Jacobo Ficher


Jacobo Ficher was an Argentine composer, violinist, conductor, and music educator of Russian birth.

Life

Ficher was born in Odessa, Russia, to Alexander Ficher, a trombonist in the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, and his wife Iente Mirl Gotz. He began to study the violin at the age of five, but his lessons were interrupted when his mother died. In 1903 he was able to resume his violin studies with Pyotr Stolyarsky, and later with M. T. Hait. From 1912 to 1917 he was enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he continued his violin studies with Sergei Korguyev and Leopold Auer. His other teachers included Vasily Kalafati, Maximilian Steinberg, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Nikolay Sokolov.
On 3 June 1920 he married Ana Aronberg, then a piano student at the Odessa Conservatory. The Revolution of 1917 was followed by deteriorating conditions in Odessa and so, in order to escape famine and persecution, the family—including his father with his second wife, his youngest brother Rachmiel and a sister-in-law—fled the city, traveling at first to Poland. In 1923 they moved to Argentina, arriving on 10 February, and eventually became citizens of that country. Jacobo and Ana had two children: a son, Miguel, born on 24 June 1923, shortly after their arrival in Buenos Aires, and a daughter, Myra, born 7 February 1928. Ana Aronberg Ficher died on 27 July 1976.
Ficher settled in Buenos Aires, where he was one of the founders in 1929 of the Grupo renovación. Later, in 1947, he was also among the founders of the Argentinian Composers' League. His notable pupils include Emilio Kauderer, Marcelo Koc, Alejandro Viñao, and Ezequiel Viñao.

Musical style

Over the course of a long and prolific career, Ficher employed a variety of styles and techniques, including neoromanticism, neoclassicism, polytonality, twelve-tone technique, serialism, and free atonality, without ever restricting himself to a single methodology. His Jewish heritage is reflected especially in his early works, though the Second Symphony, written in 1933, also uses emotional and rhapsodic Hebrew thematic material, in reaction to news of the Nazi campaign against the Jews in Europe. This aspect also appears in some later works, especially the cantata Kadish, op. 112, while the Russian tradition is plain in the two Anton Chekhov operas. French Impressionism and the influence of Paul Hindemith are present in the music from the 1920s and 30s, and as late as the slow movement of the Piano Sonata No. 1 of 1941, which is also reminiscent of Charles Koechlin and Darius Milhaud. Later, he turned to Argentine nationalism, stimulated by gauchesco literature in the overture Don Segundo Sombra , popular urban music in Tangos y milongas for piano, rural folk music in Tres danzas populares, and historical themes in the Seventh Symphony, commemorating the Argentine Independence Revolution.

Honours

According to one source, Ficher's Heroic Poem, op. 7, won first prize in a 1928 contest sponsored by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. More recent research, however, reveals that no first prize was awarded, but his work shared the second prize with Dmitri Shostakovich. He won the Municipality of Buenos Aires Prize three times, first in 1929 for his First String Quartet, then in 1931 for Sulamita, poema de amor, for orchestra, and finally in 1941, for his First Piano Sonata. His Second String Quartet was awarded a Coolidge Prize of $500 in 1937, at the Festival de Música de Cámara Panamericana in Mexico City, and his Third Symphony won first prize of the National Culture Committee in Buenos Aires in 1940. In 1969 Ficher was elected to the National Fine Arts Academy of Argentina.
Other prizes include :
Listed by opus number.
Works without opus number: