Benno Walter
Benno Walter was a German violinist and music teacher. He was also identified as a composer, conductor, and concertmaster. He was born in Munich on June 17, 1847, and died in Constance on October 23, 1901.
The son of an amateur musician, Walter began performing as a child and made his first tour of Bavaria at age eight. He graduated from the Munich Conservatory, though contemporaries considered his musicianship largely self-taught. He joined the orchestra of the Munich Court Theatre as a trainee in 1862, became a full-time player in 1864, and was appointed concertmaster in 1870. On that occasion, King Ludwig gave him a Stradivarius violin.
In 1875, Walter took over leadership of the string quartet formerly headed by his late older brother Joseph. He performed with the quartet until his death and also played in a piano trio with pianist Hans Bussmeyer and cellist Karl Ebner. A friend of Richard Wagner, Walter played violin solos at the first performance of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1882.
Walter began teaching his eight-year-old cousin once removed, Richard Strauss, in 1872. Strauss dedicated his Violin Concerto in D minor to Walter; the two first performed it in a version for violin and piano in 1882. Walter was the soloist at its orchestral premiere in Cologne on March 4, 1890, conducted by Franz Wüllner. Walter’s quartet gave the first performance of Strauss’s String Quartet, Op. 2, in 1881. Adolf Sandberger also dedicated his Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 10 (1892), to Walter.