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HUGO WEISGALL (1912 - 1997)
Although he wrote a substantial body of music for
a number of media, Hugo Weisgall (191297) is
probably best remembered as one of Americas most
important composers of opera and large-scale song
cycles, reflecting his intense lifelong interest in both
western and Judaic literature. I am attracted by the
verbal, I am sucked aside by words, he once said, and
I want to deal ideologically and musically with difficult
problems. The literary merit of his compositions,
their original vocal style, and their serious attention
to musical and dramatic detail all mark a significant
contribution to American music.
The scion of a highly cultured family that boasts several
generations of cantors in the Bohemian-Austrian orbit
(and the nephew of the illustrious Zionist leader and
producer Meyer Weisgal), Weisgall lent his artistic
gifts on many occasions to the expression of historical,
literary, biblical, and liturgical Jewish themes and
subjects. In a class by himself, he belongs among the
highest ranks of the American musical establishment,
but he also championed the perpetuation of authentic
Jewish musical tradition and of the Central European
cantorial legacy. Among serious American Jewish
composers, his singularity extended even further to
the practical realm. Not only was he fully conversant
with the entire range of American and European
synagogue choral repertoire, which he taught to
cantorial students for more than forty years, but he
knew the intricacies of the modal formulaic system of
Ashkenazi liturgical rendition known as nusah hatfilla,
and he functioned as an authoritative baal tfilla (lay
cantor or precentor) well into his retirement.
Weisgall was born in Eibenschitz (Ivancice), a town
in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire (now the Czech Republic), where he claimed
to have begun singing in a synagogue choir at the
age of three or four. His father, Abba Yosef [Adolph
Joseph] Weisgall (who added the second l to his name
in America, though his brother Meyer did not), was
both a cantor at the local synagogue and a classical
lieder and light operatic singer. From childhood, Hugo
Weisgall absorbed the Central European liturgical
traditions and the western lieder and operatic canons
from his father, whom he also accompanied on the
piano. The family immigrated to America in 1920
and soon afterward settled in Baltimore, where Abba
Yosef served for more than four decades at one of the
citys oldest and most prestigious synagoguesChizuk
Amuno Congregation. From his earliest years in
Baltimore, Hugo Weisgall became intimately involved
in the musical life of that congregation. For many
years he conducted its choir; and he also organized
and directed a mixed chorus, based there and known
as the Chizuk Amuno Choral Society, which performed
concert works as well andwith the esteemed
cantor Jacob Barkinissued one of the most artistic
LP recordings of classic and contemporary cantorial-choral
repertoire.
Apart from some consultations abroad (he went to
Europe shortly before the Second World War hoping
to study with Bartk, who was unwilling to take on
further students), Weisgall received all of his formal
education in America. He studied at the Peabody
Conservatory in Baltimore, and then intermittently
with Roger Sessions. At the Curtis Institute he studied
with Fritz Reiner and Rosario Scalero and earned
diplomas in conducting and composition, but his
variegated interests led him to pursue a doctorate
in other academic areas, and in 1940 Johns Hopkins
University awarded him a Ph.D. for his dissertation on
primitivism in 17th-century German poetry. After the war, Weisgall
returned to the United States where he founded and directed
the Chamber Society of Baltimore and the Hilltop
Opera Company; directed the Baltimore Institute of
Musical Arts; and taught at Johns Hopkins University
from 1951 until 1957all the while continuing his
work with synagogue choirs. But dearest to his heart
was his forty-four-year involvement with the Jewish
Theological Seminary. He established and stewarded
the foremost curriculum in America for education and
training in cantorial art. From its opening in 1952 until
his own retirement in 1996, Weisgall was chairman
of the faculty at the Seminarys Cantors Institute and
Seminary College of Jewish Music (now the H. L. Miller
Cantorial School). In that capacity he functioned as
a de facto co-director of the schoolespecially vis--
vis its musical (as opposed to Judaica) parameters.
He devoted a major portion of his energies to that
role, bringing both his broad worldview of Jewish
music and his exacting western musical standards
to bear upon the Seminarys approach to cantorial
studies. He also taught graduate level composition
and was the doctoral dissertation advisor for such
important American composers as Herman Berlinski
and Miriam Gideon. His legacy at the Seminary is
permanently etched.
In 1961 he simultaneously became a professor of music
at Queens College in New York, retiring in 1983 as
Distinguished Professor. And he taught for thirteen
years at The Juilliard School.
Projects on Weisgalls desk at the time of his death
included the beginnings of a second set of settings
of Yiddish folk melodies; operatic versions of two
plays by Jean Anouilh, several scenes of which were
sketched out to libretti by Charles Kondek, the
librettist for Esther; and a new opera based on John
Herseys novel The Wall, about the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising (according to Kondek, they had almost
finished a draft of the complete libretto), which was
to have been produced by New York City Opera. He
was also sketching out a group of liturgical settings for
the typical format in Conservative synagogues.
Weisgalls earlier style has been appraised as a fusion
of non-tonal neoclassicism with certain influences of
the Second Viennese School of composers, such as
Alban Berg, colored by the general opulence of that
period. But his later music more closely approaches
that Second Viennese School, especially its most lyrical
aspects. Even at its most rigorous-sounding moments,
however, it is generally more a matter of strident,
even severe chromaticism than actual atonality
although Weisgall himself was never comfortable with
such classifications.
In 1958 the eminent American composer George
Rochberg described Weisgalls music as leaning
towards free tonality; he is never quite atonal. But
nearly twenty years later Weisgall assessed his own
approach from another perspective: Generally my
music is considered complex, he said. It is texturally
thick and multifarious; rhythmically disparate; and
[it] has harmonic lines that move along on their
own. It is what is commonly called atonal, but it is
not non-melodic. Rochberg also astutely summarized Weisgalls
basic artistic credo at that time: Among American
composers he is one of the few who remain heedless of
the musical clichs which superficialize and debilitate
American music. There is strength and hope in such an
independent attitude. Weisgall remained steadfast
to those principles for nearly forty years more. He
never succumbed to popular tastes or the lure of
wider acceptance; and he never strayed from his own
artistic integrity.
Neil W. Levin and Bruce Saylor
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