Theme and Variations

HIS theme is the development of an artist; his variations are the impact upon an artist by life. Suppose a sculptor, assistant to Phidias, who had worked on the frieze of the Parthenon and known the thirty men credited with having made the greatness of the Periclean Age, had left us an intimate, modest, but thoroughly competent account of Athens from 480 B.C. to 430 B.C. — personalities, manners, theories of craftsmanship, and general ideas; then for Hellas substitute the musical culture of Central Europe at its zenith, not of creation, for that had begun to wane, but certainly of recreation, of performance, and you have some notion of the scale of Bruno Walter’s autobiography.

He uses the word culture more freely and less self-consciously than we do, meaning by it not the arts and sciences alone but the entire range of civilization. His personal experiences, brilliantly though they are told, are constantly generalized into theory and practice of his art and conduct of life, and so pregnantly that his pages invite study and reflection. They are required reading for every serious student of music, and far from painful to take.

They are also much more. Again, while music is his theme, European civilization in its golden Indian summer, 1895 to 1914, then in its first throes, 1914 to 1918, next in its rally of the two decades between wars, and the final catastrophe are his variations. Like so many other “culture personalities” he was late in grasping the urgency of the social question. He admits the fault and sees it as characteristic of the social system in which he lived.

Music must have taught him to write, for such writing is extraordinary. Vivid and accomplished, his pages are strewn with memorable portraits of distinguished people all over Europe and America, pictures of domestic interiors, witty anecdotes, epigrams, and arresting reflections which cause a reader to linger and savor and resolve to restudy them at more leisure.

Much of his major thinking lies beneath the surface. He does not say it, he lets it be inferred. Is he invariably aware of the implications of what he says? Music is religion, perhaps the religion, and with the other arts, the only religion of sufficient universality to be practicable for modern man. The custody of the musical art has suddenly passed from Europe to America in a time of crisis. Shall we be able to maintain and advance it? In Central Europe it took centuries to prepare the floruit of which Bruno Walter writes, Et quorum pars magna fui. A man of the world in the best sense, he is also a man of heart as well as of talent and intellect. Troops of old friends, by us seen or unseen, heard or unheard, of the operatic and concert stages, of the theater, studio, and salon are here introduced, treated with unfailing tact, respect, kindness, admiration, forbearance, tolerance, or heartfelt affection. The emanation of Bruno Walter’s personality from the whole book is one of nobility.

LUCIEN PRICE