Homecoming

It was the biggest musical event in Vienna since the war: after a ten-year exile, Vienna's favorite living musician had come home.

On the war-battered streets, music lovers stopped to wring the hand of 71-year-old Conductor Bruno Walter. He had come back to preside over a ceremony as symbolic as his own return: the restoration to the Vienna State Opera of a Rodin bust of another Viennese hero--Gustav Mahler.

When he passed by the once handsome old opera house, Walter turned his head away from the building's gaping wounds and boarded-up windows. "It was too awful," he said, "I could not enter."

Last year at Edinburgh Walter had led his old orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic (TIME, Sept. 22). Last week, after his first rehearsal, he said: "This is the Vienna that can't be destroyed--the sound of this orchestra. It plays now as in 1897 when I first heard it; it has lost none of its character or quality."

When he walked onstage in the great hall of the Society of the Friends of Music, a sell-out audience was waiting to see if Conductor Walter had lost any of his old magic. After a magnificent performance of Bruckner's Te Deum, they were still wary. But after Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, they could hold back no longer. Almost before Bruno could bring his baton down, a young girl had rushed to the podium with a handful of red roses. For fifteen minutes, holding his posies before him, he bowed to the bravos and applause.

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