Schalit, Heinrich, 1886-1976

Heinrich Schalit was born in Vienna on January 2, 1886. His vision seriously impaired by childhood illness, Schalit studied music at Vienna's Jewish Institute for the Blind. At Vienna's Konservatorium für Musik und darstellende Kunst, he studied piano with Theodor Leschetizky and musical composition with Robert Fuchs. Schalit graduated from the Konservatorium in 1906 with a "superior" rating, that year winning the Austrian State Prize for Composition Students. He relocated to Munich in 1907. His Jugendland solo piano pieces were performed throughout Europe by pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch. In 1916 Schalit made a concious decision to begin writing music of "Jewish content and character." His Seelenlieder was published in Vienna by Universal Edition in 1921. His 1928 hymn In Ewigkeit was performed and well reviewed throughout Germany. Schalit's early Jewish works influenced two student musicians at the State Academy for Music in Munich: Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (née Frankenburger) and American synagogue composer Herbert Fromm. In September 1927 Schalit became organist and music director of Munich's Hauptsynagoge. Schalit composed his Eine Freitagabend-Liturgie in 1932. At its world premiere in Berlin that September, the Friday evening service was praised by musicologists Alfred Einstein, Hugo Leichtentritt and Curt Sachs. In 1933 he and his family had to leave Munich to avoid Nazi persecution. Schalit became music director at Rome's Great Synagogue in December 1933. The family arrived in Rochester, N.Y. in August 1940. The ten-year struggle to bring them to America was successfully waged by Philip S. Bernstein, rabbi at Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester, N.Y. Schalit and his family relocated to Denver in 1948. In the 1960s Schalit received commissions to compose synagogue music from several American congregations. He was composing music up until the time of his death on February 3, 1976.

From the description of Papers, 1906-1996. (Jewish Theological Seminary of America). WorldCat record id: 58047764