In 1937, while living in Vienna, Ignatz Waghalter composed Ahasuerus und Ester, based on the Biblical story of the Jewish Queen of Persia who risks her life to save her people from destruction. It is not difficult to understand why Waghalter was drawn to this story. Hamen, the malevolent adviser to the …
It was the evening of February 17, 1917. The European War that had begun in August 1914 had already claimed millions of lives. At the Deutsches Opernhaus in Berlin, the curtain rose for the premier of Jugend, the third opera by Ignatz Waghalter. Based on the naturalist drama of Max Halbe, the three-act opera …
In September 1941 Ignatz Waghalter was living in New York City, in an apartment on Central Park West and 100th Street. Four years had passed since he and his wife, Toni, had fled Europe. Waghalter’s life was productive, but the world in which he had developed his art no longer …
