A Miracle of Virtuosity:
Joseph Achron as a Prodigy Performer-Composer

by Dr. Samantha Elisheva Zerin, Ph.D.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
​for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
​Department of Music
New York University
January 2020

Table of Contents

(click on a chapter to read it)

• How I Wrote My Dissertation
• Chapter 1: A Strange Turn of Events
• Chapter 2: "A Miracle of Virtuosity" (Performing Prodigy Status)
• Chapter 3: "An Incredible Technician but also a Beautiful Artist" (Navigating a Midlife Crisis)
• Chapter 4: "A Miracle of Interpretational Art" (Achron as Transcriber)
• Chapter 5: "Violinist and Composer - Rara Avis!" (The Society for Jewish Folk Music)
• Chapter 6: "America Certainly Surprised Me!" (A Grown-Up Prodigy Fails to Self-Identify)
• Chapter 7: A Strange Turn of Events, Revisited

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Once upon a time – a fine Tuesday morning in the summer of 1886 – in a small, quiet Russian-Jewish village consisting of “one long main street framed by two rows of houses,” one of those houses burst into flames. Julius and Bertha Achron raced from their burning home, but in the rush to save their lives, they had forgotten to fetch their two-month-old son from his crib. A neighbor rushed in, padded the naked baby between two cushions, and tried to run out of the house with him; but the baby fell from the cushions and landed – thud! – on the floor. Desperate, the neighbor simply grabbed him and fled. “And thus,” as a wide-eyed reporter would someday marvel, “he was saved from the fire and lived.”

The boy who lived had a name, of course: it was Joseph. But reporters often just called him “the boy” or “the child.” Somtimes, they added modifiers, dubbing him “the wonder child,” “this child of wondrous talent,” or “the small, wondrous child violinist.” In Riga, a critic went so far as to claim that “this is not a child, but a miracle of virtuosity" – so uncanny were his talents as a musical prodigy.

Joseph Achron (1886-1943) was a wunderkind, a poor Jewish boy from the shtetl who spent his earliest years conquering the Russian Empire. With his fiddle in one hand and his compositions in the other, he dazzled the press, won prizes and treasures, and rubbed shoulders with royalty, all by the time he was ten years old. By age thirteen, he had performed at a crown prince's birthday party, composed for a princess, and been given a gold watch by the Dowager Czarina. By eighteen, he had graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory with the highest prize in violin performance and was ready to embark on his first international tour.

In Austria and Germany, 18-year-old Achron quickly earned a reputation as one of his generation's greatest violinists. Critics marveled at this “perfect master of his instrument, gifted by God,” “who possesses his instrument to perfection, overcoming all difficulties as if they were jokes.” By all accounts, Joseph Achron was a rising star: astounding from birth and destined for greatness. His fame continued to grow through his twenties and thirties.

Then something strange happened. Upon arriving in New York at the age of 38 for his long-anticipated American debut, the decorated virtuoso's performance career came to a sudden and permanent halt. “America certainly surprised me,” he exclaimed to a journalist, bewildered. “Everyone hailed me as a composer, and no one seemed to know I even played the violin!” For the remainder of his life, Achron would only perform in public a handful of times, yet his compositions would be heard in households, social clubs, universities, and concert halls all across America. His friends and biographers have claimed that he intentionally chose to abandon his performance career in favor of composing, but the real story – as I explain in this dissertation – is far more complicated. We know from Achron's correspondence and publicity materials that he did, in fact, want to continue performing in America. So why didn't he?


Once upon a time – an icy Sunday morning in the winter of 1908, “on a day of hard-biting frost” – two Jewish students from the St. Petersburg Conservatory approached the governor of St. Petersburg with an unusual request. They wanted to register a Society for Jewish Music. Their goals were many and diverse: supporting Jewish musicians, researching Jewish folk songs, composing and performing new Jewish music, and nourishing public awareness of and taste for Jewish art music. As the young students entered the room, they felt intimidated, not only by the presence of the governor himself, but also by the dozen or so lofty bureaucrats who were sitting in their lofty Voltaire chairs.

