Ernest Bloch Family
Ernest and Marguerite Bloch was blessed with three children. Explore thoughts from the Bloch children as well as additional content from their respective lives and careers below.
Marguerite Elisabeth Augustina Schneider Bloch
Ivan Bloch
From “The Spiritual and Artistic Odyssey of Ernest Bloch: A Centenary Retrospective” — Pages 35-36.:
Frequently people wonder why I am not at all musical: play no instruments, rarely attend concerts, can’t read a note of music. In 1912, when I was seven, our family lived in Satigny, a small village near Geneva, in a rented, drafty, rambling, and much too big house, built by Necker, the Swiss minister of finance, for Louis XVI. One sunny morning, Father showed me a small violin and explained its workings. He demonstrated on his own instrument, then asked me to try to play. All he got was discordant, scratchy, and fuzzy noises, accompanied by a noticeable look of disinterest on my face. That was it. Father believed strongly in not forcing a child into music unless there was evidence of some musical tendencies. So I grew up among great music and great musicians without having to do more than enjoy it, without the strain of participation.
My closeness with father at first involved sharing his love of nature; hikes, bicycling in the countryside, picnics, mushroom hunting, rather unsuccessful trout fishing in nearby small streams. We made many trips into the Salève near Geneva, sleeping in farmhouses or barns, eating the local bread and cheeses and a finger of vin du pays in my glass of water. And I remember with pleasure his reading to the assembled children from great works of literature, with emphasis on the elements of style.
When I became an engineer, a special relationship developed. Father was fascinated by things scientific, especially the earth sciences: mycology, entomology, medicine and genetics. He often said he wished he’d become a man of science or a doctor of medicine. I am certain, had he chosen any of these paths, he would have achieved greatness because of his unbelievable powers of observation, logical deduction, and discipline. Much of this could be related to the voracious reading and pondering he did in philosophy, aesthetics and the basic sciences.
His mind was never at rest (he was afflicted with insomnia to boot). He pursued constantly a myriad of questions about the great mystery in the logic of the universe: all in its place, all in synergetic relationship, and all veritably inexplicable.
He imposed integral organization on everything he did. He kept constant records of income and expenses (keeping his accounts by the double-entry system). He had a small notebook in which he entered minutiae of daily expenditures: stamps, cigars, tobacco, garden supplies. In another notebook he entered the names and circumstances when he had visitors. His files were meticulously up to date. He was unrelenting in his correspondence with publishers to remove ambiguities in agreements or to make certain his works were in print (which many times they were – and, alas, are – not).
His correspondence was staggering in volume. It covered not only his business dealings but his exchanges with other composers, former students, conductors, and “plain folks” who wrote to him. Added to music communications was his equally voluminous correspondence with great writers, philosophers, geneticists, physicians. He kept track of this by entries in another notebook, giving names, dates, and contents of letters received and a summary of his answers.
Because of constant poor health, he had many contacts with a wide variety of doctors: dermatologists, homeopaths, and geneticists. The latter fascinated him. He developed contacts with many world figures in this field, including Nobel Prize winner Hermann Miller. I hazard the guess that his interest in genetics arose from the virulent anti-Semitism of the 1800’s and following years, as expostulated in the works of Houston Chamberlain, whose Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was one basis for the Nazi movement and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
When I have to dig into business correspondence dating back to the 1900’s and consider his fervent other interests, I wonder where he found that enormous reservoir of energy, logic, dedication, and inspiration from which he was able to compose. It’s plain baffling!
Whenever he was not composing, corresponding, walking in the woods or along the beach, or polishing agates, he would rest on the living-room couch, pipe in one had and a book in the other. He would read and reread works of an extraordinarily varied nature: Lin Yutang, Schopenhauer, Flaubert, Walt Whitman, Van Wyck Brooks, Balzac, Herman Melville, Confucius, Nietzsche, the Hindu classics, Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank (with whom he had great friendship, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the works of the nineteenth-century entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, the Carl Sandburg biography of Lincoln, biographies of Brigham Young, the works of Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa, the first Sioux Indian physician), Winston Churchill, and so on. He annotated each time he read with marginal expletives of admiration, agreement, cross-references, and his own observations. When he ran out of marginal space, he bought a new volume to continue the process.
