[Walter Johannes]. American musician and conductor, born at Breslau, Germany, on the 30th of January 1862. He came to America in 1871 and ten years later began his career as conductor in Newark, NJ. In 1894 he founded the Damrosch Opera Co. for producing Wagner. In 1896 he produced, as director of the Oratorio Symphony Societies, Wagner’s Parsifal in concert form for the first time in the United States. Since 1903 he has been director of the New York Symphony Orchestra. He is the composer of The Scarlet Letter (1894); Cyrano (1913); and music for Euripides’ Medea, Iphigenia in Tauris (Berkeley, 1915) and Sophocles’s Electra (New York, 1917). At the request of Gen. Pershing he reorganized the bands of the A.E.F. in 1918.
His brother, Frank Heino Damrosch, was born at Breslau on the 22nd of June 1859. He was conductor in Denver, Newark, Bridgeport, and New York (the Oratorio Society 1898–1912). From 1905 he was director of the Institute of Musical Art.
