Aformidable conductor from a respected European musical family, Walter Damrosch helped to popularise symphonic music in America by promoting it unabashedly on the radio.
Walter Johannes Damrosch was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on January 30, 1862. His father, Leopold, was a distinguished conductor and some of Europe’s greatest musicians—Hans von Bulow, Liszt, Clara Schumann, and Richard Wagner were frequent guests in the Damrosch home. By the age of ten, he had begun his musical studies, which continued when his family moved to New York in 1871.
Within two years of arriving in the U.S., Leopold had founded the Oratorio Society of New York, and, in 1877, the New York Symphony Society. He also diligently prepared the way for his son to succeed him as conductor by assigning him assistant conduct- ing duties with the Oratorio Society and allowing him to sit with the second violins in the New York Symphony, so that he would learn how to follow a conductor. When Leopold died in 1885, Walter Damrosch assumed the directorship of both the Oratorio and Symphony Societies. He was to retain the former post until 1898 and the latter until 1903, when the Symphony Society was reorganised. He remained its principal conductor until 1927.
In 1887, Damrosch and Louise Whitfield, a member of the Oratorio Society and the wife of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, persuaded Carnegie to donate $2 million toward the construction of a music hall in New York City. The opening concert at the hall, later renamed Carnegie Hall, was conducted on May 5, 1891, by Damrosch and his eminent guest, Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky.
Damrosch was responsible for the first American premieres of several major orchestral works, including Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6. He also commissioned several new pieces for his orchestra, such as George GERSHWIN’S Piano Concerto in F (1925). His expertise, however, was not limited to orchestral works only. Damrosch was also an ardent supporter of German opera, especially Wagner. From 1885 to 1891, he was the assistant conductor of German opera at the Metropolitan Opera, and in 1894 he established the Damrosch Opera Company, which performed in several major cities across America.
During World War I, Damrosch organised a bandmaster training school for the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Chaumont, France, and in 1921 helped found the Fontainebleau School of Music to promote cultural and artistic exchange between France and the U.S.
In 1926, a New York Symphony Society concert conducted by Damrosch was broadcast nationwide by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), the first such broadcast of a complete orchestra concert. Through his pioneering broadcasts, Damrosch paved the way for two of the 20th century’s most popular conductors: Arturo TOSCANINI and Leonard BERNSTEIN. Like them, Damrosch believed in the importance of bringing music to the people. Those who listened to his weekly “music appreciation hour,” on NBC from 1928 to 1942, found the melodies of the great symphonies etched in their memories, due in part to the lighthearted “lyrics” Damrosch himself composed: “This is the symphony/that Schubert wrote but never finished,” was sung to the famous melody of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.
He was frequently honoured for his efforts to spread the “gospel” of music, as he called it. Among his accolades were honorary degrees from many American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, and New York, and a gold medal from the U.S. National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1938. Damrosch died in New York on December 22, 1950, leaving behind a generation of Americans who were musically enlightened and entertained.
Douglas Dunston
SEE ALSO:
OPERA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC;RADIO.
FURTHER READING
Damrosch, Walter. My Musical Life (Temecula, CA: Reprint Services, 1991);
Finletter, Damrosch G. From the Top of the Stairs (Temecula, CA: Reprint Services, 1993).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
World Famous Conductors from Silesia.