“What?!” the governor exclaimed, upon hearing of the students' request. “A Society for Jewish Music? Does Jewish music even exist?”
The students replied that yes, Jewish music exists. Jews had been singing for millenia, they noted, and had recently begun to compose in the classical tradition. Even non-Jewish composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin, and Modest Mussorgsky had written works on Jewish themes. And not only that (this was their crowning argument): Mussorgsky's tombstone is even engraved with a Jewish melody that he had used in his oratorio Joshua Ben Nun.

“Yes, yes,” the governor conceded, lost in thought. “Indeed, I do remember hearing a Jewish melody at a wedding in Odessa. But that was a folk melody. So calling your group a Society for Jewish Music would be misleading; rather, you should call it the Society for Jewish Folk Music.”

Over the course of the next ten years, the Society for Jewish Folk Music published sheet music for eighty freshly-composed chamber works, organized hundreds of concerts, and developed a musicological discourse in lectures and print. It sponsored ethnographic expeditions, amassed a large collection of field recordings, and published anthologies of Jewish folk and liturgical music. It expanded throughout the Russian Empire with numerous local branches and registered hundreds of members, including not only musicians, but also poets, visual artists, and scientists. In the process, it became legendary, as the founding inspiration for a global wave of Jewish musical nationalism among classically-trained composers, performers, and critics. In short, contrary to the governor's misunderstanding of the young founders' intentions, the Society for Jewish Folk Music was far broader than a group for folksong enthusiasts. It was an organization of all trades, whose activities ranged from ethnography to composition, performance, journalism, education, and the publication of scholarly monographs.

When Joseph Achron joined the Society in 1911, at the energetic age of 24, he brought with him a similarly diverse set of professional skills and interests. As a composer, he wrote numerous works for the Society's sheet music series. As a violinist, he performed his own and other members' compositions in the Society's concerts. As a critic, he oversaw the Society's publications. As an entrepreneur, he established and directed his own provincial branch of the Society in Kharkov. When the Society collapsed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Achron helped manage the group's legal and financial troubles, and he rebuilt the Society's activities in Berlin as Artistic Director of the fledgling Jibneh Publishing House for Jewish Music.

Achron's professional versatility fit well with the Society's working culture. Several of the Society's other prominent composers, for example – including Moshe Milner, Leo Zeitlin, and Efraim Shklar – also conducted choirs and orchestras at Society-sponsored events. Others, such as the composers Lazare Saminsky, Mikhail Gnessin, and Solomon Rosowsky, gave frequent lectures and published articles about the Society's activities in the Jewish and non-Jewish press. Composers Pesach Lvov, Alexander Zhitomirsky, Moshe Shalit, and Hirsh Kopit undertook ethnographic research, collecting folk melodies and passing them on to their colleagues for use in new compositions. And all of them served on the Society's administrative Musical Committee (chaired by Achron), which oversaw the selection, editing, and publication of sheet music.

Despite this professional versatility, the Society quickly became marketed exclusively as a compositional movement. Jubilee articles and speeches on the Society's fifth, tenth, and fifteenth anniversaries all but ignored the work of the Society's many performers, while framing its ethnographic work as merely a precursor to composing nationalist art music. A three-step narrative emerged, in which the Society initially focused on the collection and analysis of folk music, then turned to the arrangement of said melodies for chamber ensembles, and finally matured into a movement for composing great works of modern Jewish art music. Everything else the Society sponsored – performances, journalism, publications, ethnography, academic lectures, and so forth – was treated as merely the infrastructure that supported the Society's true purpose: to compose. As Rosowsky declared to the Society's membership at an anniversary gala in 1919, the Society for Jewish Folk Music was, “in fact, a group of musicians who aspired to compose.”

It has been 100 years, almost to the day, since that gala in 1919...

Click here to read the rest of Chapter 1