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Continuator: The Autobiography of a Socially-Conscious, Cosmopolitan Composer
Paperback
Entertainment & Performing ArtsBiographies General
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Published: Feb 21 2025
Pages: 562
Weight: 1.64
Height: 1.14 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
(Black & White Photos Edition)
Historically, the term cosmopolitan has often been combined with the adjective rootless, to describe members of the Jewish diaspora with a sense of alienation from mainstream culture. The author of this autobiography, the creator of music to words in eleven languages, and translations from each of them into his native English, feels anything but rootless, however, in his devotion to learning from and extending tradition.
In this memoir, he describes the influences of family, mentors, and colleagues that have shaped his life and work, including 100 translations/adaptations, 12 operas, 7 musicals, and 246 other vocal & instrumental works (heard on 6 continents) based on words by Blake, Rossetti, Shelley, Dickinson, Malamud, Chekhov, Heine, Brecht, Nash, Abel Meeropol, Langston Hughes, Norman Rosten, Karl Shapiro, Mihai Eminescu, Joel Shatzky, and dozens of other writers (especially women and Australians) in English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Ladino, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Xhosa and Yiddish.
He also recounts his learning experiences at Harvard, Cornell, Indiana; with the Guarneri Quartet, Nadia Boulanger, Erik Werba, Boris Goldovsky; as Metropolitan Opera Assistant Chorus Master; and in several German-speaking theaters in Europe, culminating in Berlin, where he was the first Jew to conduct Fiddler on the Roof in that city, and founded the Jüdischer Musiktheaterverein Berlin. At the invitation of Wolfgang Wagner, he and his wife Helene performed the first Yiddish song recital in Bayreuth during the Wagner Festival.
Adapting/completing unfinished works by Marc Blitzstein, including Idiots First (winner of the first Off-Broadway Opera Award for most important event of the season) and Sacco and Vanzetti (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), he worked with Leonard Bernstein, who called him Marc's dybbuk and composers Lazar Weiner, Paul Hindemith, Earl Kim, Harold Blumenfeld, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Joel Mandelbaum, Tom Lehrer, Lou (& Peter) Berryman, Pete Seeger, Sheldon Harnick, Ned Rorem, Stephen Sondheim, John Eaton, Donald Erb, Robert M. Palmer and especially Elie Siegmeister, who called him my Continuator - hence the title of this book.
Finally, the autobiography chronicles adventures on four continents, including over 700 performances with soprano Helene Williams, celebrating Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Anne Frank, and five centuries of music, theatre, and naturism, in close to 5,000 YouTube videos with over 1,000,000 views, to date.
A member of the Green Party, Community Church of Boston, and the ACLU, Leonard J. Lehrman was the first President of the Long Island Composers Alliance; co-chaired the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case; and hosted WHRB's Serious Music Today and WBAI's Music of All the Americas. He attended the 1963 March on Washington and conducted the 1989 Manhattan premiere of the cantata I Have A Dream, as well as the Workmen's Circle Chorus, Oceanside Chorale, and Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island. Reference Librarian at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library since 1995, Metropolitan Synagogue High Holidays Music Director since 2014, he founded The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus and the Composer/Performer Roundtable of the Music Library Association; and created and taught the first course in Jewish Opera at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
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Lehrman, Leonard J.
Elie Siegmeister, American Composer: A Bio-Bibliography
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