Ernest Bloch

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Ernest Bloch around 1900
Ernest Bloch with children in America

Ernest Bloch (born July 24, 1880 in Geneva , † July 15, 1959 in Portland , Oregon ) was a Swiss - American composer .

The first years

Ernest Bloch began playing the violin at the age of nine and made so rapid progress under the guidance of his first teacher Albert Gos that at the end of 1894 he recommended a change to Émile Jaques-Dalcroze , professor at the Geneva Conservatory ( Conservatoire de musique de Genève ). This recognized Bloch's compositional talent and taught him music theory and composition; Louis Rey took over violin lessons . Although his parents were against it, Bloch went to Brussels in 1896 to study violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe , where François Rasse became his composition teacher. Dissatisfied with his lessons, he moved to Iwan Knorr in Frankfurt / Main at the Dr. Hoch Conservatory and two years later to Ludwig Thuille in Munich.

After graduating, he traveled to Paris. Here he met Claude Debussy . In 1903 Bloch's first public performance of his music at a Swiss-German music festival in Basel was severely attacked by critics. One even wrote that a young upstart who had the affront of writing such dissonant and wild music should be locked up forever with bread and water. Since he could not find any other job, he was forced to work in his parents' business. His opera Macbeth , for which Edmond Fleg wrote the libretto and on which he had worked for five years, was also unsuccessful when it premiered on October 30, 1910 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. After a brief activity as a concert conductor in Neuchâtel and Lausanne (1909/1910), he held lectures on music aesthetics at the Geneva Conservatory until 1915. Here the future conductor Ernest Ansermet heard him .

In America

In 1916 he took the position of orchestra conductor in Maud Allan's dance group , which went on a North American tour with 40 musicians and six other dancers. However, this was not very successful and Bloch was stranded in America. On December 29, 1916, his first string quartet by the Flonzaley Quartet - founded in Switzerland - was performed in New York at the Aeolian Hall and made a strong impression. In January 1917 he met Mrs. JFD Lanier of the Society of Friends of Music, who gave him generous and unselfish help. Because his works were still unknown in America, Paul Rosenfeld published an article "The music of Ernest Bloch" in February 1917 and in the following month Waldo Frank, director of the magazine "The Seven Arts", translated an article written by Bloch into English and published it him "Man and his Music". The apparent catastrophe turned into a triumph when several important conductors - Karl Muck in Boston, Artur Bodanzky in New York, and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia - performed Trois poèmes juifs ("Three Jewish poems": Danse, Rite and Cortege Funebre). He traveled back to Europe on June 7, 1917 and returned to America with his family on October 19. Before leaving, he had signed a contract with Rudolf Schirmer for the publication of his works. 1917–1918 he taught at The David Mannes Music School (now Mannes College of Music ), which was founded in 1916 by David Mannes (then concertmaster of the New York Symphony Orchestra ) and his wife Clara Mannes Damrosch (sister of Walter Damrosch ), and again in 1918–1919. During his time at David Mannes Music School he already had 20 private students, including Herbert Elwell , Roger Sessions , Frederick Jacobi and Ethel Leginska .

He spent the summer of 1919 with the family in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Mrs. Arthur Johnson (Joanne Bird Shaw) had started a summer school for children - The Bird School - which Bloch's daughters also attended. Here he taught the rhythmic embodiment of music based on his former teacher Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva. It was a new experience and he really enjoyed it. Chicago's Francis Parker School became interested in this new way of teaching music, and FM McMurry published a book about it.

In 1919 he won the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize for the viola suite. With the performances of the "Jewish cycle" consisting of Trois poèmes juifs , Schelomo and Israel , he had consolidated his reputation as a composer, so that on July 11, 1920 he was appointed music director at the Cleveland Institute of Music , which was being established. The faculty soon consisted of 20 people, including Nathan Fryer for piano and ensemble, the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra Louis Edlin and Victor de Gomez, principal cellist; Beryl Rubinstein (later director) and Ruth Edwards followed in the piano faculty; André de Ribaupierre, violin; Edwin Arthur Kraft , organ; Jean Binet, who founded the first Emile Jaques-Dalcroze school in New York and taught eurythmy and theory, as well as Bloch's former pupil Roger Sessions for Composition. Here he also founds a student orchestra and a choir. Here he composed his famous first piano quintet. It is compulsory for students to attend rehearsals with the Cleveland Orchestra to experience harmony and counterpoint. In 1922 he taught five “master classes” during the summer months. He also sets up a kind of adult education center where he gives lectures “Music explained by a musician”. He dedicated his second violin sonata “Poème mystique”, which he composed in 1924, to André de Ribaupierre.

