Conductor
15 September 1876, Berlin - 17 February 1962, Beverly Hills, California, USA
Without Bruno Walter, the Salzburg Festival of the 1920s and 1930s would have had no emotional centre. He was Mozart’s greatest advocate at Salzburg for two decades, Mahler’s most faithful steward after the composer’s death, and one of the conductors the Nazis worked hardest to erase from European concert life.
Walter arrived at the Salzburg Festival in its earliest seasons in the 1920s and became one of its three defining conductors alongside Arturo Toscanini and Furtwangler. His connection to Salzburg ran through Mozart, and he described the composer as “the Shakespeare of the opera,” a phrase that still resonates in festival programme notes. He conducted Don Giovanni in 1935 on multiple dates, shared the music directorship with Toscanini from 1935 to 1937, and built his Salzburg identity around the conviction that Mozart’s operas were the most complete expression of human drama ever written.
His deeper musical identity was inseparable from Gustav Mahler. Walter had worked as Mahler’s assistant at the Vienna Court Opera from 1901, and after Mahler’s death he gave the world premiere of Das Lied von der Erde in Munich in 1911, and the Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1912, both at Alma Mahler’s request. He spent the rest of his career carrying that legacy, and his recordings of Mahler’s symphonies, made late in life with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in Hollywood, remain reference recordings.
In 1933 the Nazi propaganda ministry warned the Berlin Philharmonic of “unpleasant demonstrations” before a planned Walter concert. The concert was cancelled. He was banned from German venues and later from Austria. After the 1938 Anschluss he fled, eventually reaching the United States. He returned to Salzburg after the war, leading the Vienna Philharmonic in concert series from 1949 through 1956, conducting the Mozart Requiem in his final 1956 appearance. A street in Salzburg, Walterstrasse, was named in his honour in 1963.
On the map
The 2 places on this page, where they actually stand.
Locations
Built 1693
The Felsenreitschule is a theater carved directly into the Moenchsberg cliff face, which means the backstage wall is living rock and three tiers of 17th-century arcades form the auditorium. It was originally built in 1693 as a summer riding school for the Archbishop's horses.
Completed 1960
The Grosses Festspielhaus (Large Festival Hall) opened in 1960 as a major expansion of Salzburg's Festspielhaus complex, carved in large part from the Moenchsberg cliff face to achieve its 2,179-seat auditorium. Architect Clemens Holzmeister cut the main stage directly into the rock, creating one of the widest stages in the world at 100 meters.
Organizations
One of the world's most prestigious performing arts festivals. Held annually late July to end of August. Founded 1920 by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, Franz Schalk, and Alfred Roller. Inaugural event: Jedermann on Domplatz. Herbert von Karajan defined the postwar era. Opera, drama, concerts.
