Biography

Wolfgang Sawallisch (26 August 1923 – 22 February 2013) was a German conductor and pianist. Wolfgang Sawallisch was born in Munich, the son of Maria and Wilhelm Sawallisch. His father was director of the Hamburg-Bremer-Feuerversicherung insurance company in the city. Wolfgang's brother Werner was five years older. He passed his Abitur in 1942 at the Wittelsbacher-Gymnasium in Munich.

At the age of five, he was already playing the piano and by the time he was ten, he had decided he wanted to become a concert pianist. As a child, he was greatly influenced by Richard Strauss and Hans Knappertsbusch. In his musical education he was generously supported by his family, especially by his widowed mother, who became active again because of him, and also by his older brother. At first, he studied composition and piano privately. This enabled him to prepare for his career as a pianist and conductor before and after the Second World War without financial worries. His professional development was interrupted by his military service and captivity: during the war he served in the Wehrmacht, in France and Italy, and in the closing stages of the war was detained at a British POW camp in Italy.

After returning home to Munich, he studied with Joseph Haas and, after one semester, passed his state examination at the Staatliche Musikhochschule in Munich in 1946. He took conducting lessons with Hans Rosbaud and Igor Markevitch. He found his first job at the Stadttheater Augsburg. During this time he married the singer Mechthild Schmid (1921–1998), daughter of the organ builder Magnus Schmid (1889–1964) from Pemmering, whom he had already met in his youth in Munich. She had a great influence on him throughout his life together.

Through the adoption of her son, born in 1944, from his wife's first marriage, he founded his own family. Mechthild renounced her own career as a singer in favour of her husband's career; on the one hand she suffered from standing in the shadow of the successful man, on the other hand she saw her function as his manager. After 46 years of marriage she died at the age of 77 due to her thyroid cancer.

The Wolfgang Sawallisch Foundation was founded in Grassau, in Bavaria in 2003 and comprises a music school. At a benefit concert of the Bavarian State Orchestra in Grassau on 2 February 2013 under the baton of Kent Nagano, Sawallisch was seen in public for the last time. He gave the opera world his last press interview for the January 2013 issue. His son Jörg died in January 2013, just one month before his adoptive father. Sawallisch lived for over 50 years in Grassau in Chiemgau, Upper Bavaria, where he was also buried.

The villa in Grassau, where Wolfgang Sawallisch had lived for decades, was taken over by the Sawallisch Foundation in 2014 and is occasionally used for concerts by the Grassau Music School.