Tribute in Absentia

The formidably bearded Swiss musician first came to the U.S. as an orchestra leader, accompanying a dancer. When her tour folded, he wound up in Manhattan, where he used to impress friends by accompanying himself on the piano while he sang passionate cello passages from his own Schelomo. That was 30 years ago.

Last week, Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music and the League of Composers combined to pay tribute to Composer Ernest Bloch. Juilliard faculty members and students played his rich, rhapsodic chamber music and orchestral compositions (including the now famed Schelomo) in a two-day festival. Composer Bloch, now 67 and clean-shaven, has never written any tunes that are hummed in every U.S. household. But musicians rank him, along with Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg, as the best of the European expatriates now in the U.S. Bloch knows as much about strident dissonances and spastic rhythms as the next man, but he is their master, not their servant.

Composer Bloch was too ill to make the 3,000-mile trip from his cliff-hung home on the Oregon coast to the festival, but he was not too ill to compose. He spends his days combing the beach looking for agates, and mushroom-hunting in the salal and salmonberry woods nearby. In the huge living room of his house, near a life-size woodcarving of Christ, he works nervously, but neatly, as always, on a piano concerto. He and his wife Marguerite find time to play with his half-dozen cats. Says he: "We can learn much from them. I wish they could teach me to relax."

Bloch had grown up in Geneva--a Geneva seething over the Dreyfus affair--the son of a clock merchant. He studied music in Brussels, Munich and Paris, but when his father's business went bad, he came home to help. As a child, he learned from his father the Jewish lore and emotional melodic strains that permeate his music, but he dislikes being classified, as he often is, as a racial composer.

A U.S. citizen since 1924, Bloch taught in Manhattan, and headed conservatories in Cleveland and San Francisco. But he wanted to compose, not teach. For a time he was subsidized by Cellist Gerald Warburg (son of Banker Felix) and by a wealthy San Francisco family. He retired with his wife and cats to the Oregon seaside in 1941. There, while showing his lute-playing composer daughter how Bach used 48 themes in his Well-Tempered Clavier, he got the theme for the finale of his recent Suite Symphonique. "Suzanne and I were sitting on the little stone steps in the garden. I wrote -- just like that --two pages of fugue motifs. The last one, which irritated her, is the one I used."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.