During that early period he began composing liturgical settings, at first under his father’s influence and soon developing his own style. He became his father’s choir director when he was only thirteen and remained at that post until he began his university studies. There the young Samuel Adler (originally Hans) displayed his musical talents at an early age. Within a year after the nationally orchestrated pogrom known as Reichskristallnacht, in 1938, and the realization of doom for German Jewry’s future, the family immigrated to America, where the elder Adler obtained a position as a cantor in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Chaim Adler was also an active liturgical composer.
His father, Hugo Chaim Adler, was a highly respected cantor at Mannheim’s chief Liberale synagogue, where the orientation was the mainstream German-Jewish synthesis of tradition and modernity-most closely approximating the American Conservative movement’s path in many respects. But while Weisgall’s oeuvre includes only one full-length synagogue service, Adler has written and continues to write prolifically for the Hebrew liturgy (in addition to his numerous nonliturgical Jewish works), and he has been a consistently active participant in the cantorial and Jewish musical infrastructure in America, especially-though not exclusively-within the Reform arena.Īdler was born in Mannheim, Germany, in the last years of the optimism and creative fervor of the Weimar Republic. Both had fathers who were learned émigré cantors in the Central European mold both devoted substantial creativity to Jewish subjects while never circumscribing themselves parochially both have been generally perceived as prominent in each field both served on faculties of major universities and conservatories and both established lifelong official affiliations with major American institutions of higher Jewish learning: Adler with the Reform movement, through his ongoing association with the School of Sacred Music of Hebrew Union College, and Weisgall with the Conservative movement and the Jewish Theological Seminary-as chairman of the faculty of its Cantors Institute and Seminary College of Jewish Music. Among 20th-century American Jewish composers, perhaps only the life of Hugo Weisgall offers some parallels.
Adler has long been in the forefront of both worlds, not only artistically as a composer (his primary endeavor), but also intellectually and academically as a lecturer, educator, and author. In that he has always devoted his gifts to Judaically related and general musical expression with equal emphasis, Samuel Adler is a unique phenomenon among those established mainstream American composers whose Jewish identities have informed a part of their art.
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