Jewish composers have shaped almost every corner of Western music, from the Romantic symphony and the birth of atonality to Broadway, Hollywood and minimalism. Many of them were the children of immigrants, and several lived through persecution, exile and war, experiences that echo through some of their best-known music.
Here are 10 of the greatest Jewish composers, from Felix Mendelssohn to Steve Reich, with a piece to start with for each.
The short version
If you only explore three, start with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
1. Leonard Bernstein
1918–1990 · American
Start with: “Mambo (Symphonic Dances from West Side Story)”Composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Ukraine. His first musical memories came from Friday night services at the Mishkan Tefila synagogue in Boston, and when he was ten an aunt left her upright piano at the family home. He studied at Harvard and the Curtis Institute, and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood.
In 1943 he stepped in at short notice, without a rehearsal, to conduct the New York Philharmonic when Bruno Walter fell ill, and became famous overnight. He later served as its music director and taught millions through his televised Young People’s Concerts. As a composer he is best known for West Side Story (1957), Candide and the Chichester Psalms.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 16 of the greatest American composers
2. George Gershwin
1898–1937 · American
Start with: “Rhapsody in Blue”
George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershwine in Brooklyn in 1898, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His parents bought a piano for his older brother Ira, but George was the one who couldn’t stay away from it. He studied with the pianist Charles Hambitzer and left school at 15 to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. His first big hit was “Swanee” (1919).
Rhapsody in Blue (1924), with its famous opening clarinet glissando, brought jazz into the concert hall. Working with Ira as his lyricist, he wrote standards such as “I Got Rhythm”, and his opera Porgy and Bess (1935) gave the world “Summertime”. In 1937 he began suffering headaches and smelling burning rubber. He died of a brain tumor that July, aged just 38.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 15 interesting facts about George Gershwin
3. Aaron Copland
1900–1990 · American
Start with: “Appalachian Spring (Simple Gifts variations)”🏆 Pulitzer Prize
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His mother sang and played the piano, and his sister gave him his first lessons. He studied with Rubin Goldmark in New York, then spent three years in France at Fontainebleau and with the teacher Nadia Boulanger, who shaped a whole generation of American composers.
Copland created a sound that many people still hear as “American”: open, spacious harmonies and folk-like tunes. His ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring (Pulitzer Prize, 1945) and his Fanfare for the Common Man are his best-known works, and he won an Oscar for his score for The Heiress (1949). He died in 1990, the same year as Bernstein.
4. Irving Berlin
1888–1989 · American, born in Russia
Start with: “White Christmas”🏆 Oscar win
Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin in Russia in 1888, and his family fled to New York when he was five. His only memory of Russia was watching his house burn down. His father was a cantor, and young Israel sold newspapers on the Lower East Side before leaving home at around 13. He worked as a singing waiter and joined the Ted Snyder Company as a staff lyricist in 1909.
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911) made him a star, and he went on to write an estimated 1,500 songs, including “Blue Skies”, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “God Bless America”. He could only play the piano in F-sharp and used a special transposing piano. His “White Christmas” won an Oscar and is one of the best-selling songs ever recorded. He died in 1989, aged 101.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 of the greatest musical theater composers
5. Gustav Mahler
1860–1911 · Austrian, born in Bohemia
Start with: “Symphony No. 5: IV. Adagietto”
Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, into a German-speaking Jewish family. Several of his siblings died young, which marked him deeply. He entered the Vienna Conservatory at 15 and built a career as a conductor. In 1897 he converted to Catholicism, partly to secure the post of director of the Vienna Court Opera.
His symphonies are vast in scale and emotion, mixing folk tunes, marches and huge orchestral climaxes. Start with the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony or the choral finale of the Second, the “Resurrection”. In 1908 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, conducting Tristan und Isolde, then led the New York Philharmonic. He died of a heart infection in Vienna in 1911.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: A quick guide to Mahler’s symphonies
6. Steve Reich
Born 1936 · American
Start with: “Music for 18 Musicians”🏆 Pulitzer Prize
Steve Reich was born in New York City in 1936. His mother, June Sillman, was a Broadway lyricist, and after his parents divorced when he was one he grew up between New York and California. He studied philosophy at Cornell, then composition at Juilliard and at Mills College with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. Baroque music and jazz were early loves.
