Herman Berlinski (18 August 1910 – 27 September 2001) was a German-born American composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and choir conductor.
Life Family background; early upbringing Before he was born, Herman Berlinski's parents, Boris and Deborah Wygodzki Berlinski lived in the Jewish community of ŁódźThen located in the Russian Empire following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and now a city of Poland. at the time when civil and political unrest was well underway in Russia from 1905, and growing discontent in Poland against the Russian rule had led to many uprisings. The largest of these, commonly called the June Days Uprising or the 1905 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 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.Anti-semitic attitudes, degrees of which had always operated in German society (See German Jews), accelerated after the war as certain elements alleged (under what is now known as Dolchstosslegende or the Stab-in-the-Back Legend), that the Jews were partly responsible for the German defeat. This accusation flew in the face of the truth because statistics showed that a large number of Jews fought in the German Army during that war, and more than 12,000 died during combat. (See ; also refer to Rigg, Bryan. Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 72: "About 10,000 volunteered for duty, and over 100,000 out of a total German-Jewish population of 550,000 served during World War One. Some 78% saw front-line duty, 12,000 died in battle, over 30,000 received decorations, and 19,000 were promoted. Approximately 2,000 Jews became military officers and 1,200 became medical officers.") 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.The Jews were just one, although the largest, of several minorities who were treated in this way by the mainstream of German society between the time of the 1848 German revolutions which were driven principally by a radical increase in pan-German nationalism, and the rise of Nazism in 1933. For a detailed examination of this period, see Pulzer, Peter. Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933, Wayne State University Press, 2003.
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 YiddishThey likely spoke the Central or Poylish dialect, part of the branch known as Eastern Yiddish. at home. Their mother arranged piano lessons for each of them, Herman's starting at age six. He was educated at the Ephraim Carlebach School, Leipzig's only Jewish school at that time.This school, named after its founder, German-born rabbi Ephraim Carlebach began in 1912 as a primary-level school. By the beginning of the following year a secondary level school known as the Höhere Israelitische Schule (or Jewish High School) was added. It was set up so Jewish children would be able to observe the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays and festivals, a right that was being withheld within other schools. It operated until 1942 when all Jewish schools were closed by order of the German government.
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,Shneim asar chodesh means literally "twelve months", the required period of formal mourning for sons in the Orthodox tradition. Herman began private piano lessons under Bronya Gottlieb, a Polish-born woman and a gifted graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory.
Tertiary music studies in Leipzig Having shown early talent in music and after winning a clarinet scholarship, Herman Berlinski commenced study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1926 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 (counterpoint) 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.He gave this performance with the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alfred Szendrei. 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 Lutheran liturgical music and the organ arose from attending Friday evening concertsThis was contrary to his father's direction given because he was engaging in an activity inappropriate to the Sabbath which begins at sundown on Fridays. at Leipzig's Thomaskirche where he heard repertoire largely centred on the period from J.S. Bach to Reger. Having overheard Berlinski rehearsing Bach's Goldberg Variations on the piano, Karl Straube, then cantor at the Thomaskirche and professor of organ at the Institut der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsen, offered him organ lessons at the institute. But because it was a prerequisite that Berlinski become a Christian to have access to this program, and as he was not prepared to take that step, the idea proceeded no further.
Emigration to Paris; further music studies; professional involvement 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,Sina Berlinski née Goldfein was born in Leipzig on 27 August 1910. for more information about her, see Schinköth, Thomas. Sehnsucht nach Menschlichkeit: Gedanken über die Pianistin Sina Berlinski in GewandhausMagazin, No. 49, Winter 2005/06. a former fellow-student both at school and the Leipzig Conservatory, herself a pianist and singer. 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 Boulanger's training, 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"Jewish music: I. Liturgical", in Sadie, Stanley (Ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol 9, Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1980, pp. 614-634. with the Sephardic synagogue composer Léon Algazi 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.It is worth noting that Berlinski's childhood experience of synagogue music would have been in the context of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe (called collectively the Ashkenazis or Ashkenazim), usually related to early migrants who moved eastward from the Rhine region, all classified together as speakers of their own composite language, Yiddish in one of its dialectical forms. Their links can be traced to the earliest Jewish settlements in Mesopotamia and Persia from the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judaea in the later 6th century BCE. As a result, their music has a close relationship to that of the non-Jewish populations in those areas, and the free-flowing chant used in Eastern European synagogues is based on modes (See also Hebrew cantillation) associated with the ancient Greeks, but probably with other, and seemingly older, origins. (See Musical modes for more information.)
From 1934 onwards, Berlinski became involved with a Jewish art theatre group known as the Paris Yiddish Avant-Garde Theatre (PIAT or PYAT)"Lives in the Yiddish Theatre" Accessed 2 March 2018. 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.A valuable picture of Jewish life in Paris and of the PIAT is painted in an article by Cyril Robinson about Yiddish actor Gerard Frydman, (Gerard Frydman, his Life in the Yiddish Theater in Paris in Jewish Magazine, August 2007.) who migrated in 1937 at the age of 12 from Warsaw, Poland, to Paris, and was involved with the theatre from 1944 to 1983. This survey includes a description of the impact the German invasion of France and the establishment of the Vichy régime had on Jews living in Paris at that time. As this article indicates, the company was first called Parizer arbeiter yiddisher theater (Paris Yiddish Workers Theater), later changing its name to Parizer Yiddishe Avant-Garde Theatre (which is sometimes abbreviated as PYAT, but more commonly as PIAT.) More information about PIAT is available in Rosenberg, Pnina. The World of Yiddish Theater in France, in All About Jewish Theater. 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 which he later explored in his compositions.
Military service in France; Nazi invasion; escape to the United States 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".See also the entry under Raphaël Alibert. 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."