Ernst Toch

Ernst Toch (German: [ˈtɔχ]; 7 December 1887 – 1 October 1964) was an Austrian composer of European classical music and film scores, who from 1933 worked as an émigré in Paris, London and New York.

Toch was born in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, into the family of a humble Jewish leather dealer[1] when the city was at its 19th-century cultural zenith.

Following Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, Toch went into exile, first to Paris and then London, where Berthold Viertel and Elisabeth Bergner helped him find work as a composer for the cinema.

Unlike his colleague Erich Wolfgang Korngold Toch never got much attention in the industry and was rarely top-billed, although he did win three Academy Award nominations - for Peter Ibbetson (1935), Ladies in Retirement (1941) and Address Unknown (1944).

He died in Santa Monica, California, and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

No 9 (1919) marked a significant stylistic change, shifting from the influence of Brahms towards a more radical, extended tonality and linear development.

His work during that decade included the Cello Concerto (1925) and the humorous Bunte Suite (1929), but also two short operas, Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse (1927) and Egon und Emilie (1928), notable examples of the short-lived Zeitoper genre.

That year he also invented "Gesprochene Musik," the idiom of the "spoken chorus", a technique used in his most performed work, Fuge aus der Geographie, which he himself regarded as an unimportant diversion.