Frederick Jacobi

Biography

Frederick Jacobi (May 4, 1891 – October 24, 1952) was a Jewish-American composer and teacher. His works include symphonies, concerti, chamber music, works for solo piano and for solo organ, lieder, and one opera.
He taught at Juilliard School of Music from 1936 to 1950, where his pupils included Mark Bucci, Alexei Haieff, Vera Nicolaevna Preobrajenska, Julia Frances Smith, Robert Starer, John Verrall, and Robert Ward. He also served as the director of the American section of the International Society for Contemporary Music and was a founding member of the League of Composers. He died on October 24, 1952, in New York City of heart failure.

Early life

Jacobi was the son of San Francisco wholesale wine merchant, Frederick Jacobi Sr. and Flora Brandenstein (daughter of tobacco wholesaler Joseph Brandenstein), whom Frederick Sr. had married in 1876. During the composer's childhood years, he demonstrated his musical talent, composing short pieces at the piano and playing tunes from contemporary musical comedies by ear. In these years the family traveled each summer to visit relatives in New York City. The scenery of those cross-country train rides later provided the themes of a number of Jacobi's nature-inspired compositions.

Musical training and career

When Frederick Sr. died in 1911, Frederick Jr. inherited the estate, which provided him enough wealth that he could devote his entire livelihood to music. In his twenties Jacobi studied music and composition under such masters as Isidor Philipp of the Paris Conservatory, Rafael Joseffy, Paolo Gallico, Ernest Bloch and Rubin Goldmark in New York, and Paul Juon in Berlin.
From 1913 to 1917 he worked as a vocal coach and assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. It was during that time, on April 19, 1917, that he married Irene Schwarcz, a friend of many years, who, at the time, was studying piano at the New York Institute of Musical Art (which later became Juilliard). Irene would go on to become an accomplished concert pianist and would play piano parts in many performances and recordings of Jacobi's works.
Jacobi enlisted in the army shortly after marrying Irene, where he served as a saxophone player in the Alcatraz Army Band. He was discharged in 1919, at which time he moved to New York to be in closer contact with the American composers of the time. His first large orchestral work, The Eve of St. Agnes, debuted the following year in New York. For the remainder of his life he published and performed new works nearly every year—sometimes several in the same year (see compositions section). Major American orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies performed Jacobi's orchestral compositions during the years of his life.
In works from what has become known as Jacobi's Indian period (late 1920s and early 1930s), he incorporated rhythms and other elements from indigenous Native American music he had heard in his travels through the American southwest. Indeed, he spent the winter of 1927 with the Navajo and Pueblo of New Mexico studying their music. In 1942-1944 Jacobi collaborated with Canadian playwright and librettist, Herman Voaden, to produce the opera, The Prodigal Son, which debuted at the American Opera Society of Chicago in May 1945.

Legacy

Jacobi is also known and best remembered as a composer of works with Judaic themes. His interest in this genre began with a 1930 commission from Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York for a sabbath evening service. Although he had not been religiously educated as a child, this experience affected him permanently, and thereafter the Bible influenced all of his music, secular and liturgical. He even taught himself Hebrew. Although Jacobi's secular work is performed only infrequently today, his liturgical works continue to receive performances in synagogues.
Jacobi's work largely rejects the polytonality and atonality that was popular with the avant-garde composers of his time. Instead he finds his influence in the classical and romantic periods. Baltimore Sun critic, Florestan Croche, described Jacobi's style as having "a sense of the drama which is always aristocratic, introspective, and personal, and never allowed to become theatrical. Harmonically ... his is a language of extreme chromaticism, one, however, which always appears to be tonally oriented." New York Times critic, Olin Downes, described the aesthetics of Jacobi's music as "not so much of the 20th as of the 19th century."

Awards and honors

Honorable mention in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Competition, 1924
Two-time winner of the award of the Society for the Publication of American Music
David Bispham Medal awarded by The American Opera Society for The Prodigal Son.
Source: New York Times

Quotes on musical composition and anecdotes

"I am a great believer in melody; a believer, too, that music should give pleasure and not try to solve philosophical problems."
"The surest way to kill whatever originality one possesses within himself is to try to be original!"
Irene was in a box near the Metropolitan Opera stage one evening when Frederick Jacobi was the prompter. After the performance she said, "Darling, you were wonderful. I heard every word you said!"