Life in the Vienna Prater

Siegfried Translateur was a German composer, publisher and music director. He hailed from the province of Silesia where he was born as an illegitimate child. His mother later married cantor Salomon Lagodzinsky who in turn adopted young Siegfried. His musical studies brought him to Wroclaw, Vienna and Leipzig. Following this period, he went to Berlin as music director, and conducted his own orchestra there. As a composer, Translateur was especially successful in the field of light music, and above all composed marches, waltzes and character pieces so that his total oeuvre encompassed 165 opus numbers in 1929. In this respect his curriculum vitae may well be compared to other composer-colleagues who had been active in the German capital then in this realm of music. According to statements of his own the great inspiration for his musical efforts came from the French composer Emile Waldteufel. A publishing company appeared to be the appropriate instrument to have his music disseminated in a promising way. Consequently, he founded the Lyra Publishing Company in 1911. Here he also published the works of famous colleagues such as Paul Lincke and Franz von Blon. Works of his own were not only listed in the Lyra Publishing catalogs, but also by such renowned publishers like Oertel, Bosworth or Hainauer of Wrowlaw. In 1933 he welcomed his son in his own company and henceforth called it Lyra, Translateur & Co.

During his stay in Vienna he composed the attractive waltz Wiener Praterleben (Vienna Prater Life) in 1892. It was his Opus 12. It became particularly popular, when it was premiered during the Berlin six-day-race in 1923, the more so as the artist who performed it then was the Berlin thoroughbred Otto Kermbach orchestra. Its increasing popularity meant that it became truly known by the title “Sports Palace Waltz”, and this far beyond the limits of Berlin. Not even the performance ban pronounced by the propaganda minister Goebbels in 1934 could suppress the high degree of popularity of the waltz.

According to the Nuremberg Racial Laws Siegfried Translateur was classified as “half-jew” and this evidently was enough for him to be denounced as both “jew” and “half-jew”. And now the national socialist machinery began to operate with the result that radical interventions in his business and personal life were implemented. At the end of this detrimental process he was forced to sell his publishing company.

In 1943 he was eventually deported to the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where he died in 1944 resp. where he was murdered by the SS according to Prieberg.