Max Fishman

Max Fishman was a Soviet, Moldovan composer, pianist, and music teacher. He was born on December 12, 1915, in Warsaw, in the Kingdom of Poland, and became known also as Max Benovich Fishman. He studied at the Karłowicz Music School in Warsaw and then at the Warsaw Conservatory, where he studied piano with Józef Turczyński and composition with Antoni Marek.

In Poland he made his debut in the mid-1930s as a concert pianist and composer. He often performed at Janusz Korczak's orphanage and in summer traveled with the orphanage to the countryside as an educator. He also collaborated with the theater of Ida Kamińska, with Lola Folman, and with Wolf Messing. At the beginning of the Second World War he was drafted into the army and took part in anti-fascist resistance. In November 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution, he crossed the Western Bug River with his nephew Paweł Gruenspan and reached territory occupied by the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

From 1940 to 1944 Fishman was in the "labor army," effectively in the Gulag, including the Aktobe corrective labor camp. In early 1944 he took part in a concert where he was accidentally heard by Klavdia Krivosheina, wife of Alexei Kosygin, who helped arrange for him to continue his studies at the Saratov Conservatory. He began studying there in September 1944 with Professor E. M. Singer in piano, and later continued with Professor G. N. Petrov at the Minsk Conservatory. He studied composition with A. V. Bogatyrev. From 1947 he worked as an accompanist at the Minsk Conservatory.

During the war almost his entire family and many relatives perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, and many of them took part in the 1943 uprising. After the war he was awarded the medal "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945." In 1945 he married Lydia Aksyonova. He completed the conservatory in 1949 and remained there as an accompanist, but during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the Soviet Union, which took on anti-Semitic forms, he encountered serious obstacles to professional employment in Minsk.

As a result, Fishman and his wife left for Gomel to teach at a music college, and after six months, following a petition by Grigory Shirma, they were sent to Moldova, to the Chișinău Conservatory, later renamed the Gavriil Musicescu Institute of Arts. There he worked first as an accompanist and later as a senior lecturer in the general piano department. In different years he also taught piano at the teacher-training college in Călărași and at the music school in the village of Cărpineni.

Alongside his teaching, Fishman was very active as a composer. His surviving output includes works in many genres: four piano concertos with orchestra, a sonata for clarinet and piano, a sonata for violin and piano, a trio, pieces for piano and various instruments, and symphonic and choral works. His music was performed by leading Moldovan ensembles, including the Symphony Orchestra of the Moldovan Philharmonic, the Doina Philharmonic Choir, the Moldovan jazz orchestra Bucuria, the Symphony Orchestra of Moldovan Radio and Television, the National Chamber Orchestra of the Chișinău Organ Hall, and several conservatory and academy choirs.

His works were also performed by musicians in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union continued to be heard in many countries, including Poland, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Germany, South Korea, Israel, Portugal, France, Norway, Belgium, and the United States. A scholarly assessment cited in the article describes his talent as original, vivid, and unusual, and identifies his four piano concertos as the summit of his work in that genre. The same assessment notes that his music combines formulas of Romantic harmony and texture with innovations of twentieth-century piano writing, while its originality is strongly shaped by Moldovan national character.

Fishman died on September 24, 1985, in Chișinău. He was buried at Saint Lazarus Cemetery in Chișinău. In 2006 a disc of recordings of his music from the archives of Moldova television and radio was issued, including chamber works, piano pieces, choral works, and a work for oboe and orchestra, reflecting the breadth of his creative legacy.

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