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Herman Berlinski (pianist, musicologist and choir conductor.
Herman Berlinski's parents, Boris and Deborah Wygodzki Berlinski, were Jews who lived originally in Łódź (then located in the Russian Empire following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and now a city of Poland). With civil and political unrest well underway in Russia by 1905, growing discontent in Poland against the Russian rule led to many uprisings, the largest of which, commonly called the June Days Uprising or the Łódź insurrection, took place in that same year.
At that point, the Berlinskis fled to Leipzig, where they remained after the end of World War I, for although Poland was reconstituted in 1918, turmoil between Poland and the Soviet States of Russia and the Ukraine continued until early 1921 as Russia attempted to reclaim the territory that had belonged to it in the days of the empire. Furthermore, by contrast with the relative poverty he had experienced working as a factory labourer in Łódź, Boris Berlinski had been able to gain a stable income in Leipzig from haberdashery.
In any case, as Poland had regained its independent statehood, the Berlinskis retained their Polish nationality rather than facing the increasingly difficult task foreigners had in gaining German citizenship at that time, and with success made even less likely because they were Jews.[1] In fact there was a strong probability, based on the experience of others, that the German authorities would classify them as "stateless", thereby stripping them of any citizenship and eliminating any rights they had as foreigners legally resident in the country.[2]
Herman Berlinski, born there on 18 August 1910, was the last of six children. They were brought up in the Ashkenazic tradition of Orthodox Judaism and they spoke Yiddish[3] at home. Their mother arranged piano lessons for each of them, Herman's starting when he was six years old. He was educated at the Ephraim Carlebach School, Leipzig's only Jewish school at that time.[4]
Deborah Berlinski died in 1920 leaving the children in the care of their father who never remarried. After observing the formal mourning period called shneim asar chodesh,[5] Herman began private piano lessons with Bronya Gottlieb, a Polish-born woman and a gifted graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory.
Having shown early talent in music and after winning a clarinet scholarship, Herman Berlinski commenced study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1916 at the age of 17. His first year majors were clarinet and conducting, with piano as his minor. The following year he changed his major to piano, with theory as his minor.
His teachers there included Otto Weinreich (piano), Sigfrid Karg-Elert (theory), Günther Raphael (countrepoint) and Max Hochkofler (conducting). Fellow students included the Norwegian composer Geirr Tviett, and it is a sign of Berlinski's skills as a pianist that he gave the premiere performance in 1931 of Tveitt's dynamic First Piano Concerto.[6] He graduated in 1932 with an honours degree. In the context of Leipzig's long involvement with European music, the strongest influences at that time on Berlinski's own composition style were J.S. Bach, Gustav Mahler and Max Reger.
His initial exposure to Christian to have access to this program, and as he was not prepared to take that step, the idea proceeded no further.
As the National Socialist party gained power in German politics, general restrictions, including their involvement in the arts, were imposed upon the Jews. In 1933, having gained a Polish passport at his father's urging, Berlinski returned to Łódź. However, he found himself disadvantaged by being unable to speak Polish, and he was greatly disheartened by the misery of the Jewish community within which he was living. Finally, when called up for military service, he fled to Paris. He was then joined by Sina Goldfein,[9] a former fellow-student both at school and the Leipzig Conservatory, herself a pianist and singer, and they were married in 1934.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Berlinski enrolled at the École Normale de Musique and studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and piano with Alfred Cortot. Although he valued the training he received from Boulanger, Berlinski eventually found some of her musical ideas incompatible with his own, discontinued studies with her after two years and enrolled at the Schola Cantorum of Paris where he studied Jewish liturgical music[10] with the Sephardic synagogue composer Léon Algazi[11] and composition with Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur. Through Daniel-Lesur he met other young composers who were members of the group called La jeune France. Most influential were Daniel-Lesur himself and Olivier Messiaen who, although strongly inspired by their Catholic background, encouraged Berlinski to explore and express his Jewish heritage.[12]
From 1934 onwards, Berlinski became involved with a Jewish art theatre group known as the Paris Yiddish Avant-Garde Theatre (PIAT) and made up largely of immigrants formerly involved with Yiddish theatre in Vilna. Their repertoire ranged from works by Jewish playwrights such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Leib Peretz to classic Russian plays presented in Yiddish translation.[13] He was soon appointed as music director, a role in which he continued until 1939, and for this group he directed plays or conducted, performed, arranged and composed incidental music.
