Rudolf Wagner-Régeny

Who was Rudolf Wagner-Régeny?

Rudolf Wagner-Régeny was a composer, conductor, and pianist. Born in Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, since 1920 Romania, he became a German citizen in 1930, and then East Germany after 1945.

From 1919–1920 he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory. In 1920 he enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik as a student of Rudolf Krasselt and Siegfried Ochs for conducting, and for orchestration of Emil von Řezníček, and with Friedrich Koch and Franz Schreker for composition, graduating in 1923. He served as chorusmaster at the Volksoper Berlin from 1923–1925. In 1927 joined Laban's dance company where he conducted productions for three years.

Wagner-Régeny first gained notice as a composer with his theatre pieces for Essen. In 1929 he met the designer Caspar Neher, who wrote the texts for Wagner-Régeny's best-known operas. In 1930 Wagner-Régeny became a naturalized German citizen, and married, his wife being half-Jewish. Between 1930 to 1945 he worked as a freelance composer and teacher, and with the rise of the Nazis was promoted by a faction of the party as a composer of the future despite the stylistic closeness of his music to the proscribed Kurt Weill. He managed to gain the friendship and esteem of Baldur von Schirach and his works were performed by Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. However, the success of his opera Der Günstling was followed by doubts regarding his subsequent output, ending in a scandal with his opera Johanna Balk at the Vienna State Opera, which aroused the ire of Joseph Goebbels. As punishment, Wagner-Regény was drafted into the military in 1942, though he managed to secure a desk job in the army, and survived the war.