Showcasing great Jewish classical composers who have enriched the world with their music is a powerful way to combat the false narratives of antisemitism, which often rely on harmful stereotypes about Jewish people. By appreciating the work of Jewish composers who often drew inspiration from their heritage and traditions, we celebrate the richness and diversity of Jewish culture. Antisemitism thrives on dehumanizing Jewish people, while learning about the triumphs and struggles of Jewish composers fosters empathy and understanding. In fact, many Jewish composers suffered persecution and had their works suppressed or banned. By seeking out and appreciating the works of Jewish classical composers, we can play a role in challenging antisemitism and promoting a more just and inclusive world while honoring their memory and ensuring their legacy is not forgotten.
Salamone Rossi was a violinist and composer born in Italy in 1570. His collection of Jewish liturgical music from 1623, The Songs of Solomon is the earliest known published collection of liturgical music in Hebrew; there would not be another for two hundred years.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was born in Germany in 1791 and was the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century. He studied with Antonio Salieri and Carl Maria von Weber who wore a yellow star when traveling together. He never converted, in contrast to Heine, Mahler, and others who felt it was necessary to get ahead. He influenced Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. He also influenced Wagner and helped him in Paris and Germany. Wagner first called him a German messiah and then became jealous of his enormous success and began publicly criticizing him incessantly.
Fromental Halévy was born in 1799 in Paris. A professor at the Paris Conservatory, among his students were Bizet and Gounod. He composed some 40 operas. La Juive, The Jewess, composed in 1835 was one of the most popular and admired operas of the 19th century, and was a favorite of tenors such as Enrico Caruso and Richard Tucker. Mahler admired it greatly, stating: “I am absolutely overwhelmed by this wonderful, majestic work. I regard it as one of the greatest operas ever created”.
Fanny Mendelssohn, born in 1805, in Hamburg, Germany, was Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister and a talented composer in her own right. Unfortunately, her patriarchal father refused to permit her music to be published under her name. In fact some of her music was actually published under her brother Felix’s name. Despite societal constraints limiting women’s roles in music, she composed over 460 works. Fanny was closely involved in her brother’s career, providing support and critique, and her salon performances were influential in the musical circles of Berlin.
Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809, in Hamburg, Germany, into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family, though he and his sister were baptized as Protestants at a young age. A child prodigy, Mendelssohn was composing music and performing publicly by the age of nine, and his early success led him to become a leading figure during the 1st half of the 19th century. He was not only a prolific composer, but also a concert pianist, organist, conductor, musicologist, music conservatory administrator and painter! It’s astonishing how much he accomplished before his death at the age of 38.
Jacques Offenbach, born in 1819, in Cologne, Germany, was a composer and cellist renowned for his operettas and contributions to the development of the comic opera genre. He was a central figure in French musical theater, with works such as Orpheus in the Underworld and La Belle Hélène showcasing his wit. His operettas were marked by their satirical and humorous style, often critiquing contemporary society and politics. His works paved the way for future composers of musical theater and operetta. He is most well known for the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann, and for the Infernal Galop from his opera, Orpheus in the Underworld.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born in 1829, in New Orleans. His music is influenced by Caribbean and Latin American folk traditions. His career was cut short by his early death at age 40 in 1869. His use of syncopation, predated ragtime composers such as Scott Joplin by decades.
Karl Goldmark was a Hungarian composer born in 1830. His most renowned work is the opera The Queen of Sheba.
Joseph Joachim was born in Hungary in 1831. A violin virtuoso and composer, he taught Leopold Auer, who in turn taught Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz. Joachim also advised and assisted Brahms and Dvorak with the composition of their violin concertos.
Henryk Wieniawski was born in Poland in 1835. A violin virtuoso, he was known as the reincarnation of Paganini.
Emil Waldteufel was a French composer born in 1837. A prolific composer of galops and waltzes. His most popular work is The Skaters’ Waltz.
Ignaz Brüll was born in Moravia in 1846. His most successful composition is his opera, The Golden Cross. Brüll was a close friend of Brahms, whose latest compositions were frequently given their first hearings played by Brüll and Brahms at the piano.
Moritz Moszkowski, born in Poland in 1854, was a virtuoso pianist and highly regarded composer. Paderewski said that “after Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano.”
Alberto Franchetti was born in Turin in 1860 and was known as the Meyerbeer of Italy. Mussolini’s fascist racial laws resulted in Franchetti’s works being banned from public performance.
