Anton Seidl had a short life, but one that was particularly influential in America. He was born in one of the Hungarian cities that eventually merged to create the modern city of Budapest. He studied from 1870 to 1872 at both the University and the Conservatory in Leipzig. When he graduated, he obtained a job with Richard Wagner as an assistant, participating in preparing the score of Der Ring des Nibelungen (an immense cycle of four full-length operas) for publication. (Composers, if they can afford it, often leave to assistants the lengthy and tedious job of preparing a clean and corrected manuscript for publishers, proofreading it, and extracting the parts for the individual orchestral players.) Wagner certainly appreciated the volume of detailed and attentive work this required. "What would I do without my Seidl" he once exclaimed. After that, since he knew the score as well as anyone besides the composer, it was natural that he was hired to help rehearse and coach the initial complete performance of the Ring at the first Wagner Festival in 1876. Meanwhile, Wagner had done right by his assistant by using his influence to get Seidl a conducting job, at Angelo Neumann's Wagner Theater in Leipzig in 1875. This led to him becoming director of the Leipzig Opera in 1879. It was well-known that Wagner seriously considered him to conduct the world premiere of his next and final opera, Parsifal. In the end, though he chose Herman Levi to present the work, in 1882. Seidl successfully toured Europe as a guest conductor in 1882 to 1883. In the latter year, he was appointed conductor of the Bremen Opera. While there, he married soprano Auguste Kraus. He accepted a guest conducting appearance at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1885. While he was there, one of the Met's leading conductors, Leopold Damrosch, died unexpectedly, and Seidl accepted an invitation to stay and take over the German repertoire at that house. He had a successful 12-year tenure there, and in 1891 he was also appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His success as a purely orchestral conductor was not as widely conceded. It is contended that he had to learn many standard orchestral items for the first time while conducting at the Met. But while in both positions he introduced many standard operatic repertoire items to America. He was the first to play Meistersinger, Tristan, and the Ring (of which only Walküre had previously been heard in America). It was he who conducted the world premiere of Dvorák's final symphony, From the New World. Despite his fame as one of Wagner's leading interpreters, he was not engaged to conduct in Bayreuth until 1897, when he led Parsifal. It was almost too late, for he died unexpectedly in March, 1898, at the age of 47. His career and maturity as a conductor were obviously still building at the time of his death. Despite the misgivings about his lack of experience as an orchestral conductor at the beginning of his Philharmonic tenure, it is as an orchestral conductor that his influence has been strongest. With Theodore Thomas, he was one of the leaders in propagating orchestral performance in America. He founded the Seidl Society, a touring orchestra with which he traveled throughout the country, often bringing Beethoven, Liszt, Berlioz, and other great composers to American communities for the first time. He and Theodore Thomas were the first to conduct Bruckner's symphonies in the United States.