Born on 14 March 1881[2],
in Pinsk, White Russia (Belarus). His father was a
successful lumber merchant. Although he and his wife
were religious and conducted a traditional Jewish home,
they gave their children a more or less modem
upbringing, according to the ideas of that time. Their
oldest child, a daughter, studied piano and had an
influence on her brother's musical education.
Zeitlin studied in
cheder, in a real shul [high school],
and, most important, displayed a great passion for
music. His first music teacher was the renowned Pinsk
klezmer musician Beryl Fidler, and at the age of only
nine he was admitted to the Odessa Imperial Music
School,[3]
where he studied violin with Professor Molinarski. He
finished there at age eleven “with honors[4]
and immediately entered the [St.] Petersburg
Conservatory under the guidance of Professors Samos and
Glazunov. He studied violin with Professor Galkin and
theory, harmony, counterpoint, and composition with the
famous composers Liadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vital,
Glazunov, etc. His friends were Efrem Zimbalist, Joseph
Achron, Maximilian Steinberg (Rimsky-Korsakov's
son-in-law), Mikhail Gnessin, Lazare Saminsky, Leo Low, Moshe Milner, and many others of that era.
Zeitlin's pursuit of composing can be seen from the
following: while still a student at the Odessa Music
School, without knowing anything about theory or
instrumentation, he composed a musical work for full
orchestra on Peter Weinberg's poem
“The Sea.” The same can be
said about the [St.] Petersburg Conservatory: beginning
in 1907, on the advice of Professor Glazunov, Zeitlin
devoted himself entirely to the study of composition and
in 1912 brilliantly completed his composition studies by
writing for his examination a piano sonata and a string
quartet.[5]
M[endel] Elkin writes: “At
that time, the group of young Jewish musicians made
their historic announcement to the Jewish community to
begin gathering Yiddish musical folklore. Thus was
founded the 'Society for Jewish Folk Music,' which
immediately began collecting. The collectors were S.
Anski, Kisselgof, Rivesman, the engineer Acton, and
others. The organization set up a music committee in
which were: Aharon Leib Zeitlin,[6]
Moshe Milner, Joseph Achron, S. Rosowsky, L. Saminsky,
M. Shalyt, Gnessin, Low, and others.
The committee began to work
with the collected material. Zeitlin first worked on the
following: ‘Eli Zion,’ for cello and piano; ‘Zog zhe,
rebenyu,’ a duet for tenor and baritone; ‘Reb Nakhmons
nign,’ for string quintet; and ‘Shabes-lid,’ for [men’s]
chorus. All these pieces were published by the music
society. Before long, called by their own original,
greater creations, the young music group gave up
reworking and moved on to independent compositions of
great worth, and it was then that Zeitlin displayed
remarkable productivity. Within a period of a year he
wrote eleven symphonic works (‘Chasidic Dances’)[7]
and orchestrated a series of works by his friends
Milner, Low Rosowsky, and others.”
As early
as 1898, Saul Ginsberg and Pesach Marek had published in
the Hebrew and Yiddish-Russian press a call for “All who
are close to the masses of our people to sign up and
send us the folk songs that are sung in their regions.”
The call was a great success: many sent not just the
texts but the melodies as well. In 1901, the collection
came out, but it contained only the texts and not the
musical notation. In 1909, Joel Engel began “revising”
and “adapting” the melodies, and in 1908, as Lazare
Saminsky says in his book Music of the Ghetto and the
Bible, a group of young composers, students of
Rimsky-Korsakov at the [St.] Petersburg Conservatory,
Ephraim Shkliar, Mikhail Gnessin, Shlomo Rosowsky, and
he [Saminsky] founded the “Society for Jewish Folk
Music.” The society lasted for ten years.
The outbreak of World War I
interrupted Zeitlin's creativity. In 1917, he was
appointed a teacher of theory at the Ekaterinoslav Music
School,[8]
which a year later became a conservatory, where he was
named professor and remained as director. At the same
time an opera and symphony orchestra were founded in
Ekaterinoslav, and until 1920 Zeitlin was the director
and conductor.
Impelled
by completely personal reasons to leave Russia in 1920,
he relocated to Poland, where he occupied himself mainly
with popularizing Jewish symphonic music.
