Erich Walter Sternberg

Erich Walter Sternberg (אריך ולטר-שטרנברג, May 31, 1891, Berlin – December 15, 1974, Tel Aviv) was a German-born Israeli composer. One of the founders of Israeli art music, Sternberg had a profound impact on the musical life of Palestine and Israel during the 1930s and 1940s. Although a creative composer with a unique voice, his reticent personality hampered his career and contributed to the neglect of his works. Some of his music, however, still remains in the performance repertoire, not only in Israel, but internationally.

Biography

After graduating with a law degree from Kiel University in 1918, Sternberg decided to pursue a music career and began studying composition with Hugo Leichtentritt and piano with H. Praetorius in Berlin. Sternberg's works during this time were expressionistic in style and reflect the influences of Hindemith and Schoenberg. He also incorporated traditional Jewish musical idioms into his use of dense polyphonic textures. Examples of this can be seen in his salient use of the augmented 2nd and cantilation motifs in the piano cycle Visions from the East, a programmatic work concerning the Jews of Eastern Europe, and in his String Quartet no.1, where he quotes both a Yiddish song, Bei a teich (‘The River’), and the formula for the prayer Shema Yisrael. While in Berlin, Sternberg received consistent praise for his compositions and many of his pieces were performed by leading ensembles and performers in that city. His String Quartet no.2 was performed by the Amar Quartet and Yishtabakh (‘Praise Ye’) by the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1929 he composed Yishtabakh, a work for Baritone soloist, SATB chorus, and chamber orchestra. Although written in 1929, the work was awarded the Engel Prize in 1946; an award which Sternberg would earn again in 1960.^[1]

In 1925 Sternberg began to visit Palestine annually and ultimately decided to migrate there in 1931; a decision marked by concerts of his works. He was the first of a wave of professional musicians who fled to Palestine in response to the deteriorating conditions in Germany prior to World War II. Shortly thereafter, Sternberg met and married Ella Thal. In 1936 he helped Bronisław Huberman found the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and promoted the Palestine chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music.^[2]

Sternberg found it difficult to overcome the trauma of displacement from his German heritage and never felt entirely comfortable with the political agendas of the nation of Israel. As a result he remained separated from politics; an aloofness that may have hurt his career. Although he sought a regular academic teaching position at the Palestine Conservatory and Hebrew University, he was never offered one.^[3] Given his stature as a composer, this was most likely due to his refusal to involve himself in politics rather than a reflection on his talents as a teacher, composer, and musician. He did, however, occasionally teach at both institutions part time and as a guest lecturer.^[1]

After his resettlement to Palestine, Sternberg's compositional expression returned to nostalgic Romanticism in his large-scale orchestral works while simultaneously preserving a more modern harmonic vocabulary in his piano and chamber music compositions. For example, his symphonic variations Shneim-Asar Shivtei Yisrael (‘The Twelve Tribes of Israel’, 1938), reflects the powerful rhetoric of late Romanticism with obvious influences from Brahms, Reger and Richard Strauss. The work was the first large-scale orchestral composition written in Palestine. His Capriccio for piano, a concise illustration of his style, displays a contrapuntal elaboration of two brief motifs in sonata-rondo form, with the movement's harmonic orientation stated by the two opening chords. However, even in his more radical chamber and piano works Sternberg never abandoned tonal orientation.^[1]

Sternberg was somewhat critical of the nationalist ideology prevailing among music critics and composers such as Marc Lavry in Israel (then Palestine) during the 1930s and 1940s. Lavry believed that music should be communicative and thus relatively simple and comprehensible; musical compositions, he argued, should be dominated by melodies however complex. In an article published in Musica hebraica in 1938 Sternberg criticized Lavry's ideology saying that the composer should "go his own way and speak his own language from within, with high professional standards as his only goal".^[4] As a result Sternberg's works do not reflect the simplicity found in most musical compositions in Israel during the 1930s and 1940s. For example his large-scale set of symphonic variations Yosef ve′Ehav (‘Joseph and his Brethren’, 1939) are dominated by strict contrapuntal devices which include complex fugues.^[5]

After 1940, Sternberg frequently turned back to his earlier scores, revising many and using material from others for new compositions. His most memorable works from the 1940s and 1950s are his vocal music works. Although he composed and arranged many Israeli folk songs, his treatment of the folk idiom reveals the strong influence of Fritz Jöde's choral project and of the Gebrauchsmusik of Hindemith rather than that of the predominating folk ideology of searching for inspiration in Arabic and Mediterranean songs. For example, Sternberg's arrangement of Horra kuma, echa (‘Rise up, Brother’) by Shalom Postolsky is a set of six variations for seven-part chorus displaying contrapuntal and canonic textures, while his choral song Ima Adama (‘Mother Earth’) features richly chromatic and modal harmony.^[6]

In 1971 Sternberg received the high order of merit from the President of the German Federal Republic.^[1]

Compositions

Sternberg's compositional output includes 2 string quartets, 6 orchestral works, several works for piano, works for chorus and orchestra, works for solo singer and orchestra, and numerous songs and folksong arrangements. He also wrote incidental music for the play Amcha (Your People) by S. Aleichem in 1936 and two operas, Dr. Doolittle (1939 Jerusalem) and Pacificia, the Friendly Island (1974). Most of his compositions are part of the collection at the Archives of Israeli Music at Tel Aviv University.^[1]

References

External links

• Online Biography
• The American Symphony Orchestra will perform the US Premiere of Sternberg's The Twelve Tribes of Israel (1938) in 2009 [1]

Sources

• P.V. Bohlman: The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936–40 (Oxford, 1992)
• P. Gradenwitz: The Music of Israel (Portland, OR, 1996), esp. 370
• J. Hirshberg: Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: a Social History (Oxford, 1995)
• Jehoash Hirshberg: "Erich Walter Sternberg", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed September 18, 2008), (subscription access)
• E.W. Sternberg: Shneim-Asar Shivtei Yisrael [The Twelve Tribes of Israel], Musica hebraica (1938), 1–2
• E.W. Sternberg: ‘Autobiography’, Tatzlil, vii (1967), 77–8