Ernest Bloch was one of the most original composers of the 20th century. His music was regularly performed during his lifetime, particularly in the USA, the UK and Italy. He was so admired in his heyday that many considered him the fourth ‘B’ after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. He won many prestigious composition prizes including for his Viola Suite of 1919 and in 1928 for his composition ‘America, an Epic Rhapsody’. His music was beloved by the public and inspirational for a younger and more academically oriented generation.
He wrote an enormous range of vocal, instrumental and orchestral and choral works – music of the most thundering majesty to the most delicate miniatures. In recent years, major orchestras and world-renowned soloists including Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Steven Isserlis, Raphael Wallfisch, YoYo Ma, and Itzak Perlman have been performing and recording Bloch’s works. (See a link to his works by instrument at the end).
His works reveal a wide variety of influences from neo-classical and neo-romantic styles to French and Swiss, Chinese, American and Native American folk traditions and as well as Gregorian Chant. He wrote a number of his works that carry Jewish titles such as the violin and piano suite Baal-Shem, the Israel Symphony, and Schelomo, a tone poem that is one of the world’s great cello concertos. He was able to draw on his rich Jewish background to create profound soundscapes.
Bloch’s pioneering teaching positions in the USA started in 1917 when he was appointed the first composition teacher at Mannes School of Music, a post he held for three years. In December 1920 he was selected as the first Musical Director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music. Following this he was appointed Director of the newly formed San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1925, a post he held until 1930. His proudest accomplishment was the influence he had on his admirers and students including composers Herbert Elwell, Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, George Antheil and Roy Harris.
As well as a composer and teacher, Bloch was an accomplished conductor, violinist, pianist and philosopher. He was also a prolific letter writer, a gifted photographer, a painter, a collector and polisher of agates, an expert on mushrooms and a communicator with an extraordinary love of, and concern for nature.
Early life and training: Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva on July 24, 1880. He began playing the violin at nine and started composing soon after. His musical training in Europe was intense and diverse, including advanced violin training, composition, study of eurhythmics; and sojourns with distinguished teachers or at conservatories in Geneva, Brussels, Munich, Frankfurt and Paris, as well as corresponding with Mahler and later meeting Debussy.
In 1916 he was hired as a conductor to tour the USA with the Maud Allan dance troupe. The company folded, stranding him in Ohio. But Bloch soon found success in America as a composer, conductor, music school administrator and composition teacher. In 1924 he took American citizenship. In 1930, Bloch was enabled by a trust fund, to go back to Switzerland and France, to compose without having to teach. With war looming in Europe, he and his family returned to the USA in 1939.
Bloch moved in 1941, to the small coastal community of Agate Beach, Oregon where he took great pleasure in the mountains, the forests and the ocean for the rest of his life. He returned to teaching as professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley, a position he retained until his retirement in 1952.
Family: Ernest Bloch married the pianist Margarethe Schneider in 1904 and they had three children. The eldest, Ivan b1905, was an engineer with the Bonneville Power Administration and very involved with energy conservation. The middle child, Suzanne, b1907 taught at Juilliard for 43 years. She co-founded the American Lute Society. The youngest, Lucienne, b1909 (who was named after her godmother, Lucienne Bréval, to whom Bloch dedicated his only completed opera Macbeth) became a well-known artist and photographer. She was a friend of Frida Kahlo and helped carry on the tradition of Buon Fresco throughout the United States.
Bloch died on 15 July 1959, in Portland, Oregon at the age of 78. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the ocean, near his home in Agate Beach.
Composer Alfredo Casella stated of Bloch, ‘His art is one of grandeur and majesty which sometimes recalls the Moses of Michelangelo’. Legendary cellist Pablo Casals wrote: ‘For me, the greatest composer of our time is Ernest Bloch.’
