Professor emeritus Alan Walker receives rare honorary doctorate from Liszt Academy

Professor emeritus Alan Walker has received a rare honorary doctorate from Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, one of the world’s top music schools.

Walker, a musicologist who specializes in the music of the Romantic composers, is only the seventh honorary doctor in the Academy’s 150-year history – a distinction he shares with world-renowned musicians including conductor John Eliot Gardiner and violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Best known for his influential, award-winning three-volume biography of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, which took 25 years to complete, Walker worked at McMaster from 1971 to 1995, bookending his academic career by chairing the department of music from 1971 to 1980, and from 1989 to 1995.

Along with his biography of Liszt, Walker has also written books on composers Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin, as well as conductor Hans von Bülow.

Hand in hand with his scholarly work, Walker was also active in promoting the performance of Romantic music, organizing Hamilton’s annual Great Romantics Festival from 1994 until 2010.

Eventually, his work led to part of MacNab Street South being commemoratively named “Franz Liszt Avenue” in 1995 – believed to be the only city street in North America named for the Hungary’s most famous composer.

His personal archives – 45 boxes and counting – now reside in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections in Mills Library, and include more than 20 original letters written by Liszt himself.

We chatted with him about this latest honour, and about his long career devoted to the works of Romantic composers.

How did you feel when you opened the letter informing you that you’d been named an honorary doctor of the Liszt Academy of Music – only the seventh person to receive such an honour in 150 years? 

Totally surprised and immensely privileged. My biographies of Liszt, Chopin, and Hans von Bülow have all been translated into Hungarian, of course, and I have lectured in Budapest many times. So my work is not unknown there.  But I had no idea that it would lead to such an exclusive honour and I am still somewhat stunned by it all.

You’ve written substantially on Liszt, Schumann and Chopin — what is it that appeals to you about the Romantic composers?

I think of Wordsworth’s line, “The child is father of the man.”  When I was 10 or 12 years old, I used to spend my pocket money on those short biographies published by Novello and Co in Britain – brief paperbacks of 20 pages or so – and I recall being especially intrigued by the life of Liszt. So the foundations were laid there.

Years later, as a music producer at the BBC in London, I put together a comprehensive series of piano recitals played by leading pianists, only to discover that when I came to write the notes for the BBC’s announcers to read at the microphone, there were no books that mentioned some of the pieces that were about to be broadcast for the first time.

That’s when I realized that a comprehensive life of Liszt was absolutely necessary, and I would probably have to write it.

What is it about Liszt in particular that fueled your many accomplishments around his work? 

The feeling that someone had to right a wrong. I could not think of another major composer who had endured such neglect, both from biographers and performers. When I was growing up in England performances of Liszt’s music were quite rare, and the literature about him was almost non-existent. When he was mentioned at all, he was usually described as a kind of Elvis Presley of the 19^th century, a show-biz personality, but not someone to be taken seriously.

Liszt also tended to attract the wrong players, and still does. He was, as you know, the world’s greatest pianist. But because his compositions are filled with technical challenges that he was the first to identify and then overcome, they are an open invitation to pianists with more brawn than brain, pianists whose only ambition is to drive the piano through the floorboards and walk away claiming victory.

What was working in Hungary like while the country was still under Soviet control?

I never had a negative reaction in Hungary to the fact that I was a “Westerner” writing a book about one of its leading composers. During my first trip to Budapest, in the mid-1970s, I recall meeting a group of leading Hungarian scholars and they were entirely supportive of my work.

Because of the difficult political situation in Hungary at that time, they were not allowed to travel to the West, which impeded their work; but all of them generously shared their research with me, a gift that proved vital for my biography and which I have always acknowledged.

In my youthful arrogance I responded to one of their questions by telling them that I expected the 3-volume biography to take me about five years to write.  As I was leaving the meeting, one of them came up to me and observed: “Remember, it takes a life to study a life.”  I was duly admonished.

My biography took 25 years to write.  While that’s not a lifetime, it is still a very long time indeed.