Erich Zeisl

[2] His musical precocity enabled him to gain a place at the Vienna State Academy (against the wishes of his family) when he was 14, at which age his first song was published.

[3] He won a state prize for a setting of the Requiem mass in 1934, but his Jewish background made it difficult to obtain work and publication.

Zeisl's style was essentially tonal, and conservative compared to contemporaries such as Arnold Schoenberg, and thus not totally unsuited to film music composition.

His anguish about his reduction to such work (together with the straits to which other émigré composers in America were reduced at the time) is evident in a letter written to a friend in 1945: Even Milhaud, Stravinsky, Tansman are struggling.

The premiere performance of the Requiem Ebraico was held in Los Angeles in the Hollywood First Methodist Church on April 8, 1945, by Hugo Strelitzer conducting the Fairfax Temple Choir.