Personal Characteristics
According to his son, Hausegger was “from his youth a free, creative musician,
dedicating himself to his art, far above worldly strife.” He seems to have
been, if anything, a man of excessive idealism. Eugen
Jochum has described him as “a marvelous teacher, a
spiritual musician…he was the most genuine and irreproachable person one could
imagine… a man of noble character and lofty intellect.”
The musicologist Hans Redlich, who knew him at the Munich Conservatory,
remembered him as “punctilious, pedantic and rather aloof, but quite
kind-hearted”. Well, maybe not always aloof. His son recalled a scene one
summer when Hausegger, with Karl Straube
in tow, greeted his wife from the train with an all-kazoo band, his two
children waving banners. On the way, they met the Privy-Councilor, who was
embarrassed over whether or not he should ignore this spectacle by the
President of the Munich Conservatory and the Leipzig Thomaskantor.
His kind-heartedness, on the other
hand, was a constant. As his father had been to him, so he was
a constant mentor to his own son, Friedrich, in his early musical education.
His son, who went on to conduct a chamber orchestra in Hannover, benefited
greatly from his father’s example in score-reading and analyses of works he’d
be conducting on a given evening. A more concrete example of Hausegger’s character was his offer in 1932, at the height
of the Great Depression, to take a substantial pay cut if the
“…your
husband was always, to me, one of the purest, loftiest,
kindest and most musical men in the
entire world of German music
and one whose existence in these
Godforsaken, turbulent times
had often been a source of comfort to me.”