Walter Damrosch

Walter Johannes Damrosch (January 30, 1862 – December 22, 1950) was a conductor, composer, and book writer for the stage, born in Breslau, Silesia, to conductor Leopold Damrosch and Helene von Heimburg, a former opera singer. His brother Frank Damrosch became a conductor, and his sister Clara Mannes a music teacher. His parents were Lutheran, though his paternal grandfather was Jewish. The family emigrated to the United States in 1871.

Damrosch received his earliest musical instruction from his father in harmony, and later studied under Wilhelm Albert Rischbieter and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory. His conducting career began in earnest during a large music festival organized by his father in May 1881, when, at nineteen years old, he drilled choral sections in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. The Newark chorus, drawn largely from members of the Harmonic Society, elected him as their conductor. Under his direction during that period, the ensemble performed works including Anton Rubinstein's Tower of Babel, Hector Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem.

When his father launched a season of all-German opera at the Metropolitan Opera in 1884, Damrosch served as assistant conductor. Following Leopold Damrosch's death in 1885, he continued in that role under Anton Seidl and simultaneously took on the conductorship of the Oratorio and Symphony Societies in New York. That same year he directed the first American performance of Wagner's Parsifal, presented by those two societies in March 1886. During a European trip the following summer, he was invited by the Deutsche Tonkünstler-Verein, then presided over by Franz Liszt, to conduct compositions by his father at Sondershausen, Thuringia. On January 3, 1887, he led the American premiere of Carl Goldmark's opera Merlin at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Damrosch directed the New York Symphony Orchestra from 1885 to 1928. In June 1891 he selected violinist and composer Julius Conus, whom he encountered while Conus was touring in Berlin, as first violinist for the orchestra. In April 1905 he traveled to France and Belgium to recruit musicians, engaging oboist Marcel Tabuteau, flutist Georges Barrère, bassoonist Auguste Mesnard, clarinetist Leon Leroy, and Belgian trumpeter Adolphe Dubois. The musicians' union fined him for failing to advertise locally, though the recruited musicians were permitted to remain. He also conducted solo harpist Vincent Fanelli with the orchestra from 1908 to 1911. Shortly before the New York Symphony merged with the New York Philharmonic, Damrosch recorded Brahms's Second Symphony and Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye suite with the ensemble for Columbia Records. His first recording, the prelude to Bizet's Carmen, had appeared as early as 1903 on Columbia, credited to the "Damrosch Orchestra." He additionally recorded the complete ballet music from Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII, three "Airs de Ballet" from Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide in an arrangement by François-Auguste Gevaert, and shorter works by Bach, Fauré, and Moszkowski for RCA Victor in 1930, under the name "National Symphony Orchestra."

In 1894 Damrosch founded the Damrosch Opera Company specifically to produce the works of Richard Wagner, with whom he was most closely identified as a conductor during his era. He also conducted world premiere performances of Aaron Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, Gershwin's An American in Paris, and Jean Sibelius's Tapiola. He led the first performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer as soloist. Damrosch was additionally instrumental in the founding of Carnegie Hall. At the request of General Pershing, he reorganized the bands of the American Expeditionary Force in 1918.

On May 17, 1890, Damrosch married Margaret Blaine, daughter of politician and presidential candidate James G. Blaine. The couple had four daughters: Alice, Margaret (known as Gretchen), Leopoldine, and Anita.

As a composer, Damrosch produced operas including The Scarlet Letter (1896), Cyrano (1913), and The Man Without a Country (1937), as well as The Opera Cloak (1943). He wrote incidental music for productions of Euripides's Medea and Iphigenia in Tauris and Sophocles's Electra, and composed songs including Danny Deever. His Broadway work includes The Dove of Peace (1912), a comic opera for which he served as both composer and co-librettist alongside Wallace Irwin, published by G. Schirmer. He also published an autobiography, My Musical Life, in 1922. Among his students was Esther Zweig.

Damrosch became the National Broadcasting Company's music director under David Sarnoff and from 1928 to 1942 hosted the network's Music Appreciation Hour, a radio lecture series on classical music directed at student audiences and broadcast during school hours, with textbooks and worksheets provided to teachers by the network. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1939. Damrosch died in New York City on December 22, 1950, and is interred at Ledgelawn Cemetery in Bar Harbor, Maine. Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center bears the family name, and the public school P186X Walter J. Damrosch School in the Bronx is named in his honor. A collection of photographs and other materials assembled by his daughter Anita is held in the Special Collections of the Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.