In this context, Berlinski met many Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews who had been driven out of their own countries. This was highly influential on the development of his own music style and introduced him to many themes and ideas he explored in his later compositions.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Berlinski offered to enter military service and joined the French Foreign Legion. At the end of almost a year, he was one of only 250 survivors out of 1,250 who had been assigned to battle on the Belgian border.
In 1940, after the surrender of France to the Germans, the newly established Vichy régime collaborated with the invaders by declaring certain groups including Freemasons, Communists and Jews as "undesirables".[14] Thus, when Berlinski was demobilized in that same year, he received a certificate which declared him to be a "foreigner who had no right to work in France."
Facing the high risk of internment, Berlinski and his wife obtained visas and finally sailed to the United States, arriving in 1941. With them, they took only fragments of the compositions he had written for the Yiddish theatre which they had been able to save from their ransacked Paris home. He would eventually draw on this material for works he wrote soon after he arrived in New York.
In New York, Berlinski was reunited with his father Boris who had escaped earlier from Germany, and there were also other members of the family who had migrated from Łódź and were living in New Jersey. Herman and Sina Berlinski set up their home in Manhattan and their son David was born there in 1942. Berlinski first earned a living by giving private piano lessons, and quickly made contact with the city's large Jewish community.
A significant event in Berlinski's professional development was a meeting with Lazar Weiner[2], Joseph Yasser[3],[18] Abraham Wolfe Binder[4] and Lazare Saminsky.[5] He also heard there the then young and relatively unknown Leonard Bernstein performing his new works including a piano reduction of his first symphony. He studied composition with Messiaen at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Centre and gained from him an understanding of rhythmic and harmonic techniques which would affect his approach to using Jewish melodic forms in his later works.
A change in Berlinski's career occurred in 1951 when Yasser offered him organ lessons.[19] As a result, he quickly demonstrated a high level of skills both as a recitalist and as a liturgical organist, setting the direction for the future both in terms of his professional appointments and the types of works he composed. By 1954 he had been appointed as assistant organist at Emanu-El working with Saminsky as music director. He gave his first public recital the following year. He served there for a total of eight years, during which time he composed many works including choral and other liturgical music as well as pieces for the organ.
In 1953, while continuing his organ studies with Yasser, Berlinski undertook post-graduate studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) where he engaged in a musicological analysis of the origins and practices of ancient Jewish music. He also studied composition with Hugo Weisgall[6], an experienced composer who was descended from a long line of cantors and was interested in both sacred and secular Jewish music. Working with Weisgall and in the climate of the seminary provided an ideal stimulus for Berlinski to further explore and express his Jewish background, which in turn became more recognizable in his music.
Having completed his masters degree program at JTSA, Berlinski undertook doctoral studies in composition there. A major set-back occurred in 1958 when he had a heart attack from which he made recovery and was able to complete his doctorate in 1960. This made him the first person ever to be awarded a doctorate in sacred music by that institution.
In 1963 Berlinski was appointed as music director of the Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris and Leipzig's Thomaskirche.
Rabbi Gerstenfeld died in 1968, ending five years which Berlinski described as being "the most exciting and creative" of his life. Rabbi Gerstenfeld's widow paid tribute to her husband by commissioning Berlinski to write the oratorio, Job. Berlinski continued as minister of music at the Washington Congregation until his retirement in 1977.
During those last years after Rabbi Gerstenfeld's death, requirements for Berlinski's liturgical music decreased, and he took the opportunity to compose larger vocal works and continued writing his sinfonias for organ with other instruments or singers. He lectured widely in the United States and Europe through his later career. Commitments included sessions at the Mendelssohn Academy[20] in Leipzig under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, and at the Europäisches Zentrum für jüdische Musik, Hannover.[21]
After his retirement in 1977, Berlinski remained in Washington and founded his own performing group, Shir Chadash Chorale, through which he was able to arrange the performance of much Jewish music in the city and the surrounding areas. This thirty-voice choir continued its work for eleven years, giving concerts of Hanukkah and other high holiday music annually in the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts and the Washington National Cathedral.
