More than just music

OLGA LIVSHIN

Leonard Lehrman’s achievements are too numerous to list. He is a singer and a composer, a conductor and a chorus leader, an organist and a pianist, a performer and a teacher. He has founded music theatres and festivals, written books and articles, and performed in various religious institutions. Music in all its aspects has dominated his life since he was eight years old.

“I always knew I wanted to be creative: a writer or a musician,” he said in a phone interview with the Jewish Independent from his home in Valley Stream, N.Y. “Since I turned 11, I’ve wanted to be a music teacher and a composer.”

By 1977, he had achieved those dreams. He had a doctorate in composition and was teaching and conducting when an offer came his way from the Met. The famous opera house wanted to stage the Russian operas Evgeny Onegin by Tchaikovsky and Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky in the original language, and they needed a chorus master to teach the singers Russian.

“I couldn’t refuse the Met,” Lehrman recalled. “I left academia for a one-year contract as an assistant chorus master at the Met.” He had hoped the contract would be renewed after the year was over, but it wasn’t. Not only that, but his teaching position was no longer available. He solved his unemployment quandary in an innovative way: he moved to Europe.

“I spent seven years in Europe, had several jobs with various opera houses and professional choirs,” he explained. “For three years, I worked in Berlin. I conducted Fiddler on the Roof there, the first Jewish conductor to do that. I also founded the Jewish Musical Theatre in Berlin.”

Lehrman has founded a few music and choral organizations over the years and, although some of them have folded since, others have survived and flourished. “I created them as umbrellas for things I wanted to do,” he said. One of his creations, the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus, has been performing regularly since its inception in 1988. Among other music, the choir has performed and premièred many compositions by its founder and director, as have other community and professional companies throughout the United States, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Choral music and opera have been Lehrman’s passion for decades, but his particular interest was reserved for Jewish composers. He was close to his composition teacher Elie Siegmeister and was a personal friend of Leonard Bernstein. “When Bernstein yelled ‘Bravo!’ after one of my performances, that was the best moment in my life,” Lehrman shared.

Both Bernstein and Lehrman admired another well-known American Jewish composer, Marc Blitzstein, who wrote numerous operas and recitals on social and political themes – themes close to Lehrman’s heart as well. “I was always concerned with social issues,” Lehrman said. “When I was a teenager, my mother took me to my first demonstration against nuclear testing.”

Lehrman wrote a comic musical about American imperialism, The Comic Tragedy of San Po Jo, while still in high school; it was staged by the students. Fifty years later, he and his friends are still singing songs from it at their high school reunions – in 2007, and this week.

With such a shared outlook on life and society, it is no surprise that Blitzstein’s music attracted Lehrman, who finished several unfinished works by Blitzstein, including operas Tales of Malamud, based on the stories by Bernard Malamud, and Sacco and Vanzetti, about the controversial trial of two Italian anarchists wrongfully convicted of murder and executed because of their political views.

“Sacco and Vanzetti took me 25 years to complete,” Lehrman said. “Blitzstein wasn’t even close to finishing it when he died. I knew his practice of reusing his own music, so I had to get everything he had ever written from the archives. I had to study all his works before I could finish the opera. We performed it first in 2001, very successfully.”

Lehrman also wrote a book about Blitzstein, published in 2005.

Recently, Lehrman has been an organist at several churches in the New York area, performing during Sunday services. Churches may seem an unexpected venue for a Jewish musician with a deep sense of national identity, but Lehrman explained it in the simplest terms. “I want to perform in synagogues, but in the last few years, synagogues have been getting rid of their instruments – organs or pianos. There are no musical jobs in any of the local synagogues now.” He sounded sad but resigned.

When asked how he has managed to accomplish so much, he joked: “That’s because I don’t have a full-time job.”

It’s true. He doesn’t. Lehrman works part time as a librarian at his local public library, writes articles and books, composes operas and recitals, conducts choirs, teaches and performs as a singer and accompanist with his wife, soprano Helene Williams (co-founder of the Bronx Opera). They have been working together since 1987, marrying in 2002, and, in 2010, they gave their 500th concert performance together.

In May 2013, Lehrman and Williams are coming to Vancouver. On May 10, 11 a.m., they will perform at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. They will sing songs in English, Yiddish and Ladino, and speak about their experiences in Jewish music and opera.

The next day, May 11, at 7 p.m., the pair will be joined by local tenor Will George at the Canadian Music Centre, 837 Davie St. They will perform, among other pieces, excerpts from Lehrman’s and Blitzstein’s vocal compositions.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

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