The great Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian composer and conductor born in 1860, celebrated for his monumental symphonies and song cycles. He was a leading conductor at the Vienna Court Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. To navigate the anti-Semitic climate of Vienna, Mahler converted to Catholicism in 1897, although his Jewish heritage remained a significant influence in his life and work. Personal tragedy, including the deaths of several siblings and his daughter Maria, profoundly shaped his music, often infusing it with themes of loss, mortality, and spiritual transcendence. His marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902 was turbulent, marred by his workaholic nature and her frustrations with sidelining her own creative aspirations, which led Mahler to consult Sigmund Freud in 1910 about their marital difficulties.
His 8th Symphony is set to a text from Goethe’s play, Faust. It is nicknamed “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the number of performers on stage who Mahler conducted at its premiere: 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists! His close friend and colleague, conductor Bruno Walter, championed Mahler’s music after his death in 1911, even as it was banned by the Nazis. Mahler’s music influenced Schoenberg and Shostakovich and secured his legacy as a pivotal figure in 20th-century music.
Paul Dukas, born in 1865, in Paris, was a composer and teacher renowned for his tone poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. His music, reflects his skill in creating evocative and programmatic works. Dukas’s contributions to orchestral music and his pedagogical impact have established him as a significant figure in early 20th-century French music. Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia includes Dukas’s tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Leopold Godowsky was born in Lithuania in 1870. He composed some of the most difficult piano works ever written and may have influenced Prokofiev and Ravel.
Alexander von Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer and conductor born in 1871, best known as Arnold Schoenberg’s composition teacher and for his friendship with prominent figures such as Gustav Mahler. His operas and orchestral works, blend lush harmonies with complex emotional depth.
Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874 in Vienna. He was a pioneering composer whose early works were rooted in late Romanticism, but he moved towards a new system of composition called 12-tone music, that rejected traditional tonality. Schoenberg is famous for having pushed late romanticism to its breaking point. He made a clean break with what he considered to be the oppressive conventions of harmony, which led to the beginning of the avant-garde of classical music. In his innovative work of 1912, Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg calls for Sprechstimme, or “spoken singing” whereby the singer adheres to the written rhythm, and starts on a certain pitch only to abandon it by rising or falling.
Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism in 1898 to protect himself against anti-semitism, but after experiencing several instances of bigotry, he converted back to Judaism in 1933. Works centered around Jewish themes include his opera Moses and Aaron, Kol Nidre for chorus and orchestra, and a tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, entitled A Survivor from Warsaw. Shortly after his conversion back to Judaism, he fled to Los Angeles the same year, where he lived for the rest of his life, befriending many artists and celebrities in the area, including the next composer.
George Gershwin, born in 1898 in Brooklyn, was known for his unique blend of classical and jazz elements, creating a distinctly American sound which established him as a key figure in American music. His opera, tone poems, piano concerto, songs, and scores for musical theatre continue to be favorites among performers and audiences 100 years after they were composed. His untimely death in 1937 at the age of 38 from a brain tumor cut short a brilliant career.
Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva in 1880. His is best known for his Sacred Service, Suite hébraïque for viola and orchestra, Baal Shem for violin and piano, and Schelomo for cello and orchestra. He felt that to write music that expressed his Jewish identity was “the only way in which I can produce music of vitality and significance”.
Joseph Achron was a violinist and composer, born in Lithuania in 1886. He was preoccupied with Jewish elements and the desire to develop a Jewish harmonic and contrapuntal idiom. Schoenberg described Achron as “one of the most underrated modern composers”.
Darius Milhaud was born in France in 1892. His students included Steve Reich, Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass and Karlheinz Stockhausen. A prolific composer, his music is influenced by Brazilian music and jazz. He was one of the central members of Les Six, a group of modernist French composers influenced by Erik Satie.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, born in 1895, was an Italian composer known for his guitar works, many of which were written for Andrés Segovia. Fleeing fascist persecution, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, where he became a significant composer for Hollywood films and a mentor to younger composers like John Williams and André Previn.
Erich Korngold was born in 1897 in what is now the Czech Republic. At 12 he played his cantata, Gold, for Mahler, who called him a musical genius. His violin concerto, which was written for Heifetz, and his Passover Psalm are still popular today. Living in the United States as a refugee from Nazi Europe, he was a prolific movie composer for Hollywood. He considered his 1927 opera The Miracle of Helen, to be his masterpiece.
