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In a recent television interview, Otto Klemperer announced: ‘Bruno Walter is a moralist. I am an immoralist.’ It was, I fear, one of that great conductor’s less perceptive remarks: it would be nearer the truth to say that, of the two, Klemperer is the moralist and Walter an amoralist. It is Klemperer who, in the Beethoven symphonies, makes you aware of the ethical ideas embodied in the music; Walter who caresses you with the sensuous quality of his sound. They are the last two great survivors from a fast-vanishing era in music, upholders of a tradition inherited from Gustav Mahler. Since, however, Mahler himself declared that ‘Tradition ist Schlamperei’, perhaps one ought to consider closely just what is being preserved and upheld. Walter in his eighty-sixth year is now busily engaged in re-recording Mahler symphonies in California, while Klemperer within the last month or two has been performing Mahler in London. Both men knew the composer personally, though Klemperer, who is Walter’s junior by almost ten years, was not as intimately associated with him as Walter. Their present-day interpretations of Mahler appear on the surface to differ widely from each other, but examined in detail these apparent differences lessen. Klemperer’s archetectonic sense leads him to stress the shape, the construction of a symphony, where Walter tends to work in smaller units, to interpret more closely, phrase by phrase. Thus a Klemperer performance of a Mahler symphony appears somewhat objective beside the more detailed subjective quality of Walter. One might compare Klemperer with Gielgud, who shapes in long phrases, and Walter with Olivier, who illuminates single words. Again, Klemperer is the more strongly masculine personality. I do not mean by this that he imposes himself upon the music, but that he responds directly to it. Walter is possessed of more gentleness, almost swooning over a particularly beautiful passage. Their temperaments differ, but both place themselves at the service of the music, and both respond sensitively to variations in style. Neither has a personal ‘style’ that he wishes to display through the music. It is here, I feel, that both unite to differ from many of the younger virtuoso conductors, here that we may begin to define the tradition. I once heard the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra play Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony under Walter. I don’t remember noticing what a brilliant orchestra it was, but I do still recall very clearly the warm, sunny Austrian countryside feel of it all. Some weeks ago I heard the same orchestra in the same symphony, this time conducted by Karajan. Impossible not to be wildly excited by the sheer virtuosity of the orchestral players, by the torrent of sound that Karajan drew from them, and by the nervous intensity of the performance. But it nowhere sounded like Beethoven’s Pastoral. The easy Gemütlichkeit was gone. And it isn’t a question of nationality. The efficient German maestro, Karajan, comes from Mozart’s Salzburg. Bruno Walter, epitomizing the Viennese tradition, was born in Berlin.

     Walter’s autobiography, published in English translation by Hamish Hamilton in 1947 as Theme and Variations, showed him to be a man of wide and liberal culture. This new volume (1) is in no sense a continuation of the earlier book, it is a series of essays containing reflections on the art of music and the craft of music-making. The two long chapters on various aspects of conducting are not only invaluable to the student conductor, but are certain also to prove immensely fascinating to the general music lover. Of his own earlier performances, Walter says:

     What happened in my own case was that after my early years of exuberance when I had the desire to ‘say everything’, I directed my endeavours increasingly towards moderation in the expression of emotion. This went hand in hand with a similar tendency in my personal conduct. I had, in the course of time, acquired enough insight and experience to know that every excess is the enemy of art, not to say a frequent sign of dillettantism . . . There grew up in me an ideal of understatement in matters artistic and mundane, which, to be sure, had to draw on a fund of sincere emotion before it could gain validity.

     These are hardly the terms one would have used to describe Walter’s performances of Wagner, Mozart, Strauss, Mahler and Beethoven in Vienna in the thirties, if his gramophone records with the Vienna Philharmonic made in those days are anything to go by. It is only within the last ten years that one notices a definite mellowing process. The youthful Walter must have been a much more wildly romantic figure than one imagines.

     In the penultimate essay, after looking back on his youthful days in Vienna when he was moved to intense admiration by the new movement in music, and welcomed performances of the young Schönberg, Walter confesses his inability to respond as enthusiastically to the new music of today:

     If my readiness to perform contemporary works steadily decreased in the course of the years, my conduct was not determined by indolent adhesion to the familiar or truculent rejection of the unfamiliar; for I should have desired nothing more than to be able to fall into step with the spirit of the age . . . but . . . it would have been wrong for me to make myself the advocate of tendencies which, I am convinced, are leading to (music’s) corruption: I am referring here mainly to atonality and dodecaphony which, I fear, are threatening to cause the decay of music.

     Dr Walter’s attitude is, of course, understandable. One can’t keep one’s mind open and receptive all one’s life; there comes a time to close the shop and start making up the accounts. And I, half a century his junior, fear in my more depressive moments that music is fast disappearing up the arse of its own technique. Yet patience is all. The star is not yet to be seen in the east, but it will come. In any case, a period that can boast of having three great living composers is surely at least holding its own with the past. Walter has remained faithful to the indisputable genius who was his mentor and friend sixty years ago: Gustav Mahler. He has kept the music of Mahler alive through difficult years, and lived to see it firmly established. And that, surely, is more than enough.