He became one of the founders of minimalism. In It’s Gonna Rain (1965) he let two tape loops drift out of sync, a process called phasing, and Music for 18 Musicians (1976) is a landmark of the style. He later explored his Jewish roots in Tehillim (1981), a setting of Hebrew psalms, and Different Trains (1988). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for Double Sextet.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: What is minimalism in music?
7. Felix Mendelssohn
1809–1847 · German
Start with: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture”Revived Bach
Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809, the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His parents had the children baptized as Protestants when Felix was seven, but his Jewish background followed him all his life. He gave his first public concert at nine, and wrote two masterpieces as a teenager: the String Octet at 16 and the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 17.
In 1829, aged 20, he conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin, sparking a revival of Bach’s music. He directed the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, founded the Leipzig Conservatory and was a favorite in Britain, where his oratorio Elijah premiered in 1846. Overwork and grief at the death of his sister Fanny took their toll, and he died after a series of strokes in 1847, aged 38.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 interesting facts about Felix Mendelssohn
8. Arnold Schoenberg
1874–1951 · Austrian, later American
Start with: “Verklärte Nacht”Inventor of the twelve-tone method
Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 and was largely self-taught, apart from lessons in counterpoint with Alexander von Zemlinsky. His early string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899) is lushly Romantic, and Gustav Mahler supported his work. He converted to Lutheranism in 1898 but formally returned to Judaism in Paris in 1933, as the Nazis drove him out of Germany and he left for the United States.
In works such as Pierrot lunaire (1912) he abandoned traditional keys altogether, and in the early 1920s he devised the twelve-tone method, which shaped much of 20th-century music. In America he taught at UCLA and wrote A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) for the victims of the Holocaust. He had a lifelong fear of the number 13 and died on Friday 13 July 1951.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 of the greatest serialist composers
9. Philip Glass
Born 1937 · American
Start with: “Metamorphosis One”
Philip Glass was born in Baltimore in 1937 to Jewish immigrant parents. After Juilliard he worked as a composer in Pittsburgh’s schools, then won a Fulbright to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. There he worked with Ravi Shankar on the score for the film Chappaqua, and Indian music changed how he thought about rhythm. Back in New York in 1967, a Steve Reich concert pointed him toward minimalism.
For years he supported himself as a mover, plumber and cab driver while writing pieces such as Music in Twelve Parts (1971 to 1974). His opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) was the first of a trilogy of “portrait” operas, followed by Satyagraha and Akhnaten. His film scores, including Koyaanisqatsi, Kundun and The Hours, brought his rippling, repeating style to a huge audience.
10. György Ligeti
1923–2006 · Hungarian-Austrian, born in Romania
Start with: “Atmosphères”
György Ligeti was born in 1923 in Transylvania, Romania, into a Hungarian Jewish family. He began studying at the Kolozsvár conservatory in 1941, but in 1944 he was sent to a forced labor brigade, while his father and younger brother died in concentration camps. After the war he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, then fled to Vienna after the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
In Cologne he worked at the WDR electronic music studio before developing his own technique, micropolyphony, where dense webs of lines blur into shimmering clouds of sound, as in Atmosphères (1961). Stanley Kubrick used it and other Ligeti pieces in 2001: A Space Odyssey without his permission. His opera Le Grand Macabre and his piano Études are also widely played. He died in Vienna in 2006.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 13 of the greatest Hungarian composers
Which Jewish composer is your favorite?
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Summing up
These ten composers cover a remarkable range, from Mendelssohn’s overtures and Mahler’s symphonies to Berlin’s songs, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone revolution and the minimalism of Reich and Glass. Many of them faced prejudice or exile, and several drew on their Jewish heritage directly in their music.
Which Jewish composer would you add to the list?
