Henry Weber

Henry Weber (1900 - 14 January 1991) was an American pianist and conductor. Mr. Weber was musical director of Chicago radio station WGN from 1934 to 1958 and for the Chicagoland Musical Festival from 1937 to 1958, when he retired and began traveling. He was married for 58 years to the late Marion Claire, a Chicago opera star who performed for many years on the Chicago Theater of the Air. Mr. Weber was born in 1900 in Berlin to American parents. A talented pianist who also played the cello and clarinet, Mr. Weber studied music in Vienna as a child, where he trained under composer Richard Strauss, and graduated from the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna. He was the guest conductor in Bremen, Germany of ''Mignon.'' In 1923, he was hired to conduct the Chicago Civic Opera Orchestra and became the youngest conductor of a major opera company in the world. In 1929, he left Chicago for Italy, where he became the first American to conduct opera in Italy, performing at the Opera House in Florence until 1933. He returned to the United States a staff producer and conductor from 1933 to 1934 for NBC. In the summer of 1934, a stint as guest conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra landed him a job at WGN. He joined the station in the fall of that year as commentator for the popular Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert series, at a time when their concerts were broadcast on WGN. One of his responsibilities at WGN was producing the Chicago Theater of the Air, a program of light opera and musical classics, which he did for 20 years. This required him to condense operatic and other productions into the program`s hourlong format. Mr. Weber was best known in Chicago for his Chicago Theater of the Air productions on WGN radio. He and his first wife, Marion Claire Weber, a lyric soprano with a long career in the opera, performed condensed versions of major operas for radio listeners. He was the conductor, and she sang the lead roles. He was also the conductor at the Chicagoland Music Festival for 15 years, sponsored by the Tribune and held annually in late August in Soldier Field. Mr. Weber, in addition to his talent at the keyboard and as a musical director, also played the cello, clarinet and pipe organ. He and his wife moved to Fort Lauderdale in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and lived before that of Lake Bluff. He died in Broward Medical Center in Ft. Lauderdale. Initially, he was active in providing musical direction to the Fort Lauderdale Symphony. After his first wife died in 1988, he married Marion Schroeder Levitt in March 1990, a noted soprano on the WGN staff from 1938 to 1955. He is survived by his second wife, Marion Schroeder Levitt Weber; his son, Henry/Heinzl, and daughter-in-law Yolanda, of Boca Raton; and three grandsons, Henry George III of Boca Raton, and Mark and Ronald, both of Colorado.