This almost feverish but always organized, logical turmoil translated itself into conversation – he was virtually tireless, unstoppable, and endless. He wore out his listeners, no matter how devoted. He was bursting with ideas, tirades on the “mismanagement of the planet,” and always questions on how society was organized and disorganized, whereas nature seemed to operate within a grand scheme.
But when walking in the woods, looking for his favorite chanterelle spot, traversing dewy meadows, climbing the gentle slopes of the Oregon countryside or Switzerland, fishing in a quiet brook or lake, then he was enveloped by a pervasive peace which bathed those who happened to be with him. I cherish those moments when he would stop to look at a flower or a leaf or a tree in silent wonder and reverence. Then he did not need to talk. He absorbed and renewed himself.
– Ivan Bloch, April 1980
Suzanne Bloch
From “The Spiritual and Artistic Odyssey of Ernest Bloch: A Centenary Retrospective” – Pages 37-40.:
Though he is remembered vividly as a teacher by his many students, the rare portraits of Bloch as a student come to us from anecdotes told by our parents and from the letters he wrote to his sister when as a teenager he attended the classes of Eugène Ysaÿe in Brussels. He had shown definitive talent for the violin in early years and performed with success at the age of eleven. But of this he remembered little. His clearest early recollection was of the beautiful Letitia Picard, who lived across the street; he would stand by his open window practicing persistently all the brilliant passages of his repertory, hoping to impress her. She, being older, ignored him completely.
In his first year at Brussels, he was advised that he had to play in Ysaÿe’s orchestra. This created throes of anxiety, for he was a poor sight reader. Sympathetic comrades told him about the age-old trick of putting soap on his bow, enabling him to go through the motions without having his mistakes heard. After this harrowing experience, ashamed of the inadequacy, he fortunately met a young pianist in the same predicament. They joined forces and played every possible day, reading through the piano-violin repertory, in due time overcoming their handicaps.
Ysaÿe had seen some of Bloch’s compositions and strongly urged the youth to concentrate on writing music. When he was twenty, he went to Frankfurt to study with the famed Iwan Knorr. The relationship lasted a year: they couldn’t get along. Knorr, with his intense dislike of the current French music, would say with contempt, “Ihr Herrn von Bussy,” to Bloch’s violent indignation. This brought about long arguments, in which Bloch later would admit he behaved abominably! Yet when they parted, it was with mutual respect. Bloch never failed to express the gratitude he owed to Knorr, who showed him the path to self-sufficiency, how to use his own potential and inner resources. From Knorr, Bloch realized that the best teachers were the greats of music, not textbooks. All of this would be important to his students.
As a little girl, I received much of these ideas. When he taught me the first rudiments of music, the instructions he wrote in a notebook were so clear and concise that what would be considered a year’s course took not very many pages.
It is interesting to note that the Bloch parents were never interested in finding out whether their children were musical or not. It was only when an elementary school teacher told Mother of my showing signs of musical gift that some instruction was given to me while Bloch was away in America. On hearing about this “discovery” at his return, his delight was great. He started to teach me solfège and theory. I remember the lessons – sometimes overlong – out of which I emerged a bit groggy from the smoke of the pipe he puffed so contentedly. He was very quick, pointing to music in scores rapidly, forcing me to concentrate hard. If it was over my head, I would work at it by myself later, not willing to admit I didn’t quite catch on.
