Jan Meyerowitz

Jan Meyerowitz (23 April 1913 – 15 December 1998) was a German-American composer and writer whose stage works brought him to Broadway and to major concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic. Born Hans-Hermann Meyerowitz in Breslau — the city now known as Wrocław, Poland — he was the son of a manufacturer. Beginning in 1927, he pursued musical training in Berlin under Walter Gmeindl and Alexander von Zemlinsky. The rise of National Socialism forced him out of Germany in 1933 on account of his Jewish heritage, and he continued his studies in Rome with Ottorino Respighi, Alfredo Casella, and conductor Bernardino Molinari.

Meyerowitz spent the late 1930s moving westward across Europe under increasingly dangerous circumstances. He relocated to Belgium in 1938 and then to the south of France in 1939, where he made contact with the French Resistance. In Marseille, his future wife, the singer Marguerite Fricker, assisted him in surviving the Nazi occupation of France. He emigrated to the United States in 1946, where he joined Tanglewood as an assistant to Boris Goldovsky, director of the opera program there. He became an American citizen in 1951.

His operatic output was substantial and drew on a range of literary collaborators. The one-act opera Simoon, with a libretto by Peter John Stephens after August Strindberg, premiered at Tanglewood on 2 August 1949. That same year he completed The Barrier, a two-act opera with a libretto by Langston Hughes — also known as Die Schranke, The Mulatto, and Il Mulatto — which premiered on 18 January 1950 at Columbia University in New York and subsequently reached Broadway. His four-act opera Emily Dickinson, based on a libretto by Dorothy Gardner and earlier titled Eastward in Eden, premiered in Detroit on 16 November 1951; two acts were later staged separately as The Meeting, premiering in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on 16 September 1955. The opera-farce Bad Boys in School, for which Meyerowitz wrote his own libretto after Johann Nestroy, premiered at Tanglewood on 17 August 1953. He returned to Hughes as a librettist for Esther, a one-act opera composed between 1957 and 1960 that premiered at Tanglewood on 4 August 1960. The chamber opera Godfather Death, again with a libretto by Peter John Stephens, premiered in New York on 1 June 1961. His three-act opera Die Winterballade oder Die Doppelgängerin, for which he wrote the libretto himself after Gerhart Hauptmann, received its premiere at the Staatsoper Hannover on 29 January 1967, conducted by Reinhard Petersen.

Beyond the stage, Meyerowitz composed extensively for orchestra, chorus, and chamber forces. His symphony Midrash Esther, completed in 1954, received its premiere in 1957 with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. Orchestral works also include the Flemish Overture of 1959 and an Oboe Concerto from 1962. His vocal compositions encompass the Easter cantata The Glory Around His Head with a text by Langston Hughes, the Missa Rachel Plorans for a cappella choir, the New Plymouth Cantata and Emily Dickinson Cantata both with texts by Dorothy Gardner, and song cycles drawing on texts by E. E. Cummings, Robert Herrick, John Keats, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others. A Hebrew Service and the Arvit Shir hadash l'shabbat, premiered in 1962 at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York with cantor David Putterman, reflect his engagement with Jewish liturgical music.

Meyerowitz also pursued an academic career, teaching at Brooklyn College from 1956 to 1962 and subsequently at the City College of New York. In 1956 he received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships. As a writer, he published a monograph on Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin in 1967 and a book titled Der echte jüdische Witz in 1971, reissued in 1997. After retiring, he returned to France, where he died in Colmar on 15 December 1998.