Anton Seidl

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Anton Seidl (7 May 1850 – 28 March 1898) was a Hungarian conductor.

He was born at Budapest, and entered the Leipzig Conservatory in October 1870, remaining there until 1872, when he was summoned to Bayreuth as one of Richard Wagner's copyists. There he assisted in making the first fair copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Thoroughly imbued with the Wagnerian spirit, it was natural that he should take a part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876.

His chance as a conductor came when, on Wagner's recommendation, he was appointed to the Leipzig State Theater, where he remained until, in 1882, he went on tour with Angelo Neumann's Nibelungen Ring company. To his conducting the critics attributed much of such artistic success as attended the production of the Trilogy at her Majesty's Theatre in London in June of that year.

In 1883 Seidl went with Neumann to Bremen, but two years later was appointed successor to Leopold Damrosch as conductor of the German Opera Company in New York City, and in the same year he married Auguste Kraus, the distinguished singer. In 1891 he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and was still in the post when he died in 1898.

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Excerpts from Memoirs of Anton Seidl

[edit] Further reading

Finck, Henry Theophilus and Krehbiel, Henry Edward. Anton Seidl; a memorial by his friends. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1899. Reprinted New York : Da Capo Press, 1983. ISBN 0-30676-144-0.