Yes

"This music says 'Yes' to all who ask if courage and sacrifice and endurance and fortitude can win against a cruel tyranny. . . . Somehow this music tells us that happiness is deeper than unhappiness. Many of you know of the tragedy of my life, yet I can say that. There is joy to be had, even through grief. In the depths of my heart I know it, and I know that ignorance of this may lead ultimately to defeat and suicide."

So spoke Bruno Walter one day last week to a newspaper interviewer. Few hours later, standing at the desk of the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in his 64 years, he conducted one of the finest performances of Beethoven's Fidelio ever given in the Western Hemisphere. Kirsten Flagstad sang.

Fidelio tells of triumph over adversity. Its heroine, disguised as a man, goes into a prison, defies its storm-trooperish tyrant, saves her husband from death.

Bruno Walter's recent years tell a grimmer tale. Even before the Nazis came into power, he was eased out of the Munich opera by anti-Jewish intrigue. In 1933 he was hounded out of Germany to Vienna, then out of Austria to France, then out of France to the U. S. Before Bruno Walter left Europe his daughter Marguerite was killed by her husband, an embittered or crazed "Aryan" who then killed himself.

Last week there came to grey-haired, dark-eyed Bruno Walter an experience that comes rarely even to the kings of music. Often he had been applauded for his playing of symphonies, often had shared applause in opera houses. Now, in the darkened Metropolitan, before the dimly-glowing new gold curtain, he conducted an overture--a long one, which by custom comes during the last intermission of Fidelio. The overture, with its trumpet calls of man's deliverance, reached its final chord. And the Metropolitan rocked with cheers and bravos, wave upon wave of thunderous applause: a "Yes" to Bruno Walter.

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