- Musical director and composer.
- He was the first composer-conductor to be actively involved in introducing children to classical music - on radio in the 1930s. His approach has been criticized in recent years, however; often he would write and sing silly lyrics that he would fit to well-known classical pieces, in an effort to help children remember them.
- Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center is named in honor of his family.
- Damrosch was born in Breslau, Silesia, a son of Helene von Heimburg, a former opera singer, and the conductor Leopold Damrosch, and brother of conductor Frank Damrosch and music teacher Clara Mannes.
- He recorded very few extended works, and those were near the end of his most active time as a conductor; the only symphony he recorded was Brahms's Second followed by Maurice Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye suite with the New York Symphony for Columbia shortly before the orchestra merged with the New York Philharmonic.
- He emigrated with his parents in 1871 to the United States.
- He was the director of the New York Symphony Orchestra and conducted the world premiere performances of various works, including George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Jean Sibelius' Tapiola.
- During his visit to Europe in the summer of 1886, he was invited by the Deutsche Tonkünstler-Verein, of which Franz Liszt was president, to conduct some of his father's compositions at Sondershausen, Thuringia. Carl Goldmark's opera Merlin was produced for the first time in the United States under Damrosch's direction, at the Metropolitan Opera House, 3 January 1887.
- A collection of photographs and other items compiled by his daughter Anita is among the Special Collections of the Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
- He conducted famed solo harpist Vincent Fanelli from 1908 to 1911.
- He exhibited an interest in music at an early age and was instructed by his father in harmony and also studied under Wilhelm Albert Rischbieter and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory.
- Although now remembered almost exclusively as a conductor, before his radio broadcasts Damrosch was equally well known as a composer. He composed operas based on stories such as The Scarlet Letter (1896), Cyrano (1913), and The Man Without a Country (1937). Those operas are seldom performed now.
- One of his principal achievements was the successful performance of Parsifal, perhaps the most difficult of Wagner's operas, for the first time in the United States, in March 1886, by the Oratorio and Symphony societies.
- He was also a pioneer in the performance of music on the radio, and as such became one of the chief popularizers of classical music in the United States.
- At the request of General Pershing he reorganized the bands of the A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Forces) in 1918.
- He also conducted the first performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer himself as soloist.
- In 1884, when his father initiated a run of all-German opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Walter was made an assistant conductor. After his father's death in 1885, he held the same post under Anton Seidl and also became conductor of the Oratorio and Symphony Societies in New York.
- Damrosch was best known in his day as a conductor of the music of Richard Wagner, and In 1894 he founded the Damrosch Opera Company for producing Wagner's works.
- The public school P186X Walter J. Damrosch School in the Bronx is named after him.
- Although Damrosch took an interest in music technologies, he recorded sporadically. His first recording, the prelude to Bizet's Carmen, appeared in 1903 (for Columbia Records, with a contingent of the New York Symphony credited as the "Damrosch Orchestra").
- During the great music festival given by his father in May 1881, he first acted as conductor in drilling several sections of the large chorus, one in New York City, and another in Newark, New Jersey. The latter, consisting chiefly of members of the Harmonic Society, elected him to be their conductor. During this time a series of concerts was given in which such works as Anton Rubinstein's Tower of Babel, Hector Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem were performed. He was then only 19 years of age, but showed marked ability in drilling large masses.
- Damrosch was also instrumental in the founding of Carnegie Hall.
- In April 1905 Damrosch went to France and Belgium looking for musicians for the New York Symphony Orchestra, which he directed from 1885 to 1928. He engaged five musicians: oboist Marcel Tabuteau, flutist Georges Barrère, bassoonist Auguste Mesnard, and clarinetist Leon Leroy from France, and trumpeter Adolphe Dubois from Belgium. Damrosch was fined by the musician's union for not advertising for musicians from New York, but the emigrating musicians were allowed to stay.
- Damrosch was the target of Theodor W. Adorno's criticism. Adorno, without always naming Damrosch, wrote during his rather unhappy tenure at the "Princeton Radio Research Project", funded by Sarnoff's RCA, that the Damrosch approach towards popularizing classical music was infantilizing and authoritarian, and part of a broader, if not centrally planned, system of domination.
- He also recorded the complete ballet music from the opera Henry VIII by Camille Saint-Saëns, three "Airs de Ballet" from Iphigénie en Aulide by Christoph Willibald Gluck in an arrangement by François-Auguste Gevaert, and shorter works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriel Fauré, and Moritz Moszkowski with the National Broadcasting Company's predecessor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the name of the "National Symphony Orchestra" (not to be confused with the later National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C.) for RCA Victor in May and September 1930.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content