His formal teaching had begun as a lecturer at the Geneva Conservatory. The output of his lectures between 1911 and 1916 on various aspects of musical aesthetics totaled 112. A very old Genevese critic, Péchère, at the age of ninety, reminisced that Bloch did not always seem very impressed by his often select audience. He also had a habit of leaving his given subject, going into totally different fields, but always returning logically to his original subject and showing that there was a connection there. Once the lecture was to be about Bach and “style.” Bloch had just returned from a short visit to Hungary with his cousin, whose father, a cattle dealer, had sent them on business. They had visited some of the Budapest restaurants and cafés, famed for the fiery gypsy singers who performed there. Bloch, always subject to exotic atmospheres, was still under the spell of his visit. He had to share his experience with his audience. Instead of the formal opening of his subject, he told of his trip. Walking over to the piano, he described a gypsy singer and one of the songs whose interpretation had so impressed him. To everyone’s surprise, he sang with his raucous voice one of the rather vulgar French café-concert songs in vogue, performing it with all its characteristic vulgarity, as it would have been done in Paris. Then with a flourish he explained that now they would hear the same song as sung by that beautiful smoldering gypsy. The piano became the cimbalom, Bloch became the not so beautiful gypsy. But he transformed the song into a hardly recognizable composition full of the harsh wildness of the singer. Then he calmly returned to his lectern and Bach.
When he first came to settle in New York, he taught both in schools and privately. Our modest apartment on Lexington Avenue became a sort of conservatory. There was a wide variety of entertainment for us children, who were the “door openers” for the incoming and outgoing pupils. There might be a class for solfège and ear training, followed by the arrival of no less a personage than George Antheil, carrying an oversize score with extensions added. When the English pianist-composer Ethel Leginska came, she – the only student completely permeated by Bloch’s music – would play her latest composition. We would giggle, wondering whether this was Bloch playing something of his, or Leginska. His major pupils did not emulate Bloch’s music, for he encouraged them to be themselves, to “follow your line.” He was the first to stress the mastery and beauty of the sixteenth-century polyphonic works and sent his students to the Music Division of the New York Public Library to look into the works of Josquin Des Prez, Lassus, Jannequin, and many others. The elderly librarian would look up from his desk and say, “Oh, you must be a pupil of Bloch’s.”
In his early days in New York, he taught several children’s classes. The first was at the school of a man he admired deeply, Julius Hartt, whose highly reputed conservatory in Hartford, Connecticut, still exists to this day. Later, during two summers in Peterboro, New Hampshire, he taught on the estate of a young woman who established an unusual school for her two daughters and the children of the town. She engaged only persons creative in the arts. There Bloch evolved all sorts of original ways to teach the elements of music. He even used to take the children to the woodpile to demonstrate certain aspects of rhythm. It was common to see a farmer’s son gravely writing a melody on the board. One morning, about to start a lesson, at the piano he burst into the music of Rameau with such élan, such joie de vivre, that it was impossible not to jump up and dance – which I did. This started a precedent. He would play for us to dance – anything he felt like, even his own music. What a sight it was, the floor teeming with children expressing themselves, some gracefully, others prancing like wild horses. This was life!
As director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, he took his job very seriously, driving over promptly at 9:00 a.m., in his Ford named Mesinka. He often stayed late, conducting the orchestra and chorus, giving master classes to advanced pupils, hearing students perform in his office, which was also the meeting place of the faculty and visiting artists on tour. I remember when Paul Whiteman arrived with the newly discovered George Gershwin in tow. They were to play the Rhapsody in Blue that night. Bloch discussed the importance of form; he pulled out the score of a Haydn symphony and played it, with Gershwin picking out parts of the upper register. When Mischa Elman was asked what he would like to do with his free Sunday in town, he exclaimed in his thick accent, “Play quartets, let’s play quartets” – which they did.
The Institute was always teeming with life, subject to the director’s moods, good or bad. He was not always patient, especially when faced with signs of the lack of basic training in America. I remember the fireworks when a singing teacher did not adequately prepare her students for a part to be sung with the orchestra. There was not much left of the poor woman when he was through, and the performance was cancelled. It was a pity, for rehearsals were full of life, expanding with the music. Bloch often sat down when conducting, his sandaled feet very expressive as he tapped along with a sort of benign quality. When the double bass player, who was also the Dalcroze teacher, would absentmindedly forget his cue, Bloch would shout, “Hey, Binet, hey, Dalcrozien, come on the beat!”
