Musicians - Felix Weingartner

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	Musicians - Felix Weingartner

Felix Weingartner, Edler von Münzberg (June 2 1863 – May 7 1942) was a conductor, composer and pianist.

Weingartner was born in the Dalmatian city of Zara (today Zadar) to Austrian parents, and the family moved to Graz in 1868.

He was among Franz Liszt's later pupils, and Liszt helped produce Weingartner's opera Sakuntala, though the Weimar orchestra of the 1880s, according to Liszt biographer Alan Walker, was far from its peak of a few decades earlier — and the opera performance ended with orchestra going one way and chorus another. *

From 1908 till 1927 he was the principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the finest in the world and the most prominent in Austria.

Besides several other operas Weingartner wrote seven symphonies (being recorded by cpo - classic production osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany), a sinfonietta, concertos for violin and for cello, orchestral works, at least four string quartets, quintets for strings and for piano with clarinet (as with Franz Schmidt) and other pieces. His musical style partakes somewhat more of early Romanticism than of its later developments, to say nothing of modernism. As a conductor Weingartner recorded perhaps the first complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies on record; he also wrote books on conducting, on Beethoven's symphonies and on the symphony since Beethoven, and editions of individual works of Gluck, Wagner and others, and a large edition of Berlioz. Before Brian Newbould's more recent work he reconstructed Schubert's Symphony in E major, D. 729 in a version that received some performances and recordings; he also arranged works by a number of early Romantic masters for orchestral performance. Among his students as a conductor were Paul Sacher, Georg Tintner and Josef Krips.

* Walker sources this to Weingartner's autobiography, published in Zürich and Leipzig in 1928–9.

Works

Symphonies

Symphony No. 1 in G, op. 23
Symphony No. 2 in E-flat, op. 29
Symphony No. 3 in E, op. 49 with organ
Symphony No. 4 in F, op. 61
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 71
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, op. 74, 'in Gedenken des 19. November 1828' (also Tragica. Second movement orchestrates, is based on sketches apparently meant for the dance/scherzo or minuet-movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the B minor D759.)
Symphony No. 7, Choral op. 87 (1935–7) (in manuscript?)

Operas

Sakuntala, op. 9, 1884
Malakiwa, op. 10, 1886
Genesius, op. 14, 1892
Trilogy Orestes, op. 30, 1902
Kain und Abel, op. 54, 1914
Dame Kobold (after Pedro Calderón de la Barca; the same play inspired a concert overture by Carl Reinecke
and an opera by Joachim Raff
), op. 57, 1916
Die Dorfschule, op. 64, 1920
Meister Andrea, op. 66, 1920
Der Apostat, op. 72 — unpublished.

Some material from Grove 6.

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Musicians - Felix Weingartner

Works

Symphonies

Operas

Further reading

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