Joseph Keilberth was a German conductor who specialised in opera.
He started his career in the State Theatre of his native city, Karlsruhe. In 1940 he became director of the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague. Near the end of World War II, he was appointed principal conductor of the venerable Saxon State Opera Orchestra in Dresden. In 1949 he became chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, formed mainly of German musicians expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia under the Beneš decrees. He died in Munich in 1968 after collapsing while conducting Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde in exactly the same place as Felix Mottl was similarly fatally stricken in 1911. His final recording, a Meistersinger, came a month before his death — at the Bavarian State Opera on 21 June.
Keilberth was a regular at Bayreuth in the early 1950s, with complete Ring cycles from 1952, 1953 and 1955, as well as a well-regarded recording of Die Walküre from 1954 in which Martha Mödl, perhaps the greatest Wagnerian actress and tragedian of her time, sang her only recorded Sieglinde.