Gabriel von Wayditch
Encyclopedia
Gabriel von Wayditch was a Hungarian
-American composer whose output consisted primarily of 14 grand operas.
The son of Dr. Aloysious (Lajos) von Wayditch von Verbovac (Verbovác), a nobleman and inventor who had taught physics at the University of Pécs
, and Helena von Dönhoff, a Prussian baroness, Gabriel (Wayditch Gabor) was born in Budapest. He studied piano, conducting, and composition at the National Hungarian Academy of Music (now the Franz Liszt Academy of Music
) where his teachers included Franz Liszt
's pupil Emil von Sauer
and Hans von Koessler
, who was also the teacher of composers Béla Bartók
, Zoltan Kodaly
, Ernő Dohnányi
, and Emmerich Kálmán
.
In 1910, Gabriel von Wayditch began composing his first opera, Ópium Álmok {Opium Dreams}, for which he also wrote his own Hungarian libretto. But after his parents separated, he emigrated to the United States with his father before completing it, arriving in New York harbor in 1911. In New York City
, Wayditch worked as a theater conductor while completing Ópium Álmok, which lasts 4 hours and requires an orchestra of some 110 players. Upon its completion, there was no performance of it. Wayditch subsequently derived two orchestral suites and his sole piano composition, Reminscences from Opium Dreams, from the thematic material in that opera. But none of these works received public performances either.
During the remainder of the decade he composed two additional operas, both somewhat shorter though requiring the same massive orchestration: Suh és Sah {The Caliph's Magician} (1917) and Jézus Heròdes elött {Jesus Before Herod} (1918). Although both of these works were performed after his death, he heard neither during his lifetime. During the 1920s and 1930s, he composed six additional operas, most lasting nearly five hours and all featuring his own librettos, in Hungarian, and a very large orchestra, all without any impetus of an impending production, working in almost complete isolation in an apartment in the Bronx. In addition to requiring a very large orchestra and being written in Hungarian, a language spoken by few Americans (although Wayditch also provided an alternate English text), many of Wayditch's operas contain other impracticalities. Most last nearly five hours, many call for frequent scene changes, and all have plots involving intricate historical myths that take place in exotic lands, in ancient times, or on other planets. Though the early operas were post-Romantic in style, the later works are much more modern and are heavily dissonant. For each opera, Wayditch notated by hand a full orchestral score and a piano reduction, though no separate parts for individual players.
The only opera staged in his lifetime was the ancient Egyptian-themed Horus, which was presented by the Philadelphia La Scala Opera Company
at the Academy of Music
in Philadelphia on January 5, 1939 with Fritz Mahler
conducting. The performance received a negative review from Henry Pleasants
, a harsh critic of contemporary music who later wrote a frequently-referenced anti-contemporary music polemic, The Agony of Modern Music. However, that performance of Horus was included by Nicolas Slonimsky
in his compendium of significant musical events of the 20th century, Music Since 1900.
In the 1940s, Wayditch composed another four large scale operas, still with no promise of eventual performance. In the 1950s, he served as the pianist for the Morningside Trio, which concertized throughout New York City and also taught music lessons at a studio near his apartment. Despite his abilities as a pianist, Wayditch never composed any additional compositions for the piano and apart from two songs for voice and piano and a quintet arrangement, Lullaby, derived from his 1925 opera Mária Testvér, he composed no chamber music. For the next 20 years, the only other composition he worked on for the remainder of his life was a massive eight-hour long opera, Eretnekek {The Heretics}, for which he completed a piano-vocal score. Wayditch died while writing out the 2,850th page of the orchestral score for that work. Still, The Heretics is cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest opera ever written.
