Seyfried, Ignaz (Xaver), Ritter von
Seyfried, Ignaz (Xaver), Ritter von
Seyfried, Ignaz (Xaver), Ritter von, Austrian conductor, teacher, and composer; b. Vienna, Aug. 15, 1776; d. there, Aug. 27, 1841. He was a close friend of Mozart, and had some piano lessons with him; studied also with Kozeluh and Albrechtsberger. In 1797 he became conductor at Schikaneder’s Freihaus-Theater in Vienna, then was conductor of the Theater an der Wien (1801–27). He was an extremely prolific composer, and some of his Singspiels were very successful; one of them, Die Ochsenmenuette, based on Haydn’s music (Vienna, Dec. 31, 1823), gave rise to the well-known anecdote about Haydn’s composing an Ox Minuet for a butcher and receiving an ox as a gift. Seyfried also wrote the opera Der Wundermann am Rheinfall (Vienna, Oct. 26, 1799), which elicited praise from Haydn. He further wrote numerous melodramas, ballets, oratorios, motets, syms., quartets, etc. He pubi. Albrechtsberger’s Sämmtliche Schriften (1826), Preindl’s Wiener Tonschule (1827), and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Studien im Generalbasse, Contra-puncte und in der Compositions-Lehre (1832).
Bibliography
A. Schmidt, Denksteine: Biographien von I.R. v.S …(Vienna, 1848); B. von Seyfried, I. Ritter von S.: Thematischbibliographisches Verzeichnis: Aspekte der Biographie und des Werkes (Frankfurt am Main and N.Y., 1990).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire