Jacob Weinberg

Jacob Weinberg (7 July 1879 – 2 November 1956) was a Russian-born Jewish composer and pianist who composed over 135 works for piano and other instruments. He was one of the founders of the Jewish National Conservatory in Jerusalem before immigrating to the U.S. where he became "an influential voice in the promotion of American Jewish music" from the 1940s until his death.

Weinberg was born in Odessa, Ukraine, to Dora and Wolf Weinberg, a middle-class family. His father was a merchant and his uncle was Peter Weinberg, a prominent translator of Shakespeare and Heine into Russian. Jacob completed law school at Moscow University, but he never practiced, preferring his piano studies. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory of Music under many prominent teachers and studied composition for a year in Vienna, under Sergei Taneyev.

Weinberg toured Russia as a pianist and also toured with Emil Rosenoff in their two-piano concerts from 1912-1916. He adapted Rachmaninoff's works to create a two-piano piece he called Rachmaniana. It was published and performed by Weinberg and Rosenoff. He was also very interested in preserving the unique melodies and music scales of Jewish religious and secular folk tunes. When the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music was formed in 1908 by Joel Engel, Lazare Saminsky, and others, Jacob Weinberg and his Moscow-based peers formed the Moscow branch of this society. Then he returned to Odessa, where he taught at the Odessa Conservatory of Music.

With the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution, Weinberg spent two months in prison and then fled with his wife Theresa (née Bernstein) and his only child, a son, Walter, in 1922 to Palestine (now Israel). There he composed the first Hebrew opera, The Pioneers (Hechalutz). It won First Prize in an international composition contest, sponsored by the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial. There was a performance in Jerusalem in April, 1925. With the prize money of $1500, he took his family to New York.

Weinberg produced concert versions of his opera The Pioneers at Carnegie Hall in 1941 and 1947, and at the Mecca Temple (now New York City Center) in the 1930s. In addition, there was a performance in Berlin, Germany in the 1930s, by the Kulturbund, the soprano Mascha Benya in one of the leading roles. It was performed in a synagogue since the Nazis, coming to power, banned Jewish works, even masterpieces, from being performed in a proper concert hall.

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