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.
The Story
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.