Though Wayditch's prodigious output was practically unknown during his lifetime, there has been some interest in his music over the past decades. Two of his early operas--The Caliph's Magician (1917) and Jesus Before Herod (1918)--were released on LP recordings by Musical Heritage Society in the 1970s. The former featured the orchestra, chorus and soloists of the Budapest Opera conducted by Andras Korodi, and was sung using Wayditch's original Hungarian text. The latter was sung in an English translation in a production featuring the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Peter Eros. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang Wayditch's Prayer from Maria Testver on a nationally-televised broadcast. In 1984, on the fifteen anniversary of his death, all of the commercially released recordings of Wayditch's music along with private recordings of excerpts and extracts from other works were broadcast in Gabriel Von Wayditch memorial broadcast aired on WKCR-FM, the radio station of Columbia University. In the 1990s, the three MHS LPs were re-issued in a 2 CD package by VAI. In October 2009, the Hungarian Culture Center mounted a presentation about Wayditch at the Brooklyn Museum featuring a performance of Reminscences from Opium Dreams by pianist Lloyd Arriola, a short ballet featuring excerpts from the two recorded operas, and a talk by Frank J. Oteri, who wrote the entry on Gabriel von Wayditch for the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Suh és Sah {The Caliph's Magician} (1917) - 163pp piano reduction; 483pp orchestral score
Jézus Heròdes elött {Jesus Before Herod} (1918) - 91pp piano reduction; 186pp orchestral score
Enyészet országa {Land of Death} (1920) - 424pp piano reduction; 846pp orchestral score
Mária Testvér {Sister Maria} (1925) - 486pp piano score; 1251pp orchestral score
Föld lelke a Vénuszon {Venus Dwellers} (1925) - 873pp piano reduction; 917pp orchestral score
Horus (1931) - 296pp piano reduction with stage directions; 480?pp orchestral score
Maria Magdolna {Mary Magdalene} (1934) - 246pp piano reduction; 444pp orchestral score
Buddha (1935) - 534pp piano reduction; 936pp orchestral score
Nereida (1940) - 282pp piano reduction; 637pp orchestral score
Páduai Szerit Antal {Anthony of Padua} (1942) - 617pp piano reduction; 1279pp orchestral score
Rezesztények {Catacombs} (1945) - 241pp piano reduction; 633pp orchestral score
Álmok {Fisherman's Dreams} (1948) - 490?pp piano reduction; 1479pp orch score (2 vls)
Eretnekek {The Heretics} (1949-1969) - 1531pp piano reduction; 2850pp orchestral score, incomplete
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
-American composer whose output consisted primarily of 14 grand operas.
The son of Dr. Aloysious (Lajos) von Wayditch von Verbovac (Verbovác), a nobleman and inventor who had taught physics at the University of Pécs
Pécs
Pécs is the fifth largest city of Hungary, located on the slopes of the Mecsek mountains in the south-west of the country, close to its border with Croatia. It is the administrative and economical centre of Baranya county...
, and Helena von Dönhoff, a Prussian baroness, Gabriel (Wayditch Gabor) was born in Budapest. He studied piano, conducting, and composition at the National Hungarian Academy of Music (now the Franz Liszt Academy of Music
Franz Liszt Academy of Music
The Franz Liszt Academy of Music is a concert hall and music conservatory in Budapest, Hungary, founded on November 14, 1875...
) where his teachers included Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
's pupil Emil von Sauer
Emil von Sauer
Emil Georg Conrad von Sauer was a notable German composer, pianist, score editor, and music teacher. He was a pupil of Franz Liszt and one of the most distinguished pianists of his generation...
and Hans von Koessler
Hans von Koessler
Hans von Koessler was a German composer, conductor and music teacher. In Hungary, where he worked for 26 years, he was known as János Koessler....
, who was also the teacher of composers Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
, Zoltan Kodaly
Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is best known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.-Life:Born in Kecskemét, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child....
, Ernő Dohnányi
Erno Dohnányi
Ernő Dohnányi was a Hungarian conductor, composer, and pianist. He used the German form of his name Ernst von Dohnányi for most of his published compositions....
, and Emmerich Kálmán
Emmerich Kalman
Emmerich Kálmán was a Hungarian-born composer of operettas.- Biography :Kálmán was born Imre Koppstein in Siófok, on the southern shore of Lake Balaton, Hungary in a Jewish family.Kálmán initially intended to become a concert pianist, but because of early-onset arthritis, he focused on composition...
.
In 1910, Gabriel von Wayditch began composing his first opera, Ópium Álmok {Opium Dreams}, for which he also wrote his own Hungarian libretto. But after his parents separated, he emigrated to the United States with his father before completing it, arriving in New York harbor in 1911. In New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Wayditch worked as a theater conductor while completing Ópium Álmok, which lasts 4 hours and requires an orchestra of some 110 players. Upon its completion, there was no performance of it. Wayditch subsequently derived two orchestral suites and his sole piano composition, Reminscences from Opium Dreams, from the thematic material in that opera. But none of these works received public performances either.
During the remainder of the decade he composed two additional operas, both somewhat shorter though requiring the same massive orchestration: Suh és Sah {The Caliph's Magician} (1917) and Jézus Heròdes elött {Jesus Before Herod} (1918). Although both of these works were performed after his death, he heard neither during his lifetime. During the 1920s and 1930s, he composed six additional operas, most lasting nearly five hours and all featuring his own librettos, in Hungarian, and a very large orchestra, all without any impetus of an impending production, working in almost complete isolation in an apartment in the Bronx. In addition to requiring a very large orchestra and being written in Hungarian, a language spoken by few Americans (although Wayditch also provided an alternate English text), many of Wayditch's operas contain other impracticalities. Most last nearly five hours, many call for frequent scene changes, and all have plots involving intricate historical myths that take place in exotic lands, in ancient times, or on other planets. Though the early operas were post-Romantic in style, the later works are much more modern and are heavily dissonant. For each opera, Wayditch notated by hand a full orchestral score and a piano reduction, though no separate parts for individual players.
