Nadene Goldfoot
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was actually born in Switzerland.
The famous composer Ernest Bloch spent the final two decades of his life living and working in Oregon, primarily in a seaside home in Agate Beach near Newport. He died at age 79 in Oregon.
He moved to Oregon in 1939, same year as my uncle Werner who got out of Germany as perhaps the last Jew to leave. Bloch was also fleeing war-torn Europe.
He settled permanently on the Oregon Coast at age 61 at Agate Beach in 1941.
Bloch composed a significant portion of his later classical masterworks while inspired by the Pacific coastline.
Bloch also had other interests and skills. He was a nature photographer and avid agate hunter. Most people are agate hunters when they walk along the coastline there.
I met Bloch's son or grandson at my Brookdale Assisted Living Center in Oswego Springs, Portland, Oregon. He was still following the laws of kashrut there.
Ernest was a professor of composition at the Geneva Conservatory from 1911 to 1915.
By 1917, the end of WWI, he settled in the United States.
A specific "Hebrew idiom" is inherent in much of Bloch's music, although he seldom actually used folk themes.
His works include the operas Macbeth and Jezebel,, chamber music, symphonic poems, Israel symphony, America symphony, concertos, Shelomoh rhapsody for cello and orchestra, and a setting of the Sabbath service of (Avodat ha-Kodesh). https://www.milkenarchive.org/videos/category/documentaries/ernest-blochs-sacred-service-avodat-hakodesh/
Widely considered to be the first successful and most enduring exploration of the Hebrew liturgy for serious artistic purposes, Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service remains a pinnacle within the collective repertoire of Jewish sacred music. Utilizing many of the composer’s own photographs, this original video documentary explores the environment that provided Bloch with much of the inspiration that fueled the work’s completion.
While Macbeth famously inspired Giuseppe Verdi's opera Macbeth, composers like Ernest Bloch worked on operatic interpretations of Jézabel, contrasting chromatic, sensual pagan themes with starker religious motifs.
Bloch’s Avodat Hakodesh remains the watershed (by many assessments peerless) artistic engagement with the Hebrew liturgy on the level of his best and most highly acclaimed concert works. It was conceived as a transcendent, even inclusive humanistic work of universal spiritual experience, at the same time attempting to serve the more particularistic function of specifically Jewish worship—almost as if to find a resolution between two apparent contradictions. Bloch intended his service to speak to Jews engrossed in the act of prayer and, on another spiritual-artistic plane, to general audiences of any faith or religious orientation (or none)—much in the way the communicative power of a Roman Catholic Mass setting by one of the great masters does not depend solely on the Roman Catholic or even other Christian affiliation of its audience. Avodat Hakodesh is thus a work as much for serious concert experience, which implies, ideally, some sense of communion, as it is for the liberal synagogue.(Reformed Temple). In that sense it may be considered part of the Western sacred classical choral-orchestral canon.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
- me on the coast
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