Ignatz Waghalter

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Ignatz Waghalter (March 15, 1881 – April 7, 1949) was a Polish-German composer and conductor.

Born into an impoverished Jewish family in Warsaw, Waghalter made his way to Berlin at the age of 17 where he first studied with Philipp Scharwenka. Waghalter came to the attention of Joseph Joachim, the great violinist and close friend of Johannes Brahms. With the support of Joachim, Waghalter was admitted into the Berlin Academie der Kunst, where he studied composition and conducting under the direction of Friedrich Gernsheim. Waghalter’s early chamber music revealed an intense melodic imagination that was to remain a distinctive characteristic of his compositional work. An early String Quartet in D Major, Opus 3, was highly praised by Joachim. Waghalter’s Sonata for Violin and Pianoforte in F Minor, Opus 5, received the prestigious Mendelssohn Prize in 1902, when the composer was only 21.

In 1907 Waghalter secured a post as conductor at the Komische Oper in Berlin, where his reputation grew rapidly. This was followed by a brief tenure at the Staadttheater in Essen (1911-12). Waghalter’s appointment as principal conductor at the new Deutsche Opernhaus in Berlin established his position as a major figure in German music. The house was inaugurated under Waghalter’s direction on November 7, 1912 with a performance of Fidelio. Waghalter championed the music of Giacomo Puccini, whose operas had previously failed to win public acceptance in Germany. The first performance of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West in Germany was conducted by Waghalter in March 1913 at the Deutsche Opernhaus. Its triumphant reception secured for Puccini's operas a permanent place in the repertoires of Germany's opera houses.

Three of Waghalter’s own operas received their premier at the Deutsche Opernhaus: Mandragola, based on a Renaissance comedy by Machiavelli, in January 1914; Jugend, based on the tragic realistic work by the German dramatist Max Halbe, in February 1917; and Sataniel, inspired by a Polish fantasy tale, in May 1923. The fervent melodicism of these works marked Waghalter as among the most lyrical of German operatic composers in the pre-1933 era.

Waghalter left the Deutsche Opernhaus in 1923. Traveling to the United States, he succeeded Joseph Stransky as musical director of the New York State Symphony, a post that he held during the 1924-25 season. Deeply attached to the cultural life of Berlin, Waghalter turned down an offer to remain at the State Symphony and returned to Germany. He composed several operettas, and was active as a guest conductor. Waghalter was appointed musical director at the National Opera in Riga, Latvia, for the 1931-32 season. Shortly after his return to Berlin, the Nazis came to power. In 1934 Waghalter went into exile, moving first to Czechoslovakia and then to Austria, where he composed his last opera, Ahasaverus und Esther. Several weeks after the Nazis entered Austria, Waghalter and his wife fled to the United States.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Waghalter established a short-lived classical orchestra of African-American musicians. But his opportunities to conduct were limited, and he died in relative obscurity in New York on April 7, 1949 at the age of 68.

Even though Waghalter was one of many immensely gifted German and Central European musicians whose lives and careers were shattered by the Nazi catastrophe, the degree of his subsequent and protracted obscurity, when contrasted to the scale of Waghalter’s pre-1933 prominence, is striking. The reason for Waghalter’s fate may be explained to a large extent by the radical shift in musical aesthetics in the aftermath of World War II. Waghalter did not experiment with atonality, and his commitment to melodicism placed him well outside the precincts of the musical avant-garde. But more recent critical questioning of atonalism and a corresponding revival of interest in composers who worked in a melodic idiom have encouraged a reconsideration of Waghalter. The Deutsche Oper (successor of the Deutsche Opernhaus) staged a concert performance of Waghalter’s Jugend in 1989, and a new recording of his early chamber music was released in March 2006. The emotional authenticity and force of Waghalter’s lyricism, combined with the high technical quality of his compositions, may be best appreciated as a distinctive expression of a lost musical culture whose destruction was among the tragic consequences of the barbarism unleashed by fascism in Europe.

[edit] Selected Works

String Quartet in D Major, Opus 3
Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Minor, Opus 5
Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 9
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 15
Operas: Der Teufelsweg, Mandragola, Jugend and Sataniel
Operettas: Der späte Gast, Wem gehört Helena, Bärbel, Lord Tommy, Der Weiberkrieg
Piano Works: Zwölf Skizzen für Klavier
Several Song Cycles