Three Dickinson Songs

In December 1983, Ignace Strasfogel (1901–1994) took up pencil and music paper again for the first time, ending a decades-long creative break from composing. Born in Warsaw in 1909 and moving to Berlin with his mother after the early death of his father in 1912, Stasfogel made an unprecedented career in the Weimar Republic as a musical prodigy. At the age of thirteen, he was the youngest regular student at the Berlin Academy of Music, studied composition with Franz Schreker and piano with Leonid Kreuzer and in 1926, at the age of seventeen, won the prestigious Mendelssohn Prize for his Piano Sonata No. 2. As a sought-after chamber music and lied accompanist, he was already touring with such greats as Joseph Szigeti and Carl Flesch, which made it easier for him to emigrate to the USA after the Nazis came to power. After decades of success as a pianist and conductor with the New York Philharmonic and at the Metropolitan Opera, he returned to composition in old age - inspired and encouraged by the efforts of musicians such as Kolja Lessing to bring composers who had been driven into exile from Germany in 1933 back into European musical life. The songs on texts by Emily Dickinson, the most important American poet of the 19th century, premiered by the composer himself at the piano in New York in 1984, show a composer at the height of compositional mastery, into which his decades of experience as a pianist, song accompanist and opera conductor have flowed. However, they are also moving testimonies not only to a compositional tradition that lived on despite persecution and expulsion, but also to a unique transatlantic cultural symbiosis made possible by the experience of exile.