Hermann Weigert

Hermann O. Weigert (born October 20, 1890 in Breslau , † April 12, 1955 in New York City ) was a German music teacher and conductor.

Life

Hermann Weigert was born into a German-Jewish family. Already in his childhood he stood out for his high musicality and studied at the Berlin University of Music. After the First World War he began as a répétiteur in Magdeburg and Lübeck and a little later got a job at the Berlin State Opera , where he became head of the study class and conductor. During this time he worked with Dimitri Mitropoulos , Heinz Tietjen , George Szell , Otto Klemperer and Gustaf Gründgens and received a professorship at the University of Music in Berlin.

Weigert left Nazi Berlin in 1934 and, after temporarily working in South Africa, got a job as chief coach for the German subject at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he stood out in particular as an expert on Richard Wagner's works . He worked primarily with Kirsten Flagstad and met the then 21-year-old soprano Astrid Varnay in New York in 1939 , whom he trained and married in 1944. Together with her he returned to Europe in 1948 and paved his wife's career on the renowned European theaters and in 1951 in Bayreuth . Here he also worked for several years as an advisor to the festival management.

After the war, Hermann Weigert conducted at various opera houses and broadcasters in Germany and made several records with his wife Astrid Varnay, including Tristan and Isolde, Salome, Troubadour and Brünnhilde's final scene from Götterdämmerung, which received the Grand Prix du Disque . On some recitals he accompanied his wife on the piano. He died of a heart attack in New York at the age of 65.

His urn was buried in the Fresh Pond Crematory and Columbarium in New York next to that of his father-in-law.