Richard Heuberger

Richard Heuberger (Graz, 1850 – Vienna, 1914) was an Austrian critic and composer whose memory today rests almost entirely on a single stage work, the operetta Der Opernball. He spent much of his career in late nineteenth-century Vienna, where he held prominent posts in the city's musical life.

Before devoting himself to music he worked as an engineer, but in 1876 he abandoned that profession to study in Graz with W. A. Rémy. That same year he settled in Vienna and became conductor of the Academischer Gesangverein, and in 1878 he took over the Singakademie. From 1902 he taught at the conservatory and directed the Wiener Männergesang-Verein until 1909.

His work as a critic was equally intense. He wrote for the Neues Wiener Tagblatt from 1881 and for the Munich Allgemeine Zeitung from 1889, and between 1896 and 1901 he succeeded Hanslick at the influential Neue freie Presse. He also edited the periodical Musikbuch aus Österreich between 1904 and 1906. He gathered several collections of his reviews and in 1902 published a biography of Schubert.

As a composer he wrote two ballets, four operas and several operettas. His choral and orchestral works brought him considerable fame during his lifetime, but his stage pieces met with little success. One episode illustrates this well: when he was commissioned to write the music for The Merry Widow, he failed to produce a score that satisfied the management of the Theater an der Wien, which ultimately entrusted it to the young Lehár.

Today his legacy rests chiefly on Der Opernball (1898), premiered at the Theater an der Wien, which remains a pillar of the German operetta repertoire. The duet 'Geh'n wir ins Chambre séparée', for soprano and mezzo-soprano, is especially admired. His name thus remains linked to the musical life of Vienna in his era and to a score that outlived its composer.