Ruth Schonthal; Pianist and composer (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
Martin Anderson
17 July 2006
Ruth Schonthal
Pianist and composer
Ruth Schönthal (Ruth Schonthal), composer and pianist: born
Hamburg 27 June 1924; married 1950 Paul Seckel (three sons);
died Scarsdale, New York 11 July 2006.
Ruth Schonthal's life mirrors those of so many other
musicians whose careers - some incipient, others
long-established - were thrown into disarray by the Nazis'
anti-Semitic policies. Child-prodigy executant musicians are
rare enough, but Schonthal was a child-prodigy composer,
too, writing music from the age of six. She was still
composing 76 years later: her last work, Variations for
Double-Bass on a German Folksong, was completed in June.
Schonthal's earliest career promised a glittering future: at
five she was the youngest student ever accepted into the
prestigious Stern Conservatory in Berlin, where she
attracted considerable attention as a wunderkind. But in
1935, as a Jew, she was expelled from the institution and
had to continue her piano and composition lessons with
private teachers.
In 1938 her parents fled to Stockholm where, although their
daughter didn't fulfil the standard criteria, her
extraordinary abilities gained her a place in the Royal
Academy of Music - in the teeth of protests in the press,
since there were restrictions on Jewish refugees. Her
principal teacher there was Ingemar Liljefors, whose mild,
folk-influenced modernism was prophetic of Schonthal's own
style. Her first published work, a sonatina for piano,
appeared in 1940.
In 1941 Sweden had begun to appear an insecure haven, and so
Schonthal's parents continued their flight, settling in
Mexico City (via the Soviet Union). There she again resumed
her interrupted education, studying composition with Manuel
Ponce and Rodolfo Halffter and piano with Pablo Castellanos.
She soon made her mark here, too, appearing in a concert in
the Palacio de Bellas Artes as soloist in her own first
piano concerto, the Concierto romantico.
It was in Mexico City that she met the composer Paul
Hindemith, a Hitlerflüchtling like herself, but by then one
of the most respected teachers in the United States. Deeply
impressed when he heard Schonthal performing her own works,
he helped her find a bursary which in 1946 allowed her to
join his composition class at Yale - at which point, like
many other immigrant composers whose names had diacriticals,
she dropped the umlaut which had initially graced the "o" of
Schonthal. With marriage to the painter Paul Seckel in 1950
and a house in Atlantic City, New Jersey, her wanderings
were at last at an end.
But no one now knew her as a composer, of course, and so
Schonthal had to establish herself all over again. She
helped feed her growing family by writing music for
television commercials and playing the piano in bars;
private teaching in New York also contributed to her modest
income. Professional security eventually came with a post
teaching composition at New York University, from 1976, and
another at the State University of New York at Purchase. And
she doggedly continued composing, turning her turbulent past
to good effect in her music which, toughly argued but
approachable in manner, fused elements of her European past
with Mexican folk influences and American modernism.
Ruth Schonthal's output includes over one hundred
compositions, among them three operas, all focused on female
figures: The Courtship of Camilla (1979-80), Princess Maleen
(1988) and Jocasta (1996-97), a feminist recasting of the
Oedipus legend where both the main characters are
represented by an actor, a singer and a dancer. She paid
homage to her second adoptive homeland with Fiestas y Danzas
(1961) for piano, based on Mariachi tunes, and her third
with a Whitman song-cycle, By the Roadside (1975).
A number of works address her Jewish heritage, among them a
set of Variations on a Jewish Liturgical Theme (1994) for,
unusually, electric guitar, and the Third String Quartet
(1997) which bears the title Holocaust in Memoriam. She
similarly considered contemporary events in her music,
writing an anti-war cantata The Young Dead Soldiers in 1986
and Bells of Sarajevo for clarinet and prepared piano in
1997.
Gradually the world rediscovered Ruth Schonthal. In 1980 she
made her first trip back to Germany in 42 years when she
undertook a concert and lecture tour. Performances of her
music became more frequent. In 1994 the city of Heidelberg
awarded her a medal and celebrated her life with an
exhibition. In that same year Martina Helmig's Ruth
Schonthal: ein kompositorischer Werdegang im Exil appeared
in print (an English translation, Ruth Schonthal - a
composer's musical development in exile, is due to be
published by the Edwin Mellen Press this December). In 1997
Furore Verlag in Kassel signed an exclusive contract to
publish her music.
In 1999 she presented her archive to the Academy of the Arts
in Berlin, which marked the event - and her 75th birthday -
with a gala opening, a concert and the release of a CD of
her piano music, played by Adina Mornell.
Martin Anderson