“His concerts in Lodz and
Vilna"—writes M. Elkin—“were extremely well received,
but in Warsaw, because of the anti-Semitism among the
leaders of the Philharmonic where the only symphony
orchestra performed, none of his concerts could be
staged, and because of that he returned to Vilna.”[9]
In Vilna, Zeitlin occupied
himself mainly with pedagogical work. He gave a series
of symphony concerts and conducted several operas in
Yiddish, among them Tschaikowsky's
Eugen Onegin.[10]
All his
concert programs were composed of Jewish symphonic
music, and, although he had composed several works for
voice and orchestra, he avoided performing his own
works.
Because
his living conditions were so poor, Zeitlin decided to
immigrate to America. M. Elkin writes:
“Getting
himself to America was not easy. It fell to me
personally to intervene directly in this matter, to take
care of everything that was needed for this trip. But
with the help of SEJM Deputy Yitzchok Greenbaum[11]
and of the Yiddish Artists’ Union, we managed to make
his coming here possible, and in 1923 he set foot on the
shore of the longed-for land. . . But the story of his
arrival begins on the Isle of Tears, on Ellis Island,
and who knows
whether he would have been allowed to enter if not for
his magic viola, which so impressed the ‘Princes’ of the
Isle of Tears. ‘He is a sick man,’ the ‘boss’ of Ellis
Island said to me. ‘We cannot allow him into the
country.’ Again there followed intervention and endless
requests that the gentle Zeitlin must endure. Finally,
he was freed from ‘detention,’ and his first home was
actually with me, where he lived for a long time until
he was invited to be musical leader and soloist at the
Capitol Theatre.”[12]
The
invitation to become a “leader” in such an institution
gave wings to his desire to work, and he began making
plans for his composing activities. But soon came the
first disappointment: the administration of the Capitol
Theatre overwhelmed him with so many arranging and
orchestrating duties for their programs that he hardly
had time for their work, not to mention his own personal
composing.
This was
the first disappointment that had a fatal effect on him.
Later came the so-called “efficiency” policy and the
push from the theaters to out-do each other in
programming, and all this robbed him of any possibility
of doing his own work.
The
artist and creator in Zeitlin refused to rest, so he
began working into the night. Arriving home at midnight,
exhausted after a day's work, he would sit in his room
poring over various scores until four or five o'clock in
the morning and in this way was able to write many
symphonic works. According to information from Professor
Achron, there exist in manuscript several dozen
compositions . . ., all of which Zeitlin created in the
almost inhuman conditions in which he lived and worked.
But these same efforts brought him to his fatal and
tragic end in the very flowering of his creative years.
As early
as 1923, Zeitlin had been in touch with Engel, the head
of the Jewish music publishing company in Berlin at that
time, about publishing his works. As usual, he postponed
it until he could make some corrections. Until his last
minutes he dreamed, along with others of the group of
“Yunge” (The Young Ones), of resurrecting the former
Society for Jewish Folk Music and reviving its work. And
when the Society for Yiddish Culture had, several months
earlier, in 1930, again put out a call for such a
reorganization, Zeitlin was one of the first to back it
and to sign up for this effort. He had already, in
cooperation with Joseph Achron, Professor Weinberg, F.
Koretsky, and others, begun to develop plans for this
undertaking, but it was not bashert (fated) for
him to complete it.
He died
8 July 1930 in New York.
M. E.
-
M. Elkin -- Leo tseitlin
iz geven eyger fun di shafer fun der nayer idisher
folks-muzik, "Der tog", N. Y., 21 July 1920.
-
M. Elkin -- Leib
tseitlin, "Literarisher bleter", Warsaw, N' 33,
1930.
-
Shlomo Ruzubski -- Lzkhr
hmnukh l. tseitlin, "Harts", Tel aviv, 3 September
1930.
-
Sh. Rozuvski -- Vos far
a muzikalisher talant iz geven leo tseitlin?, "Der
tog", N. Y., 27 January 1933.
-
Israel Rabinovitsh -- "Muzik
bey idn", Montreal, 1940, pp. 162-63.
---------------
Footnotes:
He
graduated from the Odessa Branch of the Imperial
Music School in 1904 at the age of twenty and entered
the St. Petersburg Conservatory the following
September.
Only one Zeitlin orchestral work entitled “Hassidic
Dance” exists.
SEJM refers to the lower house of the Polish
Parliament.
Zeitlin was a violist in the Capitol Grand Orchestra
and a staff musical arranger. There is no indication
that he was a “musical leader” or a soloist.
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