A formidable conductor from a respected European musical family, Walter Damrosch helped to popularise symphonic music in America by promoting it unabashedly on the radio.
Walter Johannes Damrosch was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on . His father, Leopold, was a distinguished conductor and some of Europe's greatest musicians—Hans von Bülow, Liszt, Clara Schumann, and Richard Wagner were frequent guests in the Damrosch home. By the age of ten, he had begun...