Botho Sigwart zu Eulenburg

The Prince zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld himself played and composed music and wrote poetry and romances (the famous Rosenlieder and Scandinavian Cantos) and was a friend and confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who regularly visited Liebenberg.

Emperor Wilhelm even commissioned the eleven-year-old boy to compose variations on the Dessauer March, a composition for orchestra that was performed in the music salon in Vienna with Sigwart himself conducting.

Apart from his diverse social life and wide circle of friends including, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Professor Arthur Nikisch, the artist continued to study the great philosophers and the different world religions.

In addition to studying the basic works of Anthroposophy, he often attended Steiner's lectures together with his sisters Lycki and Tora, his brother Karl, and his sister-in-law Marie.

Having been alerted to the texts of Euripides by his early music teacher, Count Sporck, Sigwart withdrew for a period in 1912 and 1913 to his family residence Hertefeld Castle by the Rhine to work on it in solitude.

After a labour of one and a half years, it was to be the only opera he composed, its completion coinciding with the birth of his only son Friedrich Max Donatus Sigwart on 19 February 1914.

His widow survived him by eight years, his son Friedrich, also a brilliant young musician, was accidentally killed in 1936 during a reserve duty training exercise at the age of 22.

Between 1970 and 1972 three volumes of communications between Sigwart, his sisters Lycky and Tora and sister-in-law Marie appeared in publication under the title Brücke über den Strom, published in English as Bridge over the River.

[4] The relationship to Anthroposophy continued in the family subsequently and Sigwart's older brother, the later Prince Friedrich Wend zu Eulenburg was one of the influential signatories to the petition to release the priests of the Christian Community, who had been interned by the Gestapo in 1941.