A seaman from Skye and a composer who fled the Nazis

Walter’s people came from Suisnish and Boreraig which were cleared in 1853. Most of them ended up in Australia and New Zealand, but Walter’s great-grandfather got a job on another estate and so, luckily, his family held on to their roots.

Walter was a native Gaelic speaker, a tradition bearer and a great character whose pastimes included illicit distilling. The subject of filtering the distillate came up and he assured me charcoal in an old sock worked very well. I never had any of his own distillation but I do remember first-footing him in his caravan and sharing a dram with him.

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Walter was seated at one end of the caravan, I in the only other chair at the far end. He had asked me to pour the drams and after he’d taken a good slug of his put it tenderly on the floor. We chatted away and I was downing my whisky when he surprised me by asking me to pick up his glass for him, even though it was right beside him.

I did as asked. But when I got back the full length of the caravan to my own chair, I couldn’t leave it at that. “Tell me now, why did you ask me to pick up your dram for you?”

“Well, John, it wass like this. I wass driving to Inverness one night and very tired and I fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up to see a rock face coming at me at 60 miles an hour, so I took a death-grip of the wheel.”

There were no such things as collapsible steering columns in those days and Walter saved his own life by halting the steering wheel half an inch from his chest – but at the expense of the ball joints of his shoulders which, given he had locked his arms with all a seaman’s strength, were driven straight out of their sockets. “So you see it iss sometimes a little tricky for me to lift my glass.”

According to my old fishing companion John-Angus MacKinnon, who works at the Torrin quarry, Walter was quite the driver but only passed his test as the examiner did the reversing for him. Changed days.

Walter’s injury reminds me of the conductor Rudolph Schwartz. One might wonder what possible connection he could have with Walter. It is tangential and displays a very different order of fortitude.

Rudi was conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in a live broadcast of Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and was about to set the orchestra going with the usual down beat. But no down beat came and the orchestra and the listening public were left waiting in awkward silence until, realising something was not right, the clarinettist, Duncan Nairn, raised his instrument and started playing.

It was he who opened the work simultaneously with the strings who, leaders included, had sat paralysed at their music stands. Once they got going, all proceeded as normal – but at the interval, Duncan was summoned to the conductor’s room.

He knocked on the door with some trepidation. Had he done wrong, taking the place of the orchestral leader and not waiting for a down beat? But as soon as he entered, Rudi came towards him, his hands held out: “Oh Mister Nairn. Thank you! Thank you for starting! My arms would not obey me.”

Rudi was a survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen and had been hung up by his arms tied behind his back, thus breaking both shoulders, which were never the same again.

I ONLY met him once but I call him Rudi because that is what Hans Gál called him and we were both pupils of Hans. It was a pleasure to see Schwarz and his old teacher together.

The sympathy between the two men was so apparent in personalities and musical understanding that it made performances of Gál’s own subtle and kindly music all the more affecting.

Holding off a rock face and holding up an orchestra are not the same thing, but there is another tangential connection and that is that Hans and Rudi came from displaced people and so did most of Walter’s people.

As Robert Louis Stevenson has it: “There is no foreign land. It is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.”

Walter used to direct Anzac soldiers along the hard track to Suisnish to find whence their people had come a century before, perhaps in search of that “flash of recollection”.

The other story I know about Walter (there are many more, no doubt) was about warfare with rock. Close by the caravan were the Torrin quarries where, every now and again, the red flags would go up and they would blast away a bit more of the face, for which they had to bring in a blaster.

It was a recurring expense, and Walter persuaded the manager that he could do things much cheaper with one really big blast – this one at the old limestone quarry beneath Beinn Dearg Mòr – to keep them going for a year.

He won the quarry master’s confidence and set his charges. Many charges. Large ones. The great day came and the blast was a huge success – so successful that substantial lumps of rock shot across the sea loch and narrowly avoided the houses at Faolin.

That was the last of Walter’s employment at the quarry. But anyone can get these things wrong. Long ago in Solaio, beside the marble quarries of Carrara and above Seravezza, I was told of a quarryman who had a lifetime’s experience of blasting – which they do on a small scale so as not to fracture marble intended for carving.

One day after all those years something went wrong and a piece of marble passed through a kitchen window with the family at the table, narrowly missed them all and exited by the opposite window.

The poor man was so shocked he retired immediately. At what personal financial cost I do not know. He was held in high respect for his integrity both before and after, but he never really recovered. From such things, one doesn’t.

Hans Gál, by comparison with Rudi, got off lightly. He quit Austria in time and was interned in a prison camp on the Isle of Man, still managing to make music with any musician available.

Hans was an outstanding composer, a great teacher and a good friend. He was also a wise man. I picture him in his large study, the principal room in the family home in Blacket Place in Edinburgh, the furnishing and decor all in tune with 1930s Vienna; the long wall with shelves to the high ceiling, full of music books and scores.

On the top shelf was the complete Urtext edition of the works of Johannes Brahms – massive volumes proclaiming their owner’s love of his great predecessor.

Hans was teaching me composition and knew I, too, was a devotee of Brahms, embedded in my soul by my mother’s piano playing – gentle, mysterious, passionate; full of love.

So it was particularly instructive when Hans showed me where Brahms had gone wrong and also where he had attempted to correct his mistakes.

There was the main theme of the First Piano Concerto. Great on the piano but very difficult to orchestrate as it lies in the middle range where the strings and woodwind are too weak and where the brass would be too obtrusive.

Attempts have been made to re-orchestrate it, but they don’t work. The fact is, Brahms made a mistake. It shouldn’t be in D Minor but to change that would be like asking somebody to repaint the house, outside and in, having just completed it.

Another time, Hans wanted to show me how Brahms had in 1889 revised his early 1854 Bflat major Piano Trio. Hans leant his library ladder up against the shelves and, by then in his 80s, ascended and stretched up to the very top shelf to bring down one of the weighty Urtext volumes.

I watched with dismay as his centre of gravity became increasingly perilous as the huge volume was eased out of the shelf. Offers of help were rejected. Hans tottered down, placed the vast volume lovingly on the enormous table, opened the cover and exclaimed “Ach! It is ze wrong volume!”

I offered to get the right one but his answer was “No! I play it by memory.” And he did. He went to the piano and, with hands that had been twice operated on to prevent the fingers from curling into the palms, proceeded to play the contrasting versions.

That’s how to teach. You learn from other people’s mistakes. And, more importantly, you learnt that others, even the very greatest, have to learn from their mistakes. Oh, you learn from your own too – but that should be a given.

One day I came into the study and asked how Hans was and the usual positive answer was not forthcoming. “I am sad”. I waited.

“Today I heard that my copyist has died. We have worked together all my composing life. He knows my music better than I do. I would send him a manuscript score and he would write back ‘I have taken the liberty of changing the Bnatural in bar 75 of the cello to a Bflat. You cannot possibly have meant a Bnatural.’ – and he was always right. He is irreplaceable.”

I wonder do people think much about copyists these days. The printing press, computers, spell check (godawful spell check) and everything digitised so that on the one hand it gets published pretty much as you submitted it (formatting excluded) and on the other, gross errors get passed on through multiple publications without proper scrutiny. 

I can fully understand why Hans felt bereft. Bless The National and its editors. If there are ever any errors in these essays, they are almost certainly mine.

I exchanged many letters with Hans and I treasure a long one he sent me when my career was not going well and I was depressed. What it all boiled down to was his last sentence:

“The only true way for anyone with a genuine artistic urge and imagination is truth ... if one speaks the truth, it may be irrelevant; but if one speaks untruth, it is always a damned lie.”