Anton Seidl

Anton Seidl (7 May 185028 March 1898) was a Hungarian conductor, best known for his collaboration with Richard Wagner and conducting his operas, and for his association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and the New York Philharmonic.

Biography He was born in Pest, Austria-Hungary, where he began the study of music at a very early age. When only seven years old, he could pick out at the piano melodies which he had heard in the theatre. At 15, he became a student of harmony and counterpoint under Nicolitsch. He attended the normal school at Pest for three years, the gymnasium for eight years. At age 16 he had been thinking of becoming a priest. Seidl entered the Royal University of Pest, but his love for music prevailed and he left the university two years later to go to Leipzig, where he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from October 1870, remaining there until 1872, when he was summoned to Bayreuth as one of Richard Wagner's copyists.

At Bayreuth, he assisted in making the first fair copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner treated him as one of the "chosen few", and it was natural that he should take a part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876.

In 1885, after Leopold Damrosch's death, Seidl accepted the first conductor's position of the German opera in New York, While in New York, he conducted the world premiere of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World", which greatly influenced the direction of American classical music. Dvořák had added that subtitle to the title page of his autograph score in Carnegie Hall just before turning it over to Seidl. Seidl frequently collaborated with choral conductor William Rogers Chapman who choirs often performed with the NYP. Seidl also taught Chapman conducting and music composition, and the two men became close friends.

He also had a significant role in the genesis of Edvard Grieg's Lyric Suite. It started as Seidl's orchestrations of four pieces from Book V of Grieg's Lyric Pieces, which he put together as Norwegian Suite. While Grieg acknowledged the merit of the arrangements, he nevertheless chose to revise them in 1905, and published three of them, along with an arrangement of a fourth piece he made himself directly from the original piano score, into his own Lyric Suite.

On March 28, 1898, Seidl died from food poisoning (then erroneously called "ptomaine poisoning") reportedly caused from eating a serving of tainted fish. He was 47 years old. Several thousand people attended the memorial, held at the Metropolitan Opera House, with the cremation following in Fresh Pond, Queens. He was an atheist.

Urn of Life Seidl's friends and colleagues commissioned sculptor George Grey Barnard to create a marble burial urn to hold the conductor's ashes. After Seidl's widow declined the large ornate urn, Barnard carved a smaller, simplified version, which now holds both their ashes. The unused Urn of Life was sold by Barnard in 1919 to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.