Dr. Alan Walker: A Musicologist’s Generosity

McMaster University Library is pleased to announce that Dr. Alan Walker (Professor Emeritus at McMaster, Director of the Great Romantics Festival, and the celebrated biographer of Franz Liszt) has donated 14 original letters written by Liszt and 16 other letters written by people in Liszt’s circle–Hans von Bülow, Marie Lipsius, Walter Bache, etc. Dr. Walker has been a generous donor to the University Library in various ways. In the 1990s, for a period of 5 years, he provided money to convert archival finding aids in hard copy to electronic form for Web access. Once much of that work was completed, he provided a similar cash donation for the purchase of Liszt letters. In 1997 Dr. Walker also donated his rich archives to the University Library.

In September 2007, La mort de Franz Liszt (the French translation of Dr. Walker’s annotated edition of The Death of Franz Liszt, based on the diary of Lina Schmalhausen, Liszt’s pupil) was featured in the bookstores of Paris. The launch of the Hungarian translation of this work (Liszt Ferenc utolsó napjai) took place on 29 November 2007 at the Liszt Museum in Budapest; the launch at the Liszt Museum included a piano recital by Valerie Tryon and a panel discussion with Dr. Walker, Mária Eckhardt the Director of the Liszt Museum and Fejérvári Boldizsár the book’s translator. Dr. Walker is currently at work on a biography of von Bülow (scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2008-9), the German conductor, virtuoso pianist, and composer, who married Liszt’s daughter Cosima.