Vittorio Rieti was an Italian-American composer born in 1898 in Egypt, blending Italian lyricism with modernist influences. He was particularly famous for his ballets in collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine.
Among the major Israeli composers is Marc Lavry, who immigrated to Israel from Latvia in 1936. Paul Ben-Haim and Josef Tal, both originally from Germany, moved to Israel in the 1930s, with Ben-Haim blending European and local influences in his music, while Tal pioneered electronic and avant-garde composition. Shulamit Ran, born in Tel Aviv and later based in the U.S., won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1991 for her orchestral work simply titled, Symphony.
Aaron Copland, born in 1900 in Brooklyn, is renowned as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century earned him the nickname “Dean of American Music”. Copland’s music is characterized by its use of American folk themes and a distinctive, accessible style that blends classical techniques with popular and folk elements. Works like “Appalachian Spring,” “Rodeo,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” exemplify his ability to evoke the American landscape and spirit through music. Copland was also a respected teacher and advocate for new music.
Leonard Bernstein, born in 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was a renowned American composer, conductor, and educator whose music spans various genres, including classical, musical theater, and film scores. Iconic works such as “West Side Story” and “Candide” showcase his versatility and creativity. As the music director of the New York Philharmonic and a prolific educator, Bernstein played a significant role in popularizing classical music and engaging audiences with his choreographic conducting style. His innovative ability to communicate complex ideas in accessible ways has left a lasting legacy on American music.
György Ligeti, born in 1923, in Transylvania (now Romania), was a Hungarian composer known for his avant-garde and innovative approaches to music. Ligeti’s work, such as “Atmosphères” and “Lux Aeterna,” features complex textures and rhythmic structures, pushing the boundaries of traditional composition. In 1944, Ligeti was sent to a forced labor brigade. His brother Gábor, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and both of his parents were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was the only member of his immediate family that survived the Holocaust. Ligeti is one of the most influential avant-garde composers of the 20th century and his work has had a lasting impact on both classical and experimental music.
Milton Babbitt was an American composer and theorist born in 1916, known for his innovations in electronic music. He became famous for his complex compositions that utilized mathematical techniques, and his work composing on the first programmable synthesizer. One of his many students was the famous Broadway composer, Stephen Sondheim.
Mieczysław Weinberg was a Polish-Soviet composer born in 1919, whose music often reflects Jewish folk themes and the traumas of war. He survived the Holocaust, but later faced Soviet repression due to his Jewish heritage and his association with Shostakovich, leading to his arrest in 1953. His music frequently conveys the oppression and fear under Stalin’s regime, and profound resilience in the face of adversity.
Alfred Schnittke, born in 1934, was another Soviet-Russian composer who became famous by combining elements of classical, avant-garde, and popular music with deep emotional intensity.
John Corigliano is an American composer born in 1938 known for his emotionally expressive music, blending contemporary and traditional styles. He gained wide recognition for his symphonies, operas, and film scores, notably winning an Academy Award for the score of “The Red Violin.”
Philip Glass and Steve Reich are composers who helped to found the style known as minimalism. Their innovative new approach to organizing music can be understood as being a reaction against the more complex, dissonant style of their teachers. Like Copland, Gershwin, and Bernstein, they wanted to create a distinctly American type of classical music, but instead of borrowing from jazz, blues, or other American folk music, Reich and Glass forged their own sound through simplicity and repetition.
Steve Reich, a New Yorker born in 1936, often draws inspiration from diverse sources, including non-Western musical traditions, spoken word, and religious themes.
Philip Glass, born in 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland, has brought minimalism into mainstream awareness, and his contributions continue to shape modern music, including film composers like Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer. Glass’s use of repetition can be suited to slow or fast tempos, the latter being best demonstrated by his music for the film Koyaanisqatsi.
Jonathan Leshnoff, born 1973, is an American composer known for his orchestral and chamber works. Leshnoff was raised observing Conservative Judaism but began to practice Orthodox Judaism while a student at the Peabody Institute at John Hopkins. In 2019, he gained significant recognition when the Nashville Symphony commissioned his Fourth Symphony and was nominated for a GRAMMY. It was performed on many instruments that are part of the “Violins of Hope” collection, meaning were once owned by European Jews before and during the Holocaust, and restored by Israeli luthier Amnon Weinstein.