In September 1930, he resigned his position at Bayreuth, much to the distress of Winifred Wagner, who had just succeeded her late husband Siegfried Wagner as the Festival's director. He never accommodated himself to being upstaged by Toscanini, but writing privately to Winifred Wagner, he said he had been committed to serving her husband, but the Festival now required someone other than "I, whose artistic standpoint and convictions, so far as is concerned, stem from the preceding century." He resigned his Hamburg position in 1933, uncomfortable with the Nazi authorities' direction of the city's symphony and opera.