Victor de Sabata (born April 10, 1892 in Trieste; died December 11, 1967 in Santa Margherita Ligure, Liguria) was an Italian conductor and composer. He was widely recognized as one of the greatest conductors of Italian opera, especially of Verdi and Puccini. He is also acclaimed for his conducting of Wagner and of orchestral music from the 19th and 20th centuries. Like his near contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler, de Sabata regarded composition as more important than conducting but achieved more lasting recognition as the latter. Some critics see de Sabata as a rival to Toscanini for the title of greatest Italian conductor of the twentieth century.

De Sabata was born in the cosmopolitan city of Trieste, Austria (today in Italy) to a Roman Catholic father and a Jewish mother. Both his parents were musicians: his father was a professional singing teacher and chorus master while his mother was a keen amateur. He began playing the piano at the age of four, and composed a gavotte for that instrument at the age of six. His formal musical studies began after his family moved to Milan around 1900. While at Milan, De Sabata studied at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, excelling at piano, violin, theory, composition and conducting. At the age of eighteen he graduated cum laude in composition, piano and violin. In 1911 he performed in an orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini who influenced him to become a conductor.

In 1918 De Sabata was appointed conductor of the Monte Carlo Opera, performing a wide variety of late-19th century and contemporary works. In 1925, he conducted the world premiere of L'enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel. Ravel said that De Sabata was a conductor "the like of which I have never before encountered"and wrote him a note the next day saying that "You have given me one of the most complete joys of my career". In 1921, while still conducting opera at Monte Carlo, De Sabata began his career as a symphonic conductor with the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In 1929 he made his U.S. debut with the Cincinnati Symphony.

De Sabata conducted the orchestra of La Scala in Milan for the first time in 1926, and conducted opera there from 1929, soon becoming the music director, a post he would hold for over 20 years. During the 1930s, De Sabata conducted widely in Italy and Central Europe. In 1933 he made his first commercial recordings with the Orchestra of the Italian Broadcasting Authority in Turin, including his own composition Juventus. In 1939, he became only the second conductor from outside the German-speaking world to conduct at Bayreuth when he led Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (Toscanini was the first, in 1930 and 1931). Among the audience at Bayreuth was the young Sergiu Celibidache who hid in the lavatory overnight in order to surreptitiously attend rehearsals. That same year he made celebrated recordings of Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It is unclear why de Sabata was allowed to work in Germany by the Nazi regime despite his part-Jewish background.

After World War II, De Sabata's career expanded internationally. He was a frequent guest conductor in London, New York and other American cities. In 1946 he recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the Decca recording company. In 1947 he made his first records for HMV, with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, including the first ever recording of Debussy's Jeux. He would go on to make more recordings with the same orchestra in 1948. In 1950 he was temporarily detained at Ellis Island along with several other Europeans under the newly-passed McCarran Act (the reason was his work in Italy during Mussolini's Fascist regime). In March 1950 and March 1951 De Sabata conducted the New York Philharmonic in a series of concerts in Carnegie Hall, many of which were preserved from radio transcriptions to form some of the most valuable items in his recorded legacy.

De Sabata's base remained La Scala, Milan, and he had the opportunity to work with two upwardly-mobile sopranos: Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas. In August 1953 he collaborated with Callas in his only commercial opera recording: Puccini's Tosca for HMV (also featuring Giuseppe di Stefano and Tito Gobbi along with the La Scala orchestra and chorus). This production is widely regarded as one of the greatest opera recordings of all time.

The Callas Tosca recording was planned to be only the first of a series of recordings in which HMV would set down much of De Sabata's operatic repertoire. However, soon after the sessions he suffered a heart attack so severe that it prompted him to stop performing regularly in public. His scheduled December 1953 La Scala performance of Allesandro Scarlatti's Mitridate Eupatore with Callas was replaced at short notice by an acclaimed Cherubini Medea with Leonard Bernstein. He resigned his conducting post at La Scala and was succeeded by his assistant Carlo Maria Giulini. Between 1953 and 1957 he held the administrative position of "Artistic Director" at La Scala. This period was notable for a reconciliation with Toscanini (with whom he had had a cool relationship for twenty years) during a La Scala production of Spontini's La vestale in 1954.

De Sabata only conducted twice again, once in a studio recording of Verdi's Requiem from June 1954 for HMV, and for the last time at Toscanini's memorial services (conducting the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in La Scala opera house followed by Verdi's Requiem in Milan Cathedral) in 1957. The last decade of his life was devoted to composition, but with few results. Although Walter Legge offered him an opportunity to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1964 and suggested that he write a completion to Puccini's opera Turandot, neither of these things occurred. He enjoyed solving mathematical problems in his retirement. De Sabata died alone of heart disease in obscurity in Santa Margherita, Liguria, Italy in 1967. At his memorial service, the Orchestra of La Scala performed without a conductor as a mark of respect.