Erich Zeisl

Erich Zeisl (May 18, 1905 – February 18, 1959) was an Austrian-born Jewish American composer.

Born to a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, Zeisl was the son of Kamilla (Feitler) and Siegmund Zeisl. His musical precocity enabled him to gain a place at the Vienna State Academy (against the wishes of his family) when he was 14, at which age his first song was published. While there, he studied with Richard Stöhr, Joseph Marx and Hugo Kauder. He won a state prize for a setting of the Requiem mass in 1934, but his Jewish background made it difficult to obtain work and publication. After the Anschluss in 1938 he fled, first to Paris, where he began work on an opera based on Joseph Roth's Job, and then to New York City.

Eventually he went to Hollywood where he worked on film music but increasingly felt isolated and ill at ease with the production-line demands of his employers. Among the films for which he wrote music were The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951).

Zeisl's style was essentially tonal, and conservative compared to contemporaries such as Arnold Schoenberg, and thus not totally unsuited to film music composition. But his heart lay elsewhere. At one stage he was employed to arrange the music for a highly inaccurate stage show about the life of Tchaikovsky, Song without Words. His anguish about his reduction to such work (together with the straits to which other émigré composers in America were reduced at the time) is evident in a letter written to a friend in 1945:

'Even Milhaud, Stravinsky, Tansman are struggling. Béla Bartók died in New York of hunger! [...] Last year I orchestrated a Tchaikowsky operetta which provided [a] living for 8 months, but why does Tchaikowsky have to be put into an operetta? [...] No composer is important here'.

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