Born in Zara, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today the Croatian city of Zadar, Felix Weingartner grew up in Graz, where he attended the conservatory He moved to Leipzig in 1881 to continue his studies and completed his musical education in 1886 under Franz Liszt in Weimar. The exceptionally gifted young musician began his conducting career in 1884 as a music director in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). After engagements in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk), Hamburg, and Mannheim, he joined the Royal Opera in Berlin in 1891. From 1898 to 1907, he served as music director of Munich’s Kaim Orchestra before succeeding Gustav Mahler as director of the Vienna Hofoper from 1908 to 1910. He later held positions as general music director in Darmstadt from 1914 to 1919; director of the Vienna Volksoper; and, beginning in 1927, director of the conservatory in Basel. In 1934 he was appointed director of the Vienna State Opera.
In 1886, early in his career, Weingartner came to Bayreuth as a musical assistant on the recommendation of the festival conductor Hermann Levi and soon became a welcome guest at Wahnfried, the Wagner family home. However, when he witnessed members of the family mocking the conductor Hermann Levi, a man he greatly admired, because he was Jewish, a conflict arose with the festival’s head, Cosima Wagner. But anti-Semitism at Wahnfried was not the only source of tension. The self-assured young conductor lacked the unquestioning deference that Cosima demanded, thereby violating the unwritten rules of Bayreuth orthodoxy. His departure was correspondingly chilly, and he was never invited back. In the years that followed, the Wagner circle subjected his estrangement to a particularly insidious reinterpretation. At Wahnfried, Weingartner was effectively transformed into a Jew, thereby retrospectively justifying his exclusion from Bayreuth. “In my opinion, he is an Oriental,” Cosima wrote, later elaborating that Weingartner was “of mixed Jewish descent.” This claim was false: Weingartner was not Jewish. Nevertheless, the stigma would follow him.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Weingartner reported hearing “outrageous rumors” about himself and observed that “for many years, every effort has been made to keep me away from Germany.” He believed that influential figures wished to sideline him as an “inconvenient artist through covert means.” His concerns were well founded. Rainer Schlösser, the Reich dramaturge and a close associate of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, actively sought “irrefutable evidence” against him. Some of Weingartner’s writings were banned because of their alleged pacifist tendencies. His private life came under scrutiny because of his marriages to Jewish women. At the same time, false allegations regarding his own supposed Jewish ancestry continued to circulate. This campaign of indirect persecution effectively barred Weingartner from pursuing an artistic career in Nazi Germany. Nor was there any place for him in the increasingly authoritarian Austrofascist state. In 1936 he left Vienna and went into exile in Switzerland, spending the following years directing internationally regarded summer courses for conductors in Interlaken. Felix Weingartner died on May 7, 1942, in Winterthur.
1863 Zadar (Zara)
1942 Winterthur