Ernst Toch

Austrian composer Ernst Toch (1887–1964) was considered one of the great avant-garde composers in the pre-Nazi era. He was born in Vienna, into the family of a humble Jewish leather dealer when the city was at its 19th-century cultural zenith. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, medicine at Heidelberg and music at the Hoch Conservatory (1909–1913) in Frankfurt. His main instrument was the piano, and he was a pianist of considerable stature, performing to acclaim throughout much of western Europe. His first compositions date from c. 1900 and were pastiches in the style of Mozart. In 1909, his Chamber Symphony in F major (written 1906) won the Frankfurt/Main Mozart prize. He won the Mendelssohn prize for composition in 1910. In 1913, he was appointed lecturer of both piano and composition at the College of Music in Mannheim. After World War I, he returned to Mannheim to compose, developing a new style of polyphony. He received his Ph.D. degree from Heidelberg University in 1921. He then taught on the faculty of the Mannheim Conservatory where one of his pupils was Hugo Chaim Adler. Following Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, Toch went into exile, first to Paris and then London. In 1935, he accepted an invitation from the New School for Social Research to go to New York City. He could, however, only secure his living in California by composing film music for Hollywood. Unlike his colleague Erich Wolfgang Korngold, however, Toch never got much attention in the industry and was rarely top-billed, although one of his scores was nominated for an Academy Award in 1936. During his residence in California, he was a professor at the University of Southern California, where he taught both music and philosophy. He was also a guest lecturer at Harvard University. From 1950 on, he composed seven symphonies, the third of which (Opus 75, 1954) received the Pulitzer Prize three years later. In these later works, he returned to the late Romantic style of his early years. He died in Santa Monica, California, and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. He wrote music for films, symphonies, chamber music, chamber operas. He also wrote books dealing with musical theory: Melodielehre (1923) and The Shaping Forces in Music (1948).