SEIDL, ANTON (1850-1898), Hungarian operatic conductor, was born at Budapest on the 7th of May 1850. He entered the Leipzig Conservatorium in October 1870, and remained there until 1872, when he was summoned to Bayreuth as one of Wagner's copyists. There he assisted to make the first fair copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Thoroughly imbued with the Wagnerian spirit, it was natural that he should take a part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. His chance as a conductor came when, on Wagner's recommendation, he was appointed to the Leipzig Stadt-Theater, where he remained until, in 1882, he went on tour with Angelo Neumann's Nibelungen Ring company. To his conducting the critics attributed much of such artistic success as attended the production of the Trilogy at Her Majesty's Theatre in London in June of that year. In 1883 Seidl went with Neumann to Bremen, but two years later was appointed successor to Leopold Damrosch as conductor of the German Opera in New York, and in the same year he married Fräulein Kraus, the distinguished singer. In America Seidl's orchestra became famous. In 1886 he was one of the conductors at Bayreuth, and in 1897 at Covent Garden, London. He died in New York on the 28th of March 1898.
See the memorial volume prepared by H. T. Finck, H. E. Krehbiel and others (New York, 1899).