"It was very moving to be there. Mr Berlinski was visibly moved by the process. It was obviously one of the highlights of his career. Not only was the music being recorded for the first time, but it was also being recorded for the first time in Germany. Before each piece was recorded, he would explain to the performers in German what the prayer was about. They were fascinated."[23]
Later that same year, his Sinfonia No. 12 (Die heiligen Zehn Gebote (These Holy Munich Hochschule with Berlinski present. Reports say that in Munich the work received a standing ovation, and that Professor Robert Helmschrott[24] who was then President and Rector of the Munich Hochschule and to whom the sinfonia was dedicated, greeted Berlinski in a speech at the conclusion of the concert as "his spiritual father and his music as a link between Judaism and Christianity."[25]
His last visit to Germany was early in 2001 after the Federal Republic of Germany had awarded him the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit for his artistic achievements and his contribution to interfaith dialogue. (See below under Awards and Tributes for more details.)
Berlinski died at Washington's Sibley Memorial Hospital on 27 September 2001 after heart attacks and a stroke. His final composition, Psalm 130 (Shir hamaaloth (Out of the Depths)) for solo voice, choir and organ, had been commissioned by the Washington National Cathedral for the dedication of its last stained glass window. He completed the work on 9 September just weeks prior to his death and it was first performed in the cathedral on 30 September, the day of his funeral.
Berlinski was survived by his wife, Sina, and his son, David.
"Berlinski was in danger not only because he was a Jew, but also because, in his early college days, he had composed music for a political cabaret...writing music of a satirical nature."[26]
A work known to have been composed in Paris was Chazoth, a theatrical piece for string quartet and ondes Martenot[9], which he wrote in 1938 and which had its premiere that year in the Salle Erard. Use of the then new and rather novel ondes Martenot probably came about because Daniel-Lesur, whose mother was a virtuoso performer on the instrument, had introduced Berlinski to its inventor Maurice Martenot whose name it bore. Having heard the work, Daniel-Lesur became a major advocate for Berlinski.
Another work, Allegretto grazioso con variazioni: Hommage à Ravel, for piano, also written in 1938, now exists in a revised version dated 1945 and held in The Herman Berlinski Music Collection (HBMC) at The Library of JTSA.
Apart from the handful of scores Berlinski was able to take with him from Paris, nothing else seems to have survived the destruction of the War.
"This was the music of my father's generation, now dedicated to the actors and actresses of the PIAT - almost all of them victims of the Holocaust. It will remain with me the rest of my life - for every sound in it evokes in me a name, a face, a smile, or a lament. If that is sentimental, so be it!"[10]
Under this general title, From the World of My Father, there are several suites for various instrumentations. The first (subtitled Chazoth (or Hatzot)) for chamber orchestra, written in 1941 and revised in 1995, has four movements, Prayer at Midnight, Procession, Legend, and Dance[28] and is, as its subtitle suggests, related to the suite for string quartet and ondes Martenot which he composed in Paris in 1938. It also appeared later after several revisions as an Organ Suite also under the title, From the World of My Father, but with five movements listed in the HBMC catalogue as Prayer at Midnight (Chazoth), Air (Nigun), Nocturnal Procession, Legend and Ritual Dance.[29]
The second suite, written in 1948, existed first in a version for cello and piano.[30] Subtitled Dialogues, it has four movements, Dialogue, Hasidic, Nigun, and Wedding Dance. Later Berlinski arranged it for cello and chamber orchestra.
The third suite (subtitled Klezmorim) is for clarinet and chamber orchestra and has five movements, Lament, (Untitled), Mayouffes Dance, Song, and Finale. The precise year of its composition is not known although the material would have originated from Berlinski's days in Paris. It was finally published in 1995 together with Suites Nos. 1 and 2 under the umbrella title, From the World of My Father: a trilogy for chamber orchestra, chamber orchestra and cello, chamber orchestra and clarinet.
Confusion may arise because there is another work carrying the title From the World of My Father: Suite No. 3, this one for oboe and organ. The HBMC catalogue shows it as having been written originally in 1938, rewritten in 1942 and revised in 1976, and it carries on the cover the alternate title, Peretz Suite: oboe or flute or clarinet and organ or piano, with an explanatory note from the composer, "From incidental music to stage plays by J.L. Peretz."[31] According to the catalogue, there are four movements, Lament, Pastorale, Allegretto, and Song and finale, reflecting some parallels with the suite for clarinet and chamber orchestra mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Berlinski's next major work was Symphonic Visions, for orchestra, which he started writing in 1949 and completed the following year. It has four movements which he called Sinfonias, each based on a biblical extracts, the first from Psalm 94, the second and third from the Book of Jeremiah, and the fourth from the Song of Songs. The first three movements are centred on the themes of threat, destruction and war, while the final movements declares the blessing of new life.
