Ernest Bloch

Biography

TiVo Staff [allmusic.com]

A highly individual composer, Ernest Bloch did not pioneer any new style in music but spoke with a distinctive voice into which he could assimilate folk influences, 12-tone technique, and even coloristic quarter tones. In a stylistically atomized century, his interests were universal, and his music was both beloved by the public and inspirational for a younger and more academically oriented generation. He established his reputation in music on Hebraic themes in works such as the cello concerto Schelomo (1916). Bloch was also an important teacher. His output comprised numerous operas, symphonies, concertos, and chamber music, though his works exploring Hebrew concepts, such as Baal Shem (1923) and Suite hebraique (1951), remain the most popular.

His father was the quintessential Swiss, a well-off manufacturer of watches and clocks, including cuckoo clocks. Bloch had a diverse musical training that included advanced violin training, including the study of eurhythmics with Emile Jacques-Dalcroze. Later, he studied the violin with Eugene Ysaye in Belgium and composition with Iwan Knorr in Frankfurt and Ludwig Thuille in Munich. Bloch wrote prolifically in his student years but did not publish any of his works. He married Margarethe Schneider in 1904; one of their children, Suzanne, became a well-known lute player. His music began to attract interest, and in 1910 his opera Macbeth was staged in Paris to a mostly uncomprehending audience. About this time, he began writing music with specifically Jewish aspects in subject matter, reflected by figurations in the melodies derived from Jewish worship chants and folk music. Some of the best-known compositions of this series are the violin work Baal Shem, an Israel Symphony, and Schelomo, a tone poem that is also considered one of the great cello concertos.

Bloch lived for a time in Paris, but he returned to Switzerland in 1915, where he was a professor at the Geneva Conservatory. He traveled to the U.S. in 1916 as conductor for the Maud Allan dance company. The outfit went broke, stranding him in Ohio. The composer was thus forced to remain in America, but he soon found success as a composer, conductor, and music school administrator and teacher, first at Mannes School of Music in New York and then as the first director of the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 1924 he took American citizenship. Bloch became director of the San Francisco Conservatory in 1925 and in 1927 won first prize in a contest sponsored by Musical America with his composition America, an Epic Rhapsody. He returned to Switzerland in 1930, and was based there while he composed and traveled widely in Europe to conduct his works.

The rise of Nazism in Germany and a desire to retain his U.S. citizenship prompted a return to America in 1938. He settled at scenic Agate Beach, Oregon, and was appointed a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, teaching summer courses until he retired in 1952. Bloch shaped the early careers of an enviable list of successful students, including Antheil, Kirchner, and Sessions during both periods of his American teaching career. His later works, like the Sinfonia Breve (1952), written when he was 72, developed a bold, energetic dissonance. Bloch died of cancer in 1959.