marked Waghalter as among the most lyrical of German operatic composers in the pre-1933 era. Waghalter left the Deutsche Opernhaus in 1923. Traveling to the United States, he succeeded Joseph Stransky as musical director of the New York State Symphony, which he held during the 1925 season. Deeply attached to the cultural life of Berlin, Waghalter turned down an offer to remain at the State Symphony and returned to Germany. He assumed the position of Generalmusikmeister of UFA, the country's largest film production company in Germany. For UFA, Waghalter composed the original musical score for one of the most extraordinary German films of the Weimar era, Hanns Walter Kornblum's Wunder der Schöpfung. The pathbreaking film, which premiered in Berlin in September 1925, attempted to present in a popular cinematic form the greatest discoveries of modern astronomy. His music was described by one critic as a "sensation." Waghalter composed several operettas, and he was active as a guest conductor. Waghalter was appointed musical director at the National Opera in Riga, Latvia, for the 1931–32 season. Shortly after his return to Berlin, the Nazis came to power. In 1934, he went into exile, moving first to Czechoslovakia and then to Austria, where he composed his last opera, Ahasaverus und Esther. Several weeks before the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed by Germany, he and his wife fled to the United States. Later life Shortly after arriving in New York City, Waghalter initiated a campaign to establish a classical orchestra of African-American musicians. He secured the interest and support of militant New York trade unions, the noted African-American musician Alfred Jack Thomas, and such prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance as James Weldon Johnson. The orchestra performed publicly under Waghalter's direction in 1938. However, the project could not obtain sufficient funding to be sustained. Though Waghalter appeared occasionally as a guest conductor, his opportunities were extremely limited, and he died in relative obscurity in New York in 1949, at 68. Legacy Even though he was one of many Central European musicians whose lives and careers were shattered by the Nazi catastrophe, his subsequent and protracted obscurity, when contrasted to the scale of his pre-1933 prominence, is striking. His fate may be explained, to a large extent, by the radical shift in musical aesthetics in the aftermath of World War II. Waghalter did not experiment with atonality and serialism, and his commitment to melodicism placed