Juozas Žilevičius

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Juozas Žilevičius (born March 16, 1891 in Jėrubaičiai , Rajongemeinde Plungė ; † August 5, 1985 in Baltimore ) was a Lithuanian composer, organist, music teacher and musicologist, politician .

Life

Žilevičius had his first musical training with Napoleon Sasnauskas in Plungė, where he worked as an organist and choir director from 1908. During this time he met Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , whom he later referred to as his first teacher. Between 1910 and 1912 he attended summer courses in Warsaw with Vl. Lipkowski and Mieczysław Surzyński .

When the First World War broke out, he went to St. Petersburg as a teacher. From 1915 to 1919 he studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory a . a. with Wassili Pawlowitsch Kalafati , Jāzeps Vītols , Maximilian Ossejewitsch Steinberg , Nikolai Tscherepnin and Alexander Glasunow . Here he met Česlovas Sasnauskas , for whose work he later advocated.

After graduating, Žilevičius taught in Vitebsk before returning to Lithuania in 1920. He became director of the Kaunas Theater and in 1922 Minister of Culture of Lithuania . In addition, he led the first opera performances in Lithuania as a conductor, founded a symphony orchestra with which he gave 32 concerts and taught from 1924 to 1927 at the Klaipėda Conservatory , which he directed from 1926. Here he founded a Lithuanian folklore group that collected over 300 Lithuanian folk instruments. He also gave courses for music teachers for several years, and he compiled a school hymn book that appeared in 1927.

In 1929 he was sent by the Lithuanian government to study in America and became an organist at St. Peter and Paul Church in Elizabeth / New Jersey. On the 500th anniversary of the death of Vytautas the Great in 1930, he led a choir with 500 singers in Carnegie Hall . He contributed to the establishment of the Alliance of Lithuanian Parish choirs , which organized an annual music festival between 1932 and 1952, in which Žilevičius participated as a choir director. At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, where a Lithuanian Day was held, he conducted 60 choirs with a total of 3,000 members.

On his trip to America, Žilevičius brought with him a collection of materials on the history of Lithuanian music, which he expanded over the years and which eventually comprised more than 300,000 objects (photographs, biographies, concert programs, reviews, instruments, compositions, etc.). After the outbreak of the Second World War and the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union made his return home impossible, he founded the Juozas Žilevičius Library of Lithuanian Musicology in Chicago with these materials in 1960 .

In addition, Žilevičius wrote numerous reports, reviews and critiques for magazines in Lithuania and the USA. He composed around four hundred works, including a symphony (1919/1924), which is considered the first symphony by a Lithuanian composer, as well as chamber music works, organ and piano pieces, a cantata, four masses and songs.

literature

  • Leonard J. Šimutis: Prof. Juozas Žilevičius: Lithuanian Composer, Musicologist, and Archivist . In: Lituanus . Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Science. tape 19 , no. 4 , 1973 (English, lituanus.org [accessed June 21, 2019]).
  • Alfred Baumgärtner Propylaea World of Music. The composers , Volume 5, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-549-07835-8 , p. 589

annotation

  1. ↑ Most sources give as date of birth, u. a. VIAF and VLE indicate March 16, 1891, some also mention March 28, 1891.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Leonard J. Simutis: Prof. Juozas Žilevičius: Lithuanian Composer, Musicologist, and Archivist . In: Lituanus . Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Science. tape 19 , no. 4 , 1973 (English, lituanus.org [accessed June 21, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Arvydas Karaška: Juozas Žilevičius in: Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija (VLE), 2014, last update May 31, 2019 (Lithuanian)
  3. ^ Vytas Nakas: The Music of Lithuania. A Historical Sketch . In: Lituanus . Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Science. tape 20 , no. 4 , 1974 (English, lituanus.org [accessed June 21, 2019]).
  4. ↑ The first Lithuanian symphony in: Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society , May 2019
personal data
SURNAME Žilevičius, Juozas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian composer, organist, music teacher and scholar
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Jėrubaičiai , Plungė district parish
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1985
Place of death Baltimore