Walter Küssner: If I weren’t a musician …

 

In this section we introduce members of the Berliner Philharmoniker and their extramusical passions. This time it is the turn of the viola player Walter Küssner, who likes putting old piles of papers in order.

Grownups like to ask children what they want to be when they grow up. The young Jean-Paul Sartre's answer was rumoured to have been: “a murderer”. In his book Les Mots (Words), he wrote that he had the choice between becoming a writer or becoming a criminal, and that in the end he decided on writing. Walter Küssner could not be more different. He expressed his choice of profession both clearly and unequivocally: he would become a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker! True, he was still a young lad, and had no idea what a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker actually does. But somehow he knew that these musicians were the finest in the world – and he wanted to be one of them.

There were many steps on the path towards Walter Küssner's finally becoming a member of Berliner Philharmoniker's viola section in early 1989. He actually wanted to play the cello, but this was his brother’s instrument. Also, the school he attended ran a scheme that allowed him to borrow a viola, and so this was the instrument that he chose. At the same time, he was passionate about something that many children prefer to avoid: mathematics.

Walter Küssner won prizes in mathematics at a national level, including the Prize for Mathematics awarded by the region of the Rhineland-Palatinate, allowing him to complete his schooling two years early. At that date his main interest was number theory, and he began a course in mathematics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, only to break off his studies after a short time. His love of music was greater, and from then on, it would shape his life. He studied initially with Jürgen Kussmaul in Düsseldorf before taking private lessons with Kim Kashkashian in New York.

He paid for his lessons by playing lightning chess for money on Broadway. Being a good player, he soon earned the money he needed. After six months in New York, he moved to St. Louis, where he polished his technique with Michael Tree, a founding member of the famous Guarneri String Quartet. On his return to Germany, Walter Küssner joined the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich in 1987, moving to the banks of the Spree two years later.

During his tenure with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Walter Küssner has developed another passion, this time for autograph hunting. It was two older colleagues who inspired him to start collecting manuscripts. He soon began collecting letters, photographs and scores, in the process delving deep in the orchestra’s history. When the orchestra’s violinist Bernd Gellermann left to become the intendant of the Munich Philharmonic, Walter Küssner assumed responsibility for running the orchestra’s archives.

“The archives originally consisted of no more than a few metres of shelving that had been placed at our disposal by the State Institute for Music Research,” he recalls. Once he was in charge of the archives, he made contact with older colleagues who were already living in retirement. He interviewed them as eyewitnesses, and was able to save countless documents for posterity. “I’ve brought entire estates here by car,” Walter Küssner recalls with a laugh. Over the years the archives have continued to grow and flourish.

Walter Küssner is particularly interested in exploring the orchestra’s history during the years of National Socialism. He and the historian Misha Aster spent eleven years working on this project, the results of which were published in the spring of 2007 in a well-received study, Das Reichsorchester, which marked the 125th anniversary of the orchestra’s foundation. “I can be really proud of the fact that this attempt to come to terms with the orchestra’s past came from within its own ranks and was felt to reflect a genuine need, without any pressure from outside,” Walter Küssner says.

Does mathematics still play a role in his life? Over recent decades there have been tremendous advances in mathematics, Walter Küssner explains, with the result that his interest in the subject has waned.  “But two of my children have studied maths,” he adds, “and that’s enough.”