In 1926 Bloch moved to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music , where he composed Four Episodes for chamber orchestra (1926), America: An Epic Rhapsody (1927) and Helvetia (1929). With the Rhapsody , he won the $ 3000, - music competition from Musical America 1928. The judges, consisting of five highly respected orchestral conductors, including Leopold Stokowski , unanimously selected his work as the winner. Under the title The Mountains - later Helvetia - he took part in the 1929 Victor Company music competition. He wins the prize, which is endowed with $ 25,000 and finally feels free.

The family of Rosalie and Jacob Stern (who with his brothers continued to run Levi Strauss's company ), who were kind to Bloch, set up an extraordinarily generous $ 50,000 trust fund for him, administered by the University of California at Berkeley . For a period of ten years he received $ 5000 annually from this fund. He was released from all teaching obligations and was able to devote himself fully to composing. He was also not tied to any place of residence. Then he decided to go back to Switzerland. So he settled in 1930 in Roveredo, Ticino, in the Swiss-Italian Alps, where he be in 1930-33 Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service, service ) has composed. In Roveredo he was also able to develop his passion for photography.

plant

Bloch's early works, such as his opera Macbeth (1910), are influenced by both the late Romantic school of Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy's impressionism . The mature works, including his most famous pieces, are often inspired by Jewish liturgical and folk music . These works include Schelomo (1916) for cello and orchestra , the Israel Symphony (1916), the Suite for viola and piano or orchestra (1919), Baal Schem (1923 for violin and piano , later for violin and orchestra), as well Avodath Hakodesch ( Divine Service , 1933) for baritone , choir and orchestra. Other pieces from this period include the Violin Concerto for Joseph Szigeti and America: An Epic Rhapsody for Choir and Orchestra.

Bloch had a critical understanding of religion and said in a letter from 1899 that he was "neither a believer nor an atheist" . He was not strictly bound to any religion and, as a Jew, admired Jesus Christ as the "only person who lived according to his principles, was not caught up in doctrines and acted according to what he preached himself" .

The works written after the Second World War show a greater stylistic difference, although Bloch's essentially romantic style is retained. Some, like the Suite hébraïque (1950), continue the Jewish theme, while others, like the second Concerto grosso (1952), show an interest in neoclassicism . However, here too the harmonious language is romantic and only the form is baroque . The late string quartets use atonal elements.

While Bloch was able to celebrate great successes, especially in the USA, during his lifetime (his followers saw him as the fourth "B" after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) and is still considered an important composer today, his works have largely been forgotten in Europe. Bloch visited England in the 1930s where he gave concerts. In 1949 his Concerto Symphonique for piano and orchestra was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival. In the same year he conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra with choir in the Royal Albert Hall, where Schelomo with the cellist Zara Nelsova and Avodath Hakodesch with the baritone Aron Rothmüller were performed.

Personal

Bloch was the youngest of three children. His father Maurice had a souvenir shop in Geneva and among other things sold cuckoo clocks to tourists. He and Bloch's mother, Sophie, divorced in 1901. His father had lost a lot of money in the stock market and they had gotten into financial trouble. His father died on March 31, 1913.

On August 13, 1904, in Geneva, he married Margarethe (French = Marguerite) Augusta Schneider, pianist from Hamburg, († 1963), whom he had met at the Hoch'sche Schule. They had three children:

  • February 20, 1905 birth of his son Ivan-Kolia, who became an engineer
  • August 9, 1907 birth of his daughter Suzanne, the only musician. She taught harp, lute and composition at the Juilliard School in New York.
  • January 5, 1909 birth of his daughter Lucienne. She became a (wall) painter and photographer. Together with her husband, Stephen Pope Dimitroff, she assisted Diego Rivera with his (later destroyed) wall painting at Rockefeller Center. The only surviving photographs of this wall come from her. She was friends with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo , and took many photos of her, which later became part of many biographies about Kahlo.

In 1924 he received American citizenship.

Ernest Bloch died of colon cancer in 1959 in a Portland, Oregon hospital. He had settled in Agate Beach in 1941 because the mountains and forests of Oregon reminded him of his homeland in Switzerland. Its ashes were given to the sea at Agate Beach.

