Richard Heuberger (1850-1914)
Richard Franz Joseph Heuberger hailed from Graz in Austria,
where he was born on 18
June 1850, the son of a bandage manufacturer. After embarking upon an engineering career -
a parallel he shared with Josef Strauss - he abandoned it in 1876
for a life in music.
Following studies at the Graz Conservatory, he transferred to Vienna where he became
chorus master of the Wiener Akademischer Gesangverein, conductor of the Wiener
Singakademie (1878), director of the prestigious Wiener Männergesang-Verein (Vienna Men's
Choral Association) and, in 1902, a teacher at the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien.
He turned to music criticism in 1881, at first with the Neues Wiener Tagblatt,
later with the Munich Allgemeine Zeitung (from 1889) and from 1896-1901 was Eduard
Hanslick's successor on the influential Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse.
A lifelong freelance journalist, he edited the Neue Musikalische Presse from 1904,
while his own literary works included various sketches and essays and a biography of Franz
Schubert (1902).
As a composer he wrote operas, ballets, choral works, songs and much orchestral music,
besides arrangements of works by Brahms and Schubert, and his teacher Robert Fuchs. Not
until he was in his forties did Heuberger turn his hand to writing operettas, six of which
were performed. It was, however, with the first of these, Der Opernball (The Opera
Ball, 1898), that Heuberger achieved his most lasting fame.
Particularly interesting is the fact that Heuberger was the original choice to set the
book of Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) to music. To his credit, after toiling
uninspired for three years (1901-04) on the first act, he raised no objection when the
task was entrusted instead to Franz Lehár. Richard Heuberger died in Vienna on 28 October
1914.
