David Hertzberg

David Hertzberg (born January 14, 1990) is an American composer of chamber, orchestral, and operatic music. He has received significant critical attention for his two site-specific operas, The Wake World and The Rose Elf, for which he wrote both music and libretto.

Early life and education (1990-2015)

Hertzberg was born in Los Angeles, where he studied music at the Colburn School, before attending the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Massachusetts. In 2008, he attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, Germany. He received his Bachelors and Masters of Music degrees from The Juilliard School in 2012 and 2013, respectively. There he studied composition with Samuel Adler. In 2015 he received an Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

In 2011, while a student at Juilliard, his cantata Nympharum was premiered by soprano Jennifer Zetlan and the Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, at Alice Tully Hall. In 2013, the New Juilliard Ensemble premiered his large ensemble work femminina, oscura, also at Alice Tully Hall.

Career (2015-present)

In 2015, Hertzberg's chamber work Orgie-Céleste was premiered at Merkin Hall in New York, as part of his tenure as Composer-in-Residence at Young Concert Artists. In 2016, his cantata Sunday Morning, originally commissioned by Gotham Chamber Opera, was premiered at Lincoln Center by New York City Opera. In 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2019, he had chamber works premiered on the Concert Artist Guild series at Carnegie Hall. In the spring of 2017, the American Composers Orchestra premiered his Chamber Symphony at Carnegie Hall.

From 2015-2018, he served as Composer-in-Residence for Opera Philadelphia. In September 2017, the company premiered his opera The Wake World, based on the eponymous story by Aleister Crowley, to wide critical acclaim. The opera was staged at the Barnes Foundation, and featured an often wordless chamber choir. Hertzberg was subsequently nominated for Newcomer of the Year at the International Opera Awards. The Wake World went on to win the Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera.

In June 2018, his chamber opera The Rose Elf, based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen, premiered in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Discussing the unusual venue and presentation of the opera in The New York Observer, James Jorden wrote, "If on paper the event threatened a level of bizarrerie sufficient to daunt Taylor Mac, in real time this presentation... turned out to be just about everything you want opera to be. The Rose Elf shocked, confounded, disturbed, and, in the end, exalted." The Rose Elf was cited as "The Opera Event of the Half Year" by WQXR, and later among "New York's Most Memorable Concerts of 2018" and given their annual "Freddie" Award for Best New Opera.

On April 24th, 2020, a studio recording of The Wake World was released on Tzadik Records. The New York Times listed the track "Is that you, my love?" among the 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020. On October 31, 2020, a recording of The Rose Elf was released by Swan Studios. Opera News named it one of the 5 Best New Works of 2021. In January 2022, Pittsburgh Opera presented a new production of The Rose Elf.

In January 2023, The Washington Post listed him among their "23 for 23': Composers and Performers to Watch this Year". That spring, he served as Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks.

He has been a resident at MacDowell in 2019, and Yaddo in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2024.

Critical reception

Hertzberg has received critical attention for his musical language, which critics have cited for its decadence and compared to various fin-de-siècle and modernist composers and artists, as well as those of the pre-and-post-war avant-garde.

Of his saxophone quartet, murmurations, Peter Dobrin of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "It was valuable to hear David Hertzberg's strikingly original murmurations (2014). The Juilliard- and Curtis-trained composer establishes a soundscape in this longish piece that, in its harmonic language, grows out of non-serial Berg and Schoenberg but, in the ghostly way it reveals itself, resembled little else."

Of Hertzberg's chamber work Orgie-Céleste, Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times, "In this riveting work, Mr. Hertzberg, 24, demonstrates that a gifted young composer can be inspired by masters and still speak with a vibrantly personal style. The music abounds in echoes of composers Mr. Hertzberg seems to have had in his ear, especially Messiaen, Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. Yet the sound and dogged exploration of the work’s ideas come across as utterly original. It opens with an episode in which the piano plays restless runs with hints of bird calls. The violin is consumed with cosmic harmonics, while the clarinet fixates on haunting two-note figures. The music goes through bursts of wildness, yet never loses its mystical aura."

Describing his cantata Sunday Morning, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times, "“Sunday Morning” is, above all, unusual. Attend any new-music concert, and you hear works by composers in their 20s and 30s that may be good or bad but are almost always restless and frenetic, full of dramatic contrasts. Think Pollock, or Basquiat. Mr. Hertzberg here bears more resemblance to Robert Ryman: pale and unshowy, with flickers of color evident only on close inspection. “Sunday Morning,” a setting of an eight-part Wallace Stevens poem, begins with sunrise ethereality — held high notes in the strings and light plucks of a harp — and remains raptly restrained even as it condenses and blooms."

Summing up the national critical response to the opera festival on which his opera The Wake World premiered, David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer recorded, "Composer David Hertzberg’s music in The Wake World inspired some of the best critical writing of the festival. [Heidi] Waleson: “The sheen and muscle of Strauss wedded to the diaphanous spirit of Debussy.” Tommasini: “The score, spiked with modernist elements, makes Mr. Hertzberg seem like a 21st-century Ravel.”Dobrin: “A half-remembered dream Szymanowski once had about Scriabin.”

Discussing the 2020 recording of The Wake World in Opera, John Rockwell wrote, "Hertzberg’s poetic text is positively lurid; it makes Wilde’s Salome sound downright prosaic... Score and text echo the past: the lushness of Ravel (Daphnis) and Debussy (Mélisande’s dream-state); Wilde and Strauss’s Salome, of course, but also the Emperor of Die Frau ohne Schatten turning to stone, and the loving writing for the female voice; Wagner with the Venusberg sirens and the Flowermaidens and especially the Rhinemaidens; Lulu; Alice in Wonderland (falling down the rabbit hole); Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with the prince’s magical transformation into a woman; and not least Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but with a happy ending. Yet for all that, Hertzberg’s opera sounds completely original."

Hertzberg has cited Wagner and Kabbalah as influences on his music.

Awards

Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) [1]

Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020)

Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera (2018)

References

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