David Gershfeld

David Gershfeld was a Moldavian Soviet composer, music pedagogue and organizer, and folklorist, regarded as a founder of Moldavian national opera and of the system of musical education in Moldova. He was born on 28 August 1911 in Bobrinets, in Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, and died on 26 January 2005 in Bradenton, Florida, United States.

He grew up in a musical family: his father was the violinist and composer Grigory Gershfeld. In childhood he lived in various towns of Ukraine before the family settled in Stepanovka in Vinnytsia region. He studied piano and music theory in Vinnytsia and played cornet, E-flat clarinet, baritone horn, and piccolo in the orchestra directed by his father. After finishing school he worked as a metalworker, played in military bands, and then studied at the workers' faculty of the Berdychiv branch of the Kyiv Chemical-Technological Institute.

In 1930 he entered the Odessa Music and Theatre Institute named after Beethoven, where he studied bassoon and horn and also mastered the piano. He studied composition and music theory with Nikolai Vilinsky. After graduating in 1934 he was sent to work in the Moldavian ASSR, first in Balta and then in Tiraspol, where he became head of the musical production department of the Tiraspol Ukrainian Theatre.

Gershfeld quickly became a major organizer of musical life in the region. In Tiraspol he created the Moldavian National Music and Drama Theatre, a children's arts center, a children's symphony orchestra, and in 1937 the first children's music school in the republic, which he headed until 1940. He also led the Moldavian branch of the Union of Composers and transformed it in 1940 into the Union of Composers of the Moldavian SSR in Chișinău. Together with the writer Leonid Kornyanu, he collected Moldavian musical folklore from the left bank of the Dniester and published an annotated anthology of Moldavian folk songs in 1939, as well as examples of instrumental folk traditions, especially dance melodies.

In 1940 he founded and headed the Moldavian State Conservatory. During the Second World War the institutions he had created were disrupted, but in 1942 he organized the song and dance ensemble Doina, which performed on wartime fronts and in evacuation hospitals. For this work he became the first person in the republic to receive the title Honored Art Worker of the Moldavian SSR. After returning to Chișinău in 1944, he reestablished and again headed the Union of Composers of Moldova and the Chișinău Conservatory, served as artistic director of the Moldavian State Philharmonic, chaired the Moldavian Musical-Choral Society, and directed the music college later named after Ștefan Neaga as well as the specialized music school later named after Eugen Coca. He also founded an opera studio at the conservatory.

In 1947 he was severely criticized during the campaign against so-called rootless cosmopolitans and lost all his positions, though he continued composing actively. In 1956 he was restored as head of the Union of Composers of Moldova, director of the Chișinău Conservatory and music college, and became artistic director of Moldavian radio. In 1955, drawing on his earlier theatrical experience, he founded the Moldavian State Opera and Ballet Theatre in Chișinău and served as its first director until 1964. For this theatre he wrote the first Moldavian opera, Grozovan, whose premiere opened the first season on 9 June 1956. Another of his operas, Aurelia, was staged there in 1959.

From 1966 he lived in Sochi, where until 1992 he headed the Sochi Philharmonic. In 1992 he moved to the United States and settled in Bradenton, Florida, where he spent the last years of his life. Even after leaving Moldova he continued composing works on texts by Moldavian and Romanian poets.

Virtually all of Gershfeld's творчество was connected with Moldavian national folklore. He composed three operas: Grozovan, Aurelia, and Sergey Lazo; the ballet Radda; the operetta The Poet and the Robot; the musical comedy In the Valley of Grapes; three cantatas; a violin concerto; three Moldavian dance suites; more than 250 choral and solo songs and romances; arrangements of Moldavian folk songs and dances; incidental music for dramatic productions; music for the film comedy Not in His Place; the well-known song about Sochi Festive Sochi; and an oratorio in memory of Andrei Sakharov. In the United States he wrote a cycle of romances on poems by Mihai Eminescu.

As director of the conservatory, opera studio, music college, and music schools, Gershfeld trained many future important figures of Moldovan musical culture, including opera singers such as Boris Raisov, Maria Bieșu, Valentina Savitskaya, and Tamara Cheban. His legacy is closely tied to the institutional formation of professional musical life in Soviet Moldova and to the emergence of Moldavian national opera.

Connections

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