Education Heinrich Schalit was born in
Vienna, Austria on January 2, 1886 to Joseph Schalit and Josefine Fischer. He had four siblings, including first secretary of the Zionist Office, Isidor Schalit. Schalit began his musical education and career without any connection or influence to Jewish music. He studied organ, piano and composition privately in 1898 with
Josef Labor; and in 1903 he began studying at the
Conservatory of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. His teachers included Polish pianist
Theodor Leschetizky and composer
Robert Fuchs. In 1906, he graduated and received the Austrian State Prize for Students of Composition for his
Piano Quartet in E minor. Schalit moved to
Munich in 1907, where he worked as a private music teacher and composed numerous works; primarily post-romantic songs and chamber music, including the works
Jugendland,
Six Love Songs and
Six Spring Songs.
Influence on Jewish music Between 1916 and 1920, driven by the political events of the time, Schalit began to focus more on Jewish music. He saw himself as a Jewish composer motivated by Zionism. In a letter to Anita Hepner, Schalit wrote: :[… between] 1928 and 1932, when there was no composer of Jewish birth who could have even thought of writing music with a consciously Jewish heartbeat, I was already a well-known composer of Jewish religious music [...] as a conscious Jewish musician and Zionist I considered it my duty to convince him [Paul Ben-Haim] of the necessity of devoting his talent to Jewish music and culture“. On a list of compositions in 1936, Schalit wrote: "1916, Beginning of the creative period of music of Jewish content and character."
Liturgical music At the end of the 1920s, Schalit began to study Jewish liturgical music. In his opinion, Jewish liturgical music was characterized by a romantic and operatic style, as in the works of Louis Lewandowski and Salomon Sulzer, and called for a resurgence and modernization; being based on authentic Jewish musical traditions while still integrating elements of 20th-century music. Schalit stated his displeasure with what he deemed an “unorganic mixture of traditional cantorial chants with congregational and choral music in the German style of the 19th century."
Compositional style In his music, Schalit avoided the harmonic conventions of 19th-century music by relying more on
modal elements. His musical style utilized controlled dissonances within a diatonic framework. His writing style is reminiscent of the
polyphonic density of the choral and orchestral writing in many of Arnold Schoenberg's works, without Schoenberg's traditional
atonality. Similar to composers like
Béla Bartók and
Paul Hindemith, Schalit considered the folk music traditions of individual cultural heritages and nations to be an important source of inspiration; while defining his own use of
tonality in the context of the musical innovations of the 1920s. Schalit viewed modern research and the collection of Hebrew-Oriental ritual music, as collected by Jewish ethnomusicologist and composer
Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, to be the incentive for the further development of synagogue music.
Death and legacy Schalit died on February 3, 1976 in
Evergreen, Colorado. ==Selected works==