Brief Biography:

“…my composing was not controlled by a purely musical incentive, but rather

almost always by a poetic idea, an impression of nature, or a human experience”

Thus Siegmund von Hausegger, the least absolute composer of modern times. Born August 16, 1872 in Graz, Austria, he grew up in a musical household. (His younger brother, “Fritzerl” was hypersensitive to music, which Hausegger always felt contributed to his death at age 7.) His mother Hedwig, née Goedel, gave him his first piano lessons and musical encouragement. His father was Friedrich von Hausegger, a barrister by profession, but more well known as an influential music aesthetician and staunch supporter of Wagner. His father also gave him his first lessons in theory, harmony, canon and fugue, as well as early training in score-reading and conducting.

His home schooling was “fundamental and meticulous”, banning merely “entertaining” music, but allowing leeway for experiment. After a lesson, Siegmund could play or compose as he liked, though his father naturally suggested models from which he could learn more. He grew up in an atmosphere of devotion to Liszt and Wagner, and their approach to music. His father meant his most important book Music as Expression to be a direct answer to Edward Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music. At age 11, Siegmund saw his first opera, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and was later impressed by hearing Karl Muck rehearse Die Meistersinger. In 1886, aged 14, he visited “The Holy City” (Bayreuth), where hearing Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal exposed him to the fullest extent of Wagner’s art.

He always considered his childhood doubly blessed, both by his parents’ guidance and by the beauty of the Graz landscape, which instilled his lifelong love of nature. As he put it “these two factors decide the key in which the song of life shall resound.” His continuing musical education included studying the violin and French horn, as well as trying to teach himself the organ. He studied score-reading under Erich Degner and advanced keyboard under Karl Pohlig. When the ballade composer Martin Plüddemann came to teach in Graz, Hausegger was both his student and accompanist.

In addition to his musical training, at the University of Graz, Hausegger also studied literature, philosophy, history and art history. In the latter, he was so inspired by his professor, Strzygowski, that he seriously considered art history as a career. In 1891, while in Vienna, he and his father visited Brahms. When Hausegger spoke of being a composer, he got the customary cold shower: “Alles schon besetzt sei” (All those places are taken). In the 1890s, he began serious composing with his opera Zinnober and his first published symphonic work, the Dionysian Fantasia. He also began his conducting career at the Graz Opera.

In 1899, his father died. The loss of both a loving parent and artistic mentor was a severe blow. At about this time, he and his mother left for Munich, where he’d gotten an offer from the Kaim Orchestra as the assistant to Weingartner, whom he succeeded in 1902. That same year, he married his first wife, Hertha Ritter. A concert singer especially adept in the lieder of Schubert and Wolf, she was the youngest daughter of the composer Alexander Ritter. Ritter, of course is best known as the man whose influence on the young Richard Strauss was “like a storm wind”, converting Strauss to the Liszt/Wagner camp. Ritter was also Wagner’s nephew by marriage. Thus, Hausegger bound himself all the more to the New German School. Hertha died in 1913, giving birth to their son, Friedrich. Hausegger’s second wife, Hella von Bronsart, with whom he had a daughter, Veronika, was the daughter of the pianist/composer Hans von Bronsart.

After working with several orchestras, in 1920, he settled in Munich, where he largely spent the rest of his life. He conducted the Munich Philharmonic, the orchestra with whom he is most associated, and both was the director of, and a teacher at the Munich Academy of Music, where his students included the conductor Eugen Jochum and the composers Karl Höller and Karl Marx.

While conducting in Hamburg, he got to know the young Wilhelm Fürtwängler, then at Lübeck, from a query over program selection. The resulting friendship would later stand Hausegger in good stead. His circle of friends included the conductor Walter Abendroth, the Leipzig Thomaskantor Karl Straube and the painter Raffael Schuster-Woldan.

His summer home at Obergrainau was, for nearly 40 years the place where he could relax or contemplate composing or his fall program schedule. A sign on the garden fence reading “Business discussed only in Munich” tells the story. To steal a phrase from James Huneker, he seems to have been a reflective rather than a spontaneous composer.

In the 1930s, Hausegger at first supported the Reich even to the point of becoming a party member. Not, alas, the first or the last time intellect would be drawn to power. His innate decency emerged, however, and he came under fire from Nazi authorities for his liberal sympathies. Fürtwängler, no doubt recalling Hausegger’s help from his youth, had to bail him out.

In 1934, he relinquished his post from the Academy, and in 1938 retired as the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. As a member of the RMK (Reichsmusikkammer), he eventually learned the futility of any such organizations under a dictatorship. As intellectuals find out, usually too late, power wants only more power. All else, including apparent cultural encouragements, is window dressing. He passed the war years in the sort of increasingly drab circumstances everyone by then had to undergo as the Reich wound down to its condign defeat. (The picture of the deterioration of everyday life in Fritz Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair is apropos.) Having spent his few postwar years in what his son describes as “certain circumstances” – one presumes a sort of genteel poverty – he died on October 10, 1948.