Eduard Weiß was born on October 15, 1880, in Vienna. Likely around 1915, the violist moved with his wife to Kremsier (present-day Kroměříž) in Bohemia, then part of what would later become Czechoslovakia. Their son Friedrich was born there. By 1922, the family had settled in Brünn (present-day Brno), where Eduard Weiß was engaged with the orchestra of the German Theater until 1934. He served as concertmaster there and was also active as a music teacher. Their second son, Richard, was born in December of 1927. In 1924, Weiß became a member of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra for the first time. The conductor Karl Muck, who was responsible for assembling the orchestra, had asked Adam Macudzinsky, the concertmaster of the German Theater in Brünn, to bring along “a Jewish violist”: Eduard Weiß. From then on, he played at every Bayreuth Festival through 1930.
Between 1934 and 1937, Weiß made unsuccessful attempts to obtain Czechoslovak citizenship. After the violent dissolution of Czechoslovakia by the German Reich in March of 1939, the Jewish Eduard Weiß and his family became victims of Nazi persecution. At the end of 1941, deportations of Brünn’s Jewish population began. On March 28, 1942, Weiß, his wife, and their two sons were ordered to report to a former school at Merhautova 37. Three days later, they were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and, on May 25, 1942, onward to the Majdanek camp near Lublin. Their ultimate fate remains unknown.
1880 Vienna