Erich Walter Sternberg

Erich Walter Sternberg (Hebrew: אריך ולטר שטרנברג‎‎, May 31, 1891, Berlin – December 15, 1974, Tel Aviv) was a German-born Israeli composer. He was one of the founders of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

After graduating with a law degree from Kiel University in 1918, Sternberg began studying composition with Hugo Leichtentritt and piano with H. Praetorius in Berlin. From 1925 Sternberg visited Palestine annually and moved there in 1932, along with other Jewish musicians who fled Germany prior to World War II. His life was devoted to composition and teaching of composition. In 1936 he helped Bronisław Huberman found the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and promoted the Palestine chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Sternberg married Frieda Pinner (Berlin, 1918), Ilse Tanja Wellhöner (Tel Aviv, 1936), Ella Thal (Tel-Aviv, 1949).

Sternberg's works in the 1920s and 1930s were expressionistic in style and reflect the influences of Hindemith and Schoenberg. He also incorporated traditional Jewish musical idioms into his use of dense polyphonic textures. Examples of this can be seen in his salient use of the augmented 2nd and cantilation motifs in the piano cycle Visions from the East, a programmatic work concerning the Jews of Eastern Europe, and in his String Quartet no.1, where he quotes both a Yiddish song, Bei a teich (‘The River’), and the formula for the prayer Shema Yisrael.

...
Wikipedia