Joseph Rumshinsky

Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956) was a composer, conductor, and book writer born near Vilna, Lithuania, then part of Russian Poland. Alongside Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky, and Abraham Ellstein, he is regarded as one of the four preeminent composers and conductors of American Yiddish theater. His Broadway credits include Borscht Capades, the musical Oy Is Dus a Leben!, and the musical The Singing Rabbi.

Rumshinsky's early musical formation drew on several influences. His mother taught singing to local singers and wedding entertainers, and as a child he studied with a cantor. By the age of eight he had earned the nickname "Yoshke der notn-freser" at the music school where he studied piano. He traveled with various cantors until 1894, and it was in Grodno that he first encountered Yiddish theater, seeing Abraham Goldfaden's operetta Shulamis. He subsequently joined the chorus of Kaminska's traveling troupe until 1896, when his voice changed, after which he served as choir director for a cantor named Rabinovitch. His first composition, a piano waltz, became widely popular in Vilna.

In 1897 Rumshinsky became choir director for Borisov's Russian opera and operetta company, and in 1898 he conducted a full production of Goldfaden's Bar Kokhba. Moving to Łódź in 1899, he was hired as conductor of the newly formed Hazomir Choral Society, where he studied and arranged folksongs alongside oratorios by Haydn, Handel, and Mendelssohn. He pursued formal training with the Polish musician Henryk Meltzer and at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1903, seeking to avoid conscription into the czar's army, he departed for London, where he met Charles Zunser, son of the folk bard Eliakum Zunser. Zunser persuaded Rumshinsky to emigrate to the United States in 1904.

His early years in New York were difficult. Blocked by the musicians' union from working in the theater, he supported himself by teaching piano and writing compositions, among them a funeral march commemorating the Kishinev pogrom. From 1905 to 1906 he served as director at Boston's Hope Theater before returning to New York, where he remained shut out of the theater until 1907, when he was hired as director at Brooklyn's Lyric Theater. A year later, dramatic actor Jacob Adler brought him on as conductor and composer at the Windsor Theater. Writer Sholem Perlmutter later noted that Adler was alone in recognizing Rumshinsky's originality at a time when the musicians' union treated him as an unwanted outsider.

Rumshinsky subsequently held positions at Malvina Lobel's Royal Theater from 1913 to 1914 and at Joseph Edelstein's Peoples Theater from 1914 to 1916. In 1916 he joined Boris Thomashefsky as composer and conductor at the National Theater, where he scored comedies and melodramas. His production Tsubrokhene fidele featured a full-sized dance corps and a pit orchestra of approximately two dozen musicians, a significant departure from the small dance or wedding bands that had previously been standard. When he introduced harp, oboe, and bassoon into his orchestrations, actors reportedly called him "crazy Wagner." His ambition was to move Yiddish musical entertainment away from what he termed "elevated vaudeville" and toward a new American genre of Yiddish light operetta. By 1912, a production of his Di Amerikanerin had proven so popular in Warsaw that, according to a contemporary account by Boaz Young, both Jewish and Polish audiences sang Rumshinsky's music in cabarets throughout the city.

In 1919 Rumshinsky moved to the Kessler Second Avenue Theater in the Yiddish Theater District. In 1923 he introduced Molly Picon to Second Avenue in a production of Yankele, and he, Picon, and her husband Jacob Kalich were collectively referred to as "the Three Musketeers of the East Side" in a 1931 New York Times article. That same year saw the production of Die Goldene Kale. He married the actress Sabrina Laxer; their son Maury became a pianist and composer.

Over four decades Rumshinsky composed dozens of shows. Beginning in the 1930s he expanded into radio, becoming music director of The Jewish Hour, the only Yiddish program broadcast on a nationwide network, sponsored by the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Tog. From 1946 to 1949 he worked at Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, scoring Hershele ostropoler, Isaac Leib Peretz's Dray matones, and Sholem Aleichem's Blondzhende shtern.

Rumshinsky also composed liturgical music. In 1926 he conducted the more than one-hundred-voice chorus of the Hazzanim Farband Choir in his biblically based cantata Oz yashir. In the 1940s he completed an opera in Hebrew titled Ruth, which has not been performed or recorded. He collected his writings, originally published in The Forward, and issued them in expanded form in Der Tog in 1940; the collection appeared in book form in 1944 under the title Klangen fun mayn lebn. His final show, Wedding March, was still running at the time of his death in 1956.