It was the conductor’s room at the Vienna Philharmonic, the Goldenersaal or “golden room” that was Walter Weller’s “holy place”. It was there that he was first taken as a child prodigy, a young violinist following in the footsteps of his father, who was a violinist with Vienna’s great orchestra. He imbibed the atmosphere and tradition of a place where great composers and conductors like Brückner, Mahler, Klemperer and von Karajan had sat.
From an early age he had assumed that violin playing “would be my life”. He went on to enter the orchestra as a teenager, answering an advertisement. “I am the reason all the auditions there are held behind a curtain,” he recalled, “because when I was 14 and wanted to join, they