About
Karl Ignaz Weigl was a Jewish Austrian composer and pianist, who later became a naturalized American citizen in 1943.
Weigl was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a bank official who was also a keen amateur musician. Alexander Zemlinsky took him as a private pupil in 1896. Weigl went to school at the Franz-Joseph Gymnasium and graduated from there in 1899. After that, he continued his studies at the Vienna Music Academy, where he became a composition pupil of Robert Fuchs, and also enrolled at the University of Vienna, studying musicology under Guido Adler, with Anton Webern as his classmate. At the Vienna Hofoper between 1904 and 1906, he served as a rehearsal conductor for Gustav Mahler. In 1930 he was appointed professor of theory and composition at the University of Vienna, where he succeeded Hans Gal and taught composer Mimi Wagensonner.
When the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938, Weigl's music could no longer be performed. He emigrated to the United States of America, together with his second wife, the composer, and music therapist Vally Weigl (née Pick), and their son. There, he obtained a number of increasingly important teaching posts: at the Hartt School of Music, at Brooklyn College, at the Boston Conservatory, and, from 1948 on, at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Weigl often appeared as a soloist and also played four-handed with his wife. He died in New York after a prolonged battle with bone marrow cancer.
Weigl's music, which was admired by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Strauss, shows the influence of Brahms, with an emphasis on polyphony. His works include six symphonies, several concertos, chamber music pieces including eight string quartets, many songs (lieder in the tradition of Wolf and Mahler) and solo piano works. His only opera, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, premiered in Vienna in 1932.