"This is the century of mass destruction, of gas chambers, and the atomic bomb. Fear, sleeplessness, and melancholy have become the trademarks of our “displaced minds.”... The projection of our own fears and worries, displaying and sharing them with those next to us, seems to alleviate our own suffering, making us realize that, although we are individuals, we are also part of a mass of people with similar emotions."
"The inclusion of sorrow and fear in the field of musical expression does not mean that one has to assume a continuously prophetical attitude with its implicit warning of approaching doom. Facing and including in music the realities surrounding us leaves us just at the point where the patient has told the doctor why and what he fears, which in itself will not cure him. In the realistic portrayal of a world in disorder, the artist, at least, must have a vision of order. His art will otherwise become as chaotic as the world around and within himself. But the urge for mental organization and for order cannot be satisfied by any complicated, philosophical equation. The answers must be simple and they must be unsophisticated, because truth and simplicity seem to be closely related in our minds."[32]
"There is no other work like The Burning Bush written for the organ. The piece employed a rhapsodic, fiery, twentieth-century [37]
In 1958 Berlinski completed another major work, a Friday-evening service entitled Avodat Shabbat[11] for cantor, choir and organ, which had been commissioned by Cantor David Putterman[38] of New York's Park Avenue Synagogue who was cantor in its first performance there in that same year.
Some years later the work was being assessed for performance at Emanu-El and was submitted for examination by several musicians including Leonard Bernstein who noted it to be "a fine compromise between tradition and somewhat contemporary sounds." Subsequently Berlinski orchestrated and expanded the work for a concert performance conducted by Bernstein at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1963.
"...the cantata [sic.][39] offers a range of musical expression quite unexpected in the usually tradition-laden realm of liturgical writing. As a composition it is free and easy-going...",[40]
For his doctoral dissertation at JTSA Berlinski composed a large oratorio, Kiddush Ha-Shem (Sanctification of the Name of God) for choir, soloists and orchestra, in memory of those who had died in the Holocaust. This work is still awaiting public performance.
"The organ called for in the work is one of [41]
"The music is expressive of the text. Under the influence of the twelve-tone school of German expressionism, I have expanded my harmonic palette considerably beyond the scope of Max Reger."[42]
Sinfonia No. 2, subtitled Holy days and festivals, has an earlier origin in Berlinski's compositions than No. 1, having been commenced in 1954, shortly after he was appointed to the staff of Emanu-El, and completed in 1956. According to Berlinski's explanation to Frohbieter, when he first arrived at Emanu-El, there was no Jewish organ music suitable for use as preludes to worship apart from some pieces by [43]
Hence this sinfonia is made up of five movements, one for each of the holy days, [45] the implication being that this work has potential use both as a recital piece and within the synagogue liturgy.
Sinfonia No. 3, subtitled Sounds and Motions for Organ, is a secular work, at least in the sense that it was designed to explore the full range of expressive capabilities of the symphonic organ. It was written in 1961 and dedicated to leading New York organist New York Philharmonic, who had already heard The Burning Bush. She gave the premiere performance in New York that same year.
The work has six movements entitled Trumpets, Motion and Silence, Contemplation, Light Motion, Pulsation, and Polymodal Sounds and Motions, and Berlinski employs a variety of techniques - changing rhythmic patterns, chromaticism, contrasting consonance and dissonance, occasional use of the serialist approach, dramatic gestures and sudden silences - to express his thoughts and feelings in each.
"It is perhaps of little importance whether this music is, in any sense of the word, Jewish. The work speaks in a contemporary musical language, but I think that I can never divest myself of the shadow of the Holocaust. The signature instrument of Judaism throughout Israel's history has been the trumpet. The trumpets of this first movement are not the trumpets of the High Holidays. They are not trumpets of joy. The trumpets in Sinfonia No. 3 are trumpets of the Holocaust. They spell doom in cataclysmic events."[46]
Likewise, the last movement, with the arresting subtitle Polymodal Sounds and Motions, a set of variations in chaconne form, derives its thematic material from modes called in Yiddish shtaygers[47] which are used in Ashkenazic cantorial improvisation and take their names from the first words of the prayer with which they are most often used.[12] The first is an altered Phrygian mode which is of widespread use in middle eastern music, and known commonly as Ahava Rabboh (the first line of that prayer in translation begins, "With abounding love hast thou loved us...") or Freygish[48] when used in Jewish liturgical prayer recitation and in Klezmer music.[49] The second is called Mogen ovos or Magein avot, a natural minor mode (the first line of the prayer in translation being, "Our forbears' shield, reviver of the dead, incomparable Lord...")[50]
"In 'Contemplation' I have composed a prayer which cannot be found in any liturgy. The music itself becomes the prayer."[51]
The fourth movement, Light Motion, is a playful dance with strong reference to French symphonic organ writing, while the fifth movement, Pulsation, has a hypnotic repeated note pattern in the pedal part. According to Frohbieter, Berlinski drew a parallel between this movement and the heart attack he had experienced four years before writing this work, with the abrupt ending of its first section representing the moment of the cardiac arrest itself.[52]
Between his arrival in 1963 and his retirement in 1977, Berlinski concentrated largely on writing liturgical music for use at the Reform Hebrew Congregation. Two notable exceptions are Sinfonia No. 4, The Tetragrammaton, and Sinfonia No. 5.
