of 1947 through 1949. The later recordings are made with the “Columbia Symphony Orchestra.” This is basically a term of art that refers to a professional ensemble organized by Columbia for recording purposes. Recordings took place in both New York (where New York Philharmonic musicians may have participated) and Hollywood (similarly for the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The Columbia Symphony Orchestra provided one of the earliest platforms for making stereo recordings.

The recordings of Mozart and Haydn account for seventeen CDs. To this is added a two-CD album entitled The Birth Of A Performance. The first CD consists primarily of a recording of Mozart’s K. 425 (“Linz”) symphony in C major, followed by a 30-minute account of a rehearsal of the first movement of this symphony. The second CD then presents rehearsals of the remaining three movements of the symphony. The performance is by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra recorded in New York.

Within this entire portion of the collection there are only two Haydn CDs. One has the New York Philharmonic performing Hoboken I/96 (“The Miracle”) in D major and Hoboken I/102 in B-flat major. The other is a Hollywood-based Columbia Symphony Orchestra recording of Hoboken I/88 in G major and Hoboken I/100 (“Military”), also in G major. The Mozart recordings cover a generous number of symphonies, one album of two violin concertos with soloist Zino Francescatti, an impressive cross-section of opera arias, and the K. 626 Requiem setting.

Given the resources engaged and the fact that these sessions took place between the end of World War II and early 1961, one should not expect the performances to be “historically performed.” (It would take about another decade before that phrase would begin to emerge in general use.) As a result, those that like their string sections to be thin and transparent will be seriously disappointed. On the other hand there is a good chance that many of the selections were also performed by Mahler, meaning that the Walter recordings may serve as viable hypotheses for how Mahler concerts would have sounded.

In a different context I seem to recall that Walter was one of two conductors that was interested enough in the theoretical writings of Heinrich Schenker to try to put them into practice. The other conductor was Wilhelm Furtwängler. Where recordings of symphonic music are concerned, Walter definitely brought a lighter touch to both Mozart and Haydn than Furtwängler ever did, and the violin concerto recordings almost float like a feather regardless of how many string players are involved. Sadly, Columbia did not allow Walter to make any complete opera recordings that could be compared with those of Furtwängler.

Those who would accuse me of being more sympathetic to Walter recordings than I am to many of the other ensembles during that portion of the twentieth century may have a point. Nevertheless, the Mozart and Haydn recordings constitute a useful historical document. Should the pendulum start to swing away from its current bias towards historically-informed performances, Sony Classics will be well positioned to reclaim the center of attention!