Henry Swoboda

Henry Swoboda (29 October 1897, Prague – 13 August 1990, Rossinière) was a Czech-American conductor and musicologist.

He was born into the family of Heinrich Swoboda (born 1856), a Prague university professor (1914–1915 rector of the German Charles-Ferdinand University and his wife Alma, née Budinerová (born 1868), an alto singer.^[1] After studying at the Prague Conservatory with Václav Talich, in 1922, he received a doctorate in philosophy from the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.^[2]

He worked from 1927 to 1931 for Electrola, Berlin and later as conductor for Radio-Prag. From 1931 to 1939 he was a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States, where he obtained citizenship in the mid-1940s.^[2]

Along with James Grayson and Mischa Naida, he was a co-founder of U.S. Westminster Records which flourished in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s as a purveyor of classical music recordings. Swoboda made many recordings for Westminster and the Concert Hall record label, including the first commercially available recordings of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony and Dvořák's 3rd.^[3]

Horst Weber, Manuela Schwartz (Ed.), Sources relating to the history of émigré musicians, 1933–1950, vol. 2, Munich 2005, p. 272.