Weigl, Karl

Karl Ignaz Weigl – Old Vienna

(6 February 1881, Vienna, Austria-Hungary – 11 August 1949, Stuttgart, Germany)

Composed: 1939, originally titled Tänze aus Wien / Dances from Vienna
Published: New York: American Composers’ Alliance, 1939; reprinted by Associated Music Publishers, 1978.
Premiere (4-hand piano version): 15 February 1942, in a Musicale at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Karl and Vally (Valerie) Weigl premiered the 4-hand piano version of Old Vienna
on a program that also included piano duets by Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann.
Premiere (orchestral version): 30 January 1949, on Rochester Civic Orchestra’s Viennese Night at the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, New York, USA. The program, conducted by Guy Fraser Harrison, also included music by Johann Strauss, Gaertner-Kreisler, Waldteufel, Franz Lehar, Stoltz, von Suppé.
Orchestration: double winds (with piccolo), four horns, two trumpets, low brass quartet,
timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Biography
Karl Weigl was born at 6 Gumpoldstraße, near the Ringstraße in Vienna in 1881, into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family. His parents, Ludwig Weigl (1856-1902), a bank clerk, and Gabrielle (Ella Stein-Jeiteles) Weigl (1859-1938), a homemaker, were both avid music lovers, and encouraged Weigl’s early interest in music. Since they both held Hungarian citizenship, Karl was also registered as a Hungarian citizen. Displaying immense talent from a young age, he began composing piano pieces at eleven, so his parents arranged for him to take private music lessons with their friend Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942), who also taught Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) at the same time. Weigl studied at the K. K. Franz Joseph Gymnasium from 1892-99. The Vienna of Weigl’s youth transformed quickly under Emperor Franz Joseph I (reigned 1848-1916) as new buildings like the Neue Hofoper, the Neues Rathaus, the Burgtheater, the Austria National Library, and the University sprang up along the Ringstraße encircling the historic city center. Mahler, Weigl’s future employer, was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897. …

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