The only opera staged in his lifetime was the ancient Egyptian-themed Horus, which was presented by the Philadelphia La Scala Opera Company
Philadelphia La Scala Opera Company
The Philadelphia La Scala Opera Company was an American opera company located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that was actively performing at the Academy of Music between 1925 and 1954...
at the Academy of Music
Academy of Music (Philadelphia)
The Academy of Music, also known as American Academy of Music, is a concert hall and opera house located at Broad and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1857 and is the oldest opera house in the United States that is still used for its original purpose...
in Philadelphia on January 5, 1939 with Fritz Mahler
Fritz Mahler
Fritz Mahler was an Austrian conductor.Mahler's father was a cousin of the composer Gustav Mahler. In Europe he became a leading conductor with such ensembles as the Berlin Radio Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Danish State Symphony. He fled Europe in 1936 for the United States...
conducting. The performance received a negative review from Henry Pleasants
Henry Pleasants
For the English music critic Henry Pleasants, see Henry Pleasants .Henry Clay Pleasants was a coal mining engineer and a brigadier general in the Union Army during the American Civil War...
, a harsh critic of contemporary music who later wrote a frequently-referenced anti-contemporary music polemic, The Agony of Modern Music. However, that performance of Horus was included by Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky was a Russian born American composer, conductor, musician, music critic, lexicographer and author. He described himself as a "diaskeuast" ; "a reviser or interpolator."- Life :...
in his compendium of significant musical events of the 20th century, Music Since 1900.
In the 1940s, Wayditch composed another four large scale operas, still with no promise of eventual performance. In the 1950s, he served as the pianist for the Morningside Trio, which concertized throughout New York City and also taught music lessons at a studio near his apartment. Despite his abilities as a pianist, Wayditch never composed any additional compositions for the piano and apart from two songs for voice and piano and a quintet arrangement, Lullaby, derived from his 1925 opera Mária Testvér, he composed no chamber music. For the next 20 years, the only other composition he worked on for the remainder of his life was a massive eight-hour long opera, Eretnekek {The Heretics}, for which he completed a piano-vocal score. Wayditch died while writing out the 2,850th page of the orchestral score for that work. Still, The Heretics is cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest opera ever written.
Though Wayditch's prodigious output was practically unknown during his lifetime, there has been some interest in his music over the past decades. Two of his early operas--The Caliph's Magician (1917) and Jesus Before Herod (1918)--were released on LP recordings by Musical Heritage Society in the 1970s. The former featured the orchestra, chorus and soloists of the Budapest Opera conducted by Andras Korodi, and was sung using Wayditch's original Hungarian text. The latter was sung in an English translation in a production featuring the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Peter Eros. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang Wayditch's Prayer from Maria Testver on a nationally-televised broadcast. In 1984, on the fifteen anniversary of his death, all of the commercially released recordings of Wayditch's music along with private recordings of excerpts and extracts from other works were broadcast in Gabriel Von Wayditch memorial broadcast aired on WKCR-FM, the radio station of Columbia University. In the 1990s, the three MHS LPs were re-issued in a 2 CD package by VAI. In October 2009, the Hungarian Culture Center mounted a presentation about Wayditch at the Brooklyn Museum featuring a performance of Reminscences from Opium Dreams by pianist Lloyd Arriola, a short ballet featuring excerpts from the two recorded operas, and a talk by Frank J. Oteri, who wrote the entry on Gabriel von Wayditch for the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Operatic
Ópium Álmok {Opium Dreams} (1910-1914) - 586pp piano reduction; 1200pp orchestral scoreSuh és Sah {The Caliph's Magician} (1917) - 163pp piano reduction; 483pp orchestral score
Jézus Heròdes elött {Jesus Before Herod} (1918) - 91pp piano reduction; 186pp orchestral score
Enyészet országa {Land of Death} (1920) - 424pp piano reduction; 846pp orchestral score
Mária Testvér {Sister Maria} (1925) - 486pp piano score; 1251pp orchestral score
Föld lelke a Vénuszon {Venus Dwellers} (1925) - 873pp piano reduction; 917pp orchestral score
Horus (1931) - 296pp piano reduction with stage directions; 480?pp orchestral score
Maria Magdolna {Mary Magdalene} (1934) - 246pp piano reduction; 444pp orchestral score
Buddha (1935) - 534pp piano reduction; 936pp orchestral score
Nereida (1940) - 282pp piano reduction; 637pp orchestral score
Páduai Szerit Antal {Anthony of Padua} (1942) - 617pp piano reduction; 1279pp orchestral score
Rezesztények {Catacombs} (1945) - 241pp piano reduction; 633pp orchestral score
Álmok {Fisherman's Dreams} (1948) - 490?pp piano reduction; 1479pp orch score (2 vls)
Eretnekek {The Heretics} (1949-1969) - 1531pp piano reduction; 2850pp orchestral score, incomplete