Siegmund von Hausegger

The son of a well-known lawyer and music critic, Siegmund von Hausegger enjoyed a long career in music as a conductor and made a very limited, but, at the time, seemingly notable contribution as a composer. He was initially trained in music by his father Friedrich von Hausegger (1837-1899) who, despite being a lawyer by profession, wrote and advocated extensively on music (and authored a university textbook on music education near the end of his life). Friedrich, who was also a very early devotee of Wagner's work and theories, established an environment that encouraged musical creativity almost above all else, and reportedly even brought in professional soloists, and an orchestra and choir to perform a student work of his son's that proved too difficult for the forces at his school. All of this positive reinforcement led to Hausegger's composing of the one-act opera Helfrid, from his own libretto, at the age of 18. His second opera, the three-act Zinnober, adapted from the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann, was conducted at its 1898 premiere by Richard Strauss. Hausegger held various conducting posts over the turn of the century and beyond, in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. His output as a mature composer is limited to five orchestral works, of which the best known today is the Naturesymphonie, scored for large orchestra, organ, and chorus, which has been recorded as recently as 2006. Hausegger was, at one point early in the 20th century, pegged by some critics in the German-speaking world as a potential successor to Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss; but his boldly conceived, neo-Romantic style and large-scale conceptions fell out of favor after the First World War, and he ended up instead becoming much more influential as a conductor in the decades that followed. His most notable achievement was probably his decision to exhume Anton Bruckner's own original score for the Symphony No. 9. Hausegger was the first to use Bruckner's score, as opposed to the Ferdinand Lowe edition, by which the work had become known over the preceding three decades; in a gesture the boldness of which anticipated the work of musical archeologists such as Leon Botstein by 50 years, he had the boldness to present both versions of the work at the same concert on April 2, 1932, in Munich, to which the critics responded positively. The original has since become the accepted standard version of the piece, supplanted the Lowe version. Hausegger retired from conducting in 1938 and died in Munich in 1948.
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