Erich Walter Sternberg

[1] After graduating with a law degree from Kiel University in 1918, Sternberg began studying composition with Hugo Leichtentritt and piano with H. Praetorius in Berlin.

In 1936 he helped Bronisław Huberman found the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and promoted the Palestine chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Examples of this can be seen in his salient use of the augmented 2nd and cantillation motifs in the piano cycle Visions from the East, a programmatic work concerning the Jews of Eastern Europe, and in his String Quartet no.1, where he quotes both a Yiddish song, Bei a teich (‘The River’), and the formula for the prayer Shema Yisrael.

For example, his symphonic variations Shneim-Asar Shivtei Yisrael (‘The Twelve Tribes of Israel’, 1938), reflects the powerful rhetoric of late Romanticism with obvious influences from Brahms, Max Reger and Richard Strauss.

His Capriccio for piano, a concise illustration of his style, displays a contrapuntal elaboration of two brief motifs in sonata-rondo form, with the movement's harmonic orientation stated by the two opening chords.

For example, his large-scale set of symphonic variations Yosef ve′Ehav (‘Joseph and his Brethren’, 1939) are dominated by strict contrapuntal devices which include complex fugues.

For example, Sternberg's arrangement of Hora kuma (‘Rise up, Brother’) by Shalom Postolsky is a set of six variations for seven-part chorus displaying contrapuntal and canonic textures, while his choral song Ima Adama (‘Mother Earth’) features richly chromatic and modal harmony.