Composition of Sinfonia No. 4, The Tetragrammaton for Organ and Orchestra, was started in New York, December 1962, and dated at final measure, November 1, 1965 (Washington, DC). The work is dedicated to [53] in Independence, Missouri. Knoche was a collaborator and student of Jewish liturgical music interpretation with Berlinksi. The tetragrammaton are the three Hebrew letters used to represent the name of God. Berlinski selected three emotive attributes from the Sefirot for Sinfonia No. 4 and placed them in three parts for the composition: I. Keter (crown), II. Tiferet (beauty), and III. Gevurah (might). The work is written for trumpets I, II, III; horns I, II, III, IV; trombones I, II, III; tuba; harps I, II; piano; celesta; timpani; percussion; organ; violins I, II; viola; violoncello and double bass. Facsimile copies of Sinfonia No. 4 are housed at the Library of Congress and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Sinfonia No. 5 for organ was composed between 1964 and 1968 and like the previous sinfonia was dedicated to Bethel Knoche who gave the first performance on the Auditorium organ in Independence, Missouri, on 6 May 1967.
This is a five movement work in which each movement is based on an excerpt from the poetry of Nelly Sachs[13] taken from the collection entitled "O The Chimneys".[54]
Berlinski recorded the poetry excerpts on his score against each movement as follows:
I. Footsteps – Age-old game of hangman and victim, persecutor and persecuted, hunter and hunted. "Auf dass die Verfolgten nicht Verfolger werden." (That the persecuted may not become persecutors). From "In the Habitations of Death".
II. Here amen must be said, this crowning of words which moves into hiding and peace. You great eyelid closing on all unrest, your heavenly wreath of lashes, you most gentle of all births. "Einer" (Someone). From "Flight and Metamorphosis".
III. The blood’s circulation weeps toward its spiritual sea there where the blue flame of agony bursts through night. "Wan endlich" (When at last). From "Glowing Engimas II".
IV. Only death draws out of them the truth of misery, these recurring rhymes cut out of night’s blackness, these reed exercises at the end of the organ of sounds. "Nur Sterben" (Only death). From "Glowing Enigmas I".
V. Footsteps - Which turn time ravenous emblazing the hour with wolves extinguishing the flight in the fugitive’s blood. "Auf dass die Verfolgten nicht Verfolger werden'" (That the persecuted may not become persecutors). From "In the Habitations of Death".
The following year, 1969, Berlinski began his Sinfonia No 10 for cello and organ and completed it in 1976. It has two movements, the second of which is a theme and set of variations based on the traditional memorial prayer melody, Av Ha-rachamim (Merciful Father).[55]
Works from the earliest stage of his retirement include: a song cycle, Dost thou sleep, my brother Abel? (1979–1980; A Psalm of unity, commissioned in 1980 by Washington's [56] and a Sonata for violin and piano: Le violon de Chagall, both in 1985.
"With his new Hanukah oratorio ... Herman Berlinski has affirmed his conviction that it is as important to celebrate victories as it is to remember tragedies."[57]
In 1990 Berlinski wrote Maskir Neshamoth (In Remembrance of the Souls) which was originally commissioned by Ann and Donald Brown in memory of Jules C. Winkelman, and its premiere was of excerpts only which were performed in 1998 at the Library of Congress for the sixtieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. He wrote a Cello Concerto between 1992 and 1994, a work which has yet to be performed.
In 1993 the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) asked him to write Das Gebet Bonhoeffers (The Prayer of Bonhoeffer), part of a longer work, Bonhoeffer-Triptychon, a tribute to a man who had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War, for which other sections were co-commissioned from German composers Heinz Werner Zimmermann, a Protestant, and Robert Helmschrott, a Catholic. The work was premiered that same year at UTS, and has now been performed in many countries including Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel and South Africa.