Awards and honors

  • Coolidge Prize - 1919
  • Carolyn Beebe Prize - 1927
  • Musical America - 1928
  • RCA Victor Award - 1929
  • Italy's Academy of Saint Cecelia - 1929
  • Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters - 1937
  • Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters - 1947
  • Stephen Wise Award - 1952
  • Music Critics Circle of New York City - 1954
  • National Jewish Welfare Board's Frank L. Weil Award - 1956
  • Brandeis Creative Arts Award - 1956
  • Henry Hadley Medal - 1957 awarded by the "National Association of Composers and Conductors"
  • Honorary Doctorate from Linfield College - 1948
  • Honorary Doctorate from Brandeis University - 1955
  • Doctoral degree from Reed College - 1955
  • Professeur Eméritus de l'Université de Berkeley - 1952

In May 1937 the Ernest Bloch Society was founded in England by Albert Einstein , Sir Thomas Beecham , Serge Koussevitzky , Havelock Ellis , Romain Rolland , Sir Donald Francis Tovey and Bruno Walter , who also acted as directors.

Bloch the photographer

Inspired by his professor, Bernard Freemesser, who had heard of the work of the photographer W. Eugene Smith to combine Bloch's music with photography, Eric Johnson contacted Ivan Bloch in 1969, who referred him to his sister Lucienne, who made him invited them to look through her father's photo archive. Bloch began taking still pictures as a violin student as early as 1897 with the self-timer and had collected more than 6000 negatives and 2000 prints in the course of his life. Armed with a college project, Johnson began reviewing in 1970-71 and set up a makeshift darkroom on Lucienne and Stephen Dimitroff's property in Gualala, Mendocino County, California. Thousands of the photos were contact sheets without enlargement. But there were also rolls of film from his Leica and 4x5 glass plates. Johnston documented his findings in "Aperture magazine" of 1972 "A Composer's Vision: Photographs by Ernest Bloch". Later in the graduate program at the University of New Mexico, Johnson had better developing techniques and Paul Caponigro showed him the printing technique for the negatives. In 1977 he created the first exhibition at the University of New Mexico together with the Faculty of Music, to which Lucienne and Steve Dimitroff also came.

Bloch's huge collection of 6,000 negatives and 2,000 prints was acquired and archived in 1978 by the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.

Eric Johnson donated 105 black-and-white photographs from the period 1896 to 1937 to the Library of Congress.

In 2011, Johnston exhibited 40 photos of Bloch at the Portland Jewish Museum.

Catalog raisonné

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Macbeth Opera in 3 Acts ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / homepage3.nifty.com
  2. ↑ Bloch in the Bibliothèque des Conservatoire de Musique de Genève
  3. ↑ Meet the Artist
  4. ↑ Ernest Bloch in Schirmer
  5. ↑ David Mannes: Music Is My Faith. To Autobiography. WW Norton & Co. Inc. 1938 - Bloch in David Mannes' School - pages 242-43
  6. ↑ Ernest Bloch in: FM McMURRY: A SCHOOL IN ACTION Data on Children, Artists, and Teachers (Birk School, Peterborough, NH) Publisher: EP BUTTON & COMPANY, 1922 - Music, page 45ff
  7. ↑ The Bloch Viola Suite
  8. ^ Cleveland Institute of Music - History
  9. ^ Cleveland Orchestra Principal Musicians
  10. ↑ Helga Maria Craubner: André de Ribaupierre. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . January 4, 2012 , accessed June 6, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Jean Binet
  12. ^ San Francisco Conservatory of Music - history
  13. ^ David Z. Kushner: Religious Ambiguity in the Life and Works of Ernest Bloch ; in Israel Studies in Musicology Online , Vol. 2004
  14. ↑ Biography Lucienne Bloch (1909-1999) ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.luciennebloch.com
  15. ↑ Members: Ernest Bloch. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 17, 2019 .
  16. ^ Website Ernest Bloch
  17. ↑ The International Ernest Bloch Society - Re-launched 2008 ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 668 kB)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ernestblochsociety.org
  18. ↑ Website Eric Johnston - Photographs by Ernest Bloch ( Memento of the original from June 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ericjohnsonphoto.com
  19. ↑ Eric Johnson Collection of Ernest Bloch Photographs (PDF file; 34 kB) in the Library of Congress
  20. ↑ Johnston photos in the Jewish Museum ( Memento of the original from June 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ericjohnsonphoto.com
  21. ↑ http://uflib.ufl.edu/spec/belknap/composers/bloch.htm (English)
personal data
SURNAME Bloch, Ernest
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-American composer
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Geneva
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1959
Place of death Portland , Oregon