Bruno Walter Deplores Tardy Notice Of Mozart as Dramatic Music Genius

"Mozart is the greatest musical dramatic genius before us today," Bruno Walter, musical advisor of the New York Philharmonic Society, yesterday told over 300 people gathered in the Kirkland House Common Room by the invitation of the Food Relief Committee.

Speaking from notes he took during the time he conducted "The Magic Flute" at the Metropolitan Opera House, the short, stocky, Berlin-born conductor declared that only recently has the genius of Mozart been fully appreciated.

Poor acting, bad staging, and a generally accepted opinion that the operatic form was not the most advantageous for Mozart's purposes kept his dramatic works relatively unpopular even in 1899, when Walter remembers having to play them to half-empty houses on the continent.

Mozart Needs No Improvement

"Mozart completed to the highest perfection what he started," he said, criticizing people who allege that Beethoven carried on and perfected Mozart's geura. "His seeming simplicity could in no way be advanced any farther," he continued.

"Big dramatic truthfulness is an unique manisfestation of human genius," Walter stated, but like Goethe's, it is not a revolutionary but a mere "harmonious type of human genius that in every new work makes a conquest in a new sphere, in a new phase of superhuman creative form."