Gabriel von Wayditch (28 December 1888, Budapest – 28 July 1969 New York City) was a Hungarian-American composer whose output consisted primarily of 14 grand operas.
He studied piano, conducting, and composition at the National Hungarian Academy of Music (now the Franz Liszt Academy of Music) where his teachers included Franz Liszt's pupil Emil von Sauer and Hans von Koessler, who was also the teacher of composers Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernő Dohnányi, and Kálmán Emmerich.
Wayditch subsequently derived two orchestral suites and his sole piano composition, Reminscences from Opium Dreams, from the thematic material in that opera.
During the remainder of the decade he composed two additional operas, both somewhat shorter though requiring the same massive orchestration: Suh és Sah (The Caliph's Magician) (1917) and Jézus Heròdes elött (Jesus Before Herod) (1918).
During the 1920s and 1930s, he composed six additional operas, most lasting nearly five hours and all featuring his own librettos, in Hungarian, and a very large orchestra, all without any impetus of an impending production, working in almost complete isolation in an apartment in the Bronx.
Most last nearly five hours, many call for frequent scene changes, and all have plots involving intricate historical myths that take place in exotic lands, in ancient times, or on other planets.
[9] In October 2009, the Hungarian Culture Center mounted a presentation about Wayditch at the Brooklyn Museum featuring a performance of Reminscences from Opium Dreams by pianist Lloyd Arriola, a short ballet featuring excerpts from the two recorded operas, and a talk by Frank J. Oteri, who wrote the entry on Gabriel von Wayditch for the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.