Conductor's Comeback

A grave, hulking German came on to the stage at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, last week, made a solemn bow and, turning around, flipped his coat tails in the face of a smart Philharmonic-Symphony audience. The gesture was not one of disrespect. German Bruno Walter was just preparing to sit down before a keyboard, to play the harpsichord part of Handel's G Minor Concerto for Strings, also to conduct the orchestra. Sometimes his right hand, sometimes his left, flew from the keyboard long enough to let his will be emphatically known to violinists, 'cellists, viola and contrabass players. But he conducted for the most part by facial expressions slightly stern.

Walter's double-barreled feat was not new. Conductors sat at harpsichords before they ever thought of standing up in front of their orchestras, waving the first stout batons. In just such a fashion big, bewigged Handel made music for the Londoners of King George I. In the U. S. Karl Muck and Willem Mengelberg have conducted from keyboards.

Last week's performance attracted unusual attention because it was Walter's Philharmonic debut, his first attempt to please a public still hypnotized by the beauty of the farewell concerts Arturo Toscanini gave, the pain in his right arm apparent to everyone who watched him.

Bruno Walter was no stranger to the audience which cordially applauded his entrance last week and cheered him when the concert ended. In 1923 Walter came to Manhattan to conduct the New York Symphony and it became known then that his real name was Schlesinger, that he had taken the more euphonious name Walter after the hero of Die Meistersinger, an opera he conducted brilliantly when he was very young. After the long administration of Walter Damrosch, the New York Symphony was in a hopelessly lethargic state. Conscious of failure, he returned to Europe to increase his honor.

Because Walter was the man chosen as most worthy to relieve Toscanini, no audience this season has waited with more curiosity to read the criticisms in next day's papers. How would the big German please Critic Lawrence Gilman, sitting languid and aloof on the left side of the house? How would spare, dry William James Henderson react to him? Or Olin Downes, sitting a few rows behind Henderson? Gilman went to the Herald Tribune office, wrote poetically of the program's "deathless" beauty, praised Walter as "a conductor of secure and confident musicianship, of rare artistic integrity, of refreshing modesty and simplicity of attitude." Henderson let his Sun readers believe that things had been just soso. In the Times Olin Downes wrote heavy, rhapsodic sentences about a great triumph: "For once the music of Handel was properly enunciated. It had the lordly sweep, the songfulness, the strength which inhere in Handel's glorious art, and it was clothed in sumptuous tone that rang and chanted through the auditorium."

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