Also in 1993, when he was commissioned to write a work for the groundbreaking ceremony for the synagogue about to be rebuilt in Dresden, called the New Synagogue, he reworked in German his oratorio, Job (under the title, Hiob). In 1995 he revised his unfinished 1983 cantata, The Beadle of Prague, incorporating it into the oratorio Etz Chayim (The Tree of Life).
A work of particular interest is called Celan, for narrator and piano, written in 2001 in memory of the Romanian-born poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan[58] Celan's prolific output included many works about the Holocaust. After the war he moved to Paris where, following many years of isolation and loneliness, he committed suicide in 1970. Berlinski has constructed the work so poems are narrated between movements written for the solo piano. This dramatic work was first performed at Washington's United States Holocaust Memorial Museum only a few weeks before Berlinski's death.
Berlinski received many awards, honours and fellowships.
The first major award was a MacDowell Fellowship[14] which he received in 1958. This assisted him in undertaking extensive musicological research.
In 1984 the [59]
In 1992 he was granted the American Guild of Organists.
In the international arena, the then Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Order of Merit which he received from the President in 1995, followed by the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit which he received in 2001. The award letter for the Commander's Cross cited Berlinski as having been a builder of "many lasting bridges over the Atlantic", significant recognition from a former enemy against whom Berlinski had fought during the Second World War.
Considering the way Belinski had been treated by French authorities following his demobilization from the French Foreign Legion in 1940, leading to his urgent departure for the United States, it is ironic that he was decorated by the French Government with a Croix du combattant volontaire 1939–1945 after this award was created in 1954.[16]
"Herman Berlinski's deep involvement with Jewish liturgical music meant that his compositions didn't get the attention they deserve on the wider stage of concerts and recordings."[60]
Parallels can be drawn between Berlinski and other composers whose reputations have been built so strongly on one part of their output that other equally important aspects have been unduly ignored.
For example, Franz Liszt's fame as a pianist and his enormous output of virtuosic works for this instrument have distracted attention from his orchestral tone poems and symphonies, choral works and oratorios, chamber music and lieder.[61]
The picture is similar with [62]
Even closer to Berlinski's own situation, British composers Sir Charles Villiers Stanford[63] and Herbert Howells[64] whose contributions to Anglican church music have been in frequent use by choirs around the world, also wrote many other types of works - for orchestra, piano, chamber ensemble and so on - which have been all but forgotten.
A quick glance through a catalogue of Berlinski's works, even the selective listing below, quickly reveals that his music covers a broad range of formats - symphonic and chamber works, solo works for the organ, song cycles, numerous liturgical choral works and oratorios. Many of these works have been inspired by ideas related to his Jewish background and experience.
"I don't think I can write a piece of music, no matter what I do and what I will try, that does not have the stamp of my Jewish existence."[17]
It would be misguiding though to assume that either Berlinski's Jewish identity or his close involvement with writing music for the synagogue would or should limit the appeal of his works in any way. As Frohbieter commented in her thesis, "His music transcends parochial boundaries, to touch the souls of all mankind."[65] In other words, Berlinski's music has something worthwhile to say to everyone.
"...I cannot suppress a continuous urge to come back to it again and again. I may be haunted by the fear that time will mollify the intensity of our memory, that the event will be forgotten altogether. Elie Wiesel once said, 'Memory is our strongest weapon.' I do not need the Holocaust to create music. Those who have been silenced by it need us."[67]
Much of Berlinski's music expresses a sense of triumph in the face of affliction. His belief in that principle appears not only in the themes and ideas he explored in his music but also in the way he lived. In view of the tortuous path that led him from his place of birth, Leipzig, via his parents' home country, Poland, to France which was then overtaken by Germany's Nazi forces, and finally to the United States, it is highly memorable that a man could have had the wisdom, insight and strength of purpose that would allow him to do so.
Music, Tempo, Dynamics (music), Richard Wagner, Baroque music
Netherlands, Switzerland, Danube, North Sea, Lake Constance
Torah, Kabbalah, Israel, Hebrew language, Mishnah
Cold War, Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Germany, Battle of the Atlantic, Second Sino-Japanese War
Dave Brubeck, Igor Stravinsky, Clint Eastwood, Philip Glass, Darius Milhaud
Conservative Judaism, Bible, Jewish history, Jerusalem, Columbia University
1940, 1945, 1950, 1983, 2005