Herman Berlinski

Herman Berlinski (1910-2001) was a German-born, American composer of Jewish liturgical choral works and oratorios. Berlinski's considerable output included symphonic and chamber works, concertos, song cycles, a sonata for violin and piano titled Le Violon de Chagall, and a work for two singers, narrator, and instruments called The Glassbead Game that was based on the Hermann Hesse novel. He also wrote secular pieces for the organ, which he learned to play at age 40. Religiously inspired works such as the oratorios Job and The Trumpets of Freedom and a composition for organ, The Burning Bush, were among his best-known creations. His large-scale works included Ets Chayim (The Tree of Life), commissioned by Project Judaica to mark the opening of the Smithsonian's "Precious Legacy" exhibit. Other works, many inspired by the Holocaust, were performed at the Library of Congress, Kennedy Center, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and elsewhere. One often-performed work, a series of suites titled "From the World of My Father," was first played in Paris in 1938. His final composition, Psalm 130, for solo voice, choir, and organ, was commissioned by the Washington National Cathedral. Berlinski, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, settled in Washington three decades later to become music director at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a post he held until 1977. He had begun his musical career as a pianist, but after mastering the organ, performed and recorded on the instrument in this country and abroad well into advanced age. In his later years, he established a choir called Shir Chadash that performed between the Jewish high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at the Kennedy Center and elsewhere.

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Herman Berlinski

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