Anton Seidl (7 May 185028 March 1898) was a famous Hungarian Wagner conductor, best known for his association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and the New York Philharmonic. Biography He was born in Pest, Austria-Hungary, where he began the study of music at a very early age. When only seven years old, he could pick out at the piano melodies which he had heard in the theatre. At 15, he became a student of harmony and counterpoint under Nicolitsch. He attended the normal school at Pest for three years, the gymnasium for eight years. At age 16 he had been thinking of becoming a priest. Seidl entered the Royal University of Pest, but his love for music prevailed and he left the university two years later to go to Leipzig, where he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from October 1870, remaining there until 1872, when he was summoned to Bayreuth as one of Richard Wagner's copyists. At Bayreuth, he assisted in making the first fair copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner treated him as one of the "chosen few", and it was natural that he should take a part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Wagner then sent him to Vienna to stage Siegfried and Götterdämmerung there, the last two of his operatic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. His chance as a conductor came in 1879 when, on Wagner's recommendation, he was appointed to the Leipzig State Opera. In May 1881, he introduced in the Victoria Theatre, Berlin, the complete Ring tetralogy for the first time. In 1882, he went on tour with Angelo Neumann's Nibelungen Ring company. The critics attributed much of the artistic success that attended the production of the Ring at Her Majesty's Theatre in London in June of that year to his conducting. In 1883 Seidl went with Neumann to Bremen, and in 1884 he married Auguste Kraus in Frankfurt, a distinguished singer of the German Opera Company. In 1885, after Leopold Damrosch's death Anton Seidl accepted the first conductor’s position of the German opera in New York, then domiciled at the Metropolitan Opera House, where Seidl made his debut with Wagner’s Lohengrin on 23 November in 1885. Seidl, as celebrated conductor of the musical life in New York, became the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1891, where he remained until his death in 1898. During his tenure,