Ruth Schönthal
Born: June 27, 1924, Hamburg, Germany
Died: July 10, 2006, Scarsdale, NY
“I feel a special kinship to the European, especially the German and Viennese musical tradition, and use this as the foundation of my own musical creativity.”
BIOGRAPHY MUSIC RECORDINGS SOURCES
German composer, pianist, and teacher, Ruth Schönthal, of Viennese ancestry, showed musical promise at a young age. By 5-years-old, she was studying at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, however she and other Jewish students were later expelled once Hitler rose to power. Shortly after, Schönthal and her family immigrated to Sweden, where she attended the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm until 1941 when the Germans occupied Scandinavia. Her family attempted to obtain a visa to move to the USA, but was unable to do so, leading them to flee to Moscow, then to Japan, and finally to Mexico City, where Schönthal had the opportunity to study composition under Rodolfo Halffter and Manuel M. Ponce for the next 4 years.
In 1946, Schönthal premiered her own work, the Concerto Romantico for Piano and Orchestra, in Mexico City. Paul Hindemith, an audience member at this performance, offered Schönthal a scholarship to study with him at Yale, which she accepted. Graduating in 1948, she made her living by writing jingles and popular songs. She also performed as a concert pianist and was praised for her improvisational skills.
In 1950, Schönthal met and married Paul Seckel, an artist from New Rochelle, NY. They had 2 sons while she devoted herself to teaching private piano. In the 1960s, as she developed a friendship with the composer Paul Creston and his friends, her composing began to flourish. Shawnee Press and Oxford University Press published some of her earliest piano works. While in Westchester, Schönthal worked part time on the faculty of New York University, Adelphi University, and the Westchester Conservatory of Music.
Schönthal’s compositional output spanned 60 years during which she wrote operas, works for orchestra, chamber music, piano, harpsichord, and organ music. Her career was both successful and, at times, challenging. In 1986, in a letter to music historian Diane Peacock Jezic, Schönthal shared, “It has been a tremendous struggle to find time and energy to compose, copy, contact artists, having to spend so much time earning a living.” Despite the challenges she faced, Schönthal received awards and grants from ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Publishers) and Meet the Composer. Her one act opera, The Courtship of Camilla, made it to the finals of the New York Opera Competition and, in 1994, she was awarded the Heidelberg International Composition Prize for Women Composers in Germany.
Later in her life, Schönthal returned to Germany each year as a pianist, composer, lecturer, and panelist. She was well known for her workshops, her critiques, and for her work as an adjudicator. Her biography, “Ruth Schonthal: A Composer’s Musical Development in Exile,” by Martina Helmig, was published in German and English. In 1994, an exhibition at the Prinz Carl am Kornmarkt Museum was devoted to her life and work. She died peacefully in New York in 2006.
“More romanticist than modernist, yet fully conversant with 20th-century developments, Schönthal pretty much resisted the sway of both the European and American avant-garde forces. But some of those influences are still to be found within her synthesized aesthetic, which includes many elements of the aggregate European musical tradition, Mexican folk music, aleatoric aspects, and even occasional nods to more recent so-called minimalism.” She sees all these factors not as artistic ends in themselves, but as tools to serve her primary concern: the conveying of emotion. By her own observation, she envisions her work “as a mirror held up to a world full of complex human emotions.” -MILKEN
