Walter L. Bogert

Walter Bogert was a teacher of music, a lecturer on the history and appreciation of music, an occasional conductor, and a singer. He was also, for a time, a practicing lawyer. With all the distinctions that rewarded his varied efforts, he remained a gentle person, never imposing his views on others or, indeed, talking about himself. He seldom mentioned his music or insisted upon the quite positive opinions he was known to hold. Rather, he would talk about some hobby such as photography which he especially enjoyed. And, in spite of the affliction which overtook him in later years, his happy dis position seemed never to lapse.

He was born ninety-four years ago in Flushing, New York, descended from Dutch ancestors who settled on Long Island in the 1600’s. He was educated at Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1888. Two years later he took his LL.B. degree at Columbia Law School. The law, however, was never his first love: his main activity in these years was the study of instrumental and vocal music at the National Conservatory of Music and the Institute of Musical Art. As a result of these studies he became instructor in harmony at the Conservatory. Because of his interpretative skill he was given the post of organist at St. George’s Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1903 he took time off to conduct the United States Marine Band in Washington. As a baritone he gave some five hundred recitals.

In 1920 he began to lecture at Yale in what is now known as musicology. At one time he was president of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and later he was one of its directors. He was a director, too, of the Russian Symphony Society and the MacDowell Club of New York. A less formal post was that of secretary of “The Bohemians,” an organization which met once a month at the Harvard Club for a convivial musical evening.

Bogert’s closest friends at the Century were Francis Rogers, Willem Willeke, and Theodore Steinway, all of whom he survived. In the earlier days of his membership he would come to the Club and occasionally play informally for the entertainment of whatever members were there. In later years he was unhappily prevented from coming or, indeed, from seeing most of his old friends by a crippling disease which eventually confined him to a wheel chair.

A Centurion friend writes of Walter Bogert: “He was a live and let live sort of fellow with standards of courtesy and forbearance which seem to be old hat in the hurly-burly of the second half of our turbulent century.”

Roger Burlingame
1960 Century Association Yearbook