Meinhard von Zallinger

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Meinhard von Zallinger-Thurn (born February 25, 1897 in Vienna , † September 24, 1990 in Salzburg ) was an Austrian conductor .

Life

Von Zallinger came from an old South Tyrolean family. He was the son of the legal historian Otto von Zallinger, professor of German and Austrian legal history and German private law at the University of Vienna and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The marriage with the journalist Maria Ziegler resulted in two daughters: Ursula von Zallinger, long-time General Secretary of PRIX JEUNESSE, and Monika Fürstin Rohan, stage and costume designer. After reluctantly dropping out of law studies in Innsbruck , von Zallinger began his musical training as a private student of piano and conducting at the Salzburg Mozarteum . His mentor was Bernhard Paumgartner, director of the Mozarteum, who developed the Mozarteum into a music college. Between 1920 and 1922 von Zallinger conducted the Mozarteum Orchestra several times. He then began his career as a répétiteur, first at the opera school of the Vienna Academy for Music and Performing Arts until 1926 , then, on the recommendation of Richard Strauss, at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich until 1929, combined with first conducting. From there he moved to the Cologne Opera as Kapellmeister. In the summer of 1935 he was called back to Munich as Kapellmeister, later as the first Staatskapellmeister, where he stayed until 1944. Meinhard von Zallinger was obviously a member of the NSDAP . From 1940 to 1944 he also directed the opera school of the Mozarteum. In the spring of 1944, von Zallinger became general music director of the Duisburg Opera , which at that time had already been relocated to Prague, an office which he could no longer fully assume due to time restrictions.

In the immediate post-war period, the rhythm of the station changes accelerated until the second return to Munich the stabilitas loci occurred again. The management of the opera school of the Mozarteum and the Mozarteum orchestra formed the first stop (1947–1949). In Graz, Zallinger only had one season as opera director (1949–1950). Then he succeeded in moving to Vienna as head of the Volksoper, which is part of the State Opera. His next stop sparked a stir and controversy. Two months after the uprising of June 17, 1953 in East Berlin, he took up his post as musical director of the Komische Oper almost to the day, fascinated by its artistic director and director Walter Felsenstein. In the middle of 1956 his path took him a third time to Munich, this time as the "first Staatskapellmeister", a position which included the permanent deputy of the general music director. In this function he was given a musical interregnum several times. Outward highlights of Zallinger's last conducting period were the reopening of the Cuvilliés Theater (1958) and National Theater (1963).

On June 25, 1973 he conducted for the last time at the Munich National Theater, "Le nozze di Figaro", and so not only left the Bavarian State Opera, to which he had been a member for 29 years, but also ended his conducting activities after more than 50 years and moved back to Salzburg.

He was buried in the Salzburg municipal cemetery .

Zallingers' career as a conductor was not preceded by any systematic training. He was "purely self-taught", he confessed. The focus of his conducting, which the US musicologist and Haydn expert HC Robbins Landon described as highly professional, was on the works of Mozart, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Mozart was his musical idol, which made him a conductor filled with Mozart's spirit. His repertoire ranged from Monteverdi (L'incoronazione di Poppea) to Orff (Prometheus) and the US composer John Alden Carpenter, who died in 1951 and whose ballet he recorded with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The actual calling to conduct was for him an "arcanum". Something inexplicable and above all unlearnable is what characterizes the conductor's profession. He had a very decidedly negative view of "realistic-naturalistic scene design". It is no substitute for the imagination, which creates a real atmosphere even without expensive decorative effort. The viewer must be educated to activate his own imagination and not be inhibited by visual barriers. Music theater will always have to be an illusion, because this is the only way to create enchantment. Von Zallinger was at the podium in Munich on over 2,500 evenings. He was the “calm pole in the madhouse of the opera business” (Karl Schumann, important music critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the “indispensable” with the characteristics “sedentary, unpretentious, available at any hour”.

Awards

  • 1964: Bavarian Order of Merit
  • Honorary Senator of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich
  • Honorary member of the University of Music and Performing Arts Mozarteum Salzburg

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Photo with party badge on heimatsammlung.de ( memento of the original from March 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.heimatsammlung.de
  2. ↑ a b c Memories - Meinhard von Zallinger-Thurn (private print, Salzburg 1975)
  3. ↑ Die Zeit, No. 1, January 3, 1957
  4. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 26, 1990
personal data
SURNAME Zallinger, Meinhard von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zallinger-Thurn, Meinhard von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian conductor
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1990
Place of death Salzburg