THE MUSIC OF HUGO WEISGALL

Abstract

G IVEN the forbidding circumstances facing native American opera today, it is astonishing we have a composer working in a post-Viennese idiom whom we can with certainty call an opera composer. Hugo Weisgall has since the early 1950s produced superbly theatrical, inventive, and literate musical theater. The limited attention this body of work commands is unfortunate, but hardly surprising or singular. Even major works by Schoenberg, Sessions, and Dallapiccola have yet to be mounted by this country's opera companies. Like these composers, Weisgall has not chased after stylistic bandwagons or deferred to public taste as a short route to success. He has, despite the absence of a traditional support for home-grown products enjoyed by composers in other lands, built his reputation from ten important works: his six operas and four song cycles. Weisgall's intimate experience with the Central European Jewish musical traditions and with the standard opera and song literature permeates his work as a composer and performer. From both parents he inherits a love of singing and the theater. Whereas his mother's highly cultured family received their musical education in Vienna and Budapest, his father, Adolph Joseph Weisgal, was the product of at least four generations of cantors and composers, and had himself sung opera professionally in Austria and the Czech provinces before accepting a synagogue post in the Moravian town of Ivangice.1 Here, on October 13, 1912, the cantor's elder son, Hugo David, was born. His father was from the first the boy's chief musical influence.