Walter Herbert (conductor)

Walter Herbert (conductor)

Walter Herbert (né Seligmann, February 18, 1898 – September 14, 1975) was an American conductor and impresario of German birth, as well as a world champion at contract bridge.

He was born Walter Seligmann in Frankfurt, and studied composition under Arnold Schönberg in Vienna. He gained experience as a conductor in Germany and Switzerland, as well as chief conductor at the Vienna Volksoper (1931–38). His operatic debut was with Carmen, at the Stadttheater Bern, in 1925. Just before the 1938 Anschluss of Germany and Austria, Herbert visited Japan to introduce modern western music. From there he migrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen in 1944.

Herbert was director of Opera in English (San Francisco, 1940–43), and in 1943 was appointed the first general director of the New Orleans Opera Association, where he held the post until 1954. He proceeded to found the Houston Grand Opera in 1955, where he remained as both general director and conductor until 1972, and was music director of Opera/South (which was founded by Sister M. Elise Sisson, SBS) in Jackson, Mississippi. He founded the San Diego Opera in 1965, and became its general director and conductor from 1969 until his death.

Herbert worked with most of the great singers of his day, and gave many of them their start in the opera world. In April 1948, during Herbert's regime in New Orleans, the young Mario Lanza made one of his very few operatic stage-appearances, as B.F. Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, under Herbert's baton, and Armando Agnini's stage direction. It was announced that he had accepted the role of Alfredo Germont, in the New Orleans Opera's La traviata, in May 1948, but Hollywood apparently interfered with those plans.