During his last year in Cleveland, he was concerned to notice that students who had not yet mastered their basic craft were discounting tonality and form in favor of the new theories of atonality and such. He would quote Oscar Wilde’s words, “It is dangerous to be too modern, for one is apt to become old-fashioned quite suddenly.” One day he announced that he would write a short piece, completely tonal and in good classic form. He sat up all night working on it and gave some of us the job of copying parts which we brought to the orchestra rehearsal still wet. Its reading ended with a bedlam of shouts and applause. This was the prelude to his first Concerto Grosso. When he finished it at home, with its exciting fugue, he said to us mildly, “I think it might be published and played by schools.”
During his directorship of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he entered into a new phase of his ever-continuing education: he relearned counterpoint. He was to start a so-called advanced class in the subject, but found that the students were not ready for it. He realized that his own training had been superficial and decided to begin all over again, using the old church modes and, as his mentors, his old friends Josquin, Lassus, and Palestrina. He and the class had to write examples from the first species on, he bringing his own as one of the students. He wrote an immense amount of examples and copied the best in black notebooks. I looked at these the day after his death, when we returned to the big house in Agate Beach, now empty of his physical self. I went up to his studio – a large, bare, cold room with his piano, an old wooden table, and bookshelves – above the garage and pulled out the eleven books of his counterpoint exercises. There, leafing through examples in the mixolydian mode, I found one he indicated “Basso ostinato” over a cantus firmus, with a penciled remark, “For possible Jewish Service.” The six-note motif of the cantus firmus was the one used in his Avodath Hakodesh, and already in the counterpoint was the opening phrase. These six notes are the basis of the whole work and show that his studies served him well in the beautiful way he emulated the craftsmanship of his masters.
He did not teach again for several years during his stay in Europe, until he settled in Oregon in 1941. From there he journeyed to deliver two courses annually at the University of California at Berkeley, accumulating an enormous amount of notes that are a valuable revelation, compared to the superficial and glib courses that exist nowadays.
Again he entered into a new phase of study for himself. Having decided to give a course on fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavichord, he used the unusual approach of trying to compose the fugues he had never analyzed or really known, except superficially. He would first write the theme as he remembered it, then compare it with Bach, and continue step by step in the various sections, composing what he thought was right – always checking with Bach, admiring Bach’s logic and mastery, realizing how one single changed note affected the whole work, marveling at each fugue’s having its own rules and structure, like a tree with its individual harmony and proportion. He meticulously copied examples, using colors, with pages of explanations beautifully calligraphed. Each fugue was a universe unto itself, and he shared his marvels with his class.
When he gave a course on Beethoven’s Eroïca symphony, he took out all the Beethoven sketches of the work from the Nottebohm publication and copied them himself. No Xeroxing for him! He wanted to absorb, to get his teeth in the material. He wanted to show the true creative process of one who struggles to free the theme conceived from the first draft, to have it emerge out of the mass of sketches, not in a facile way but through the inner force of a creative will, bringing out the intentions of a musical thought, shaping it with innumerable efforts into what shall seem to spring out freshly in its perfection, as if ready-born, from the mind.
Some of Bloch’s last lectures at Berkeley were taped by Lucienne and Stephen Dimitroff in July 1951. These dealt with “the language of music” and were less specialized than his earlier ones. Reading through notes taken from them, one is overwhelmed by the immense amount of material used from both music and literature, ranging from Confucius to our present time. Full of quotations, anecdotes, diatribes against the false values of our civilization, humorous asides counterbalancing his pessimism, Bloch at the age of seventy-one was still as much a student as a teacher. When he retired from teaching and was living quietly in the big house on the cliff overlooking the ocean, late in the evening he would shuffle off to his bedroom and lie down with a score of music – old or new – propped in front of him, his glasses slipping a bit after a while, listening as he read, conversing with his friends, grateful for what they were telling him in the silence of the night.”
– Suzanne Bloch Smith
Suzanne Bloch performed in Portland in 1962. “Life at Portland State, August, 1962, p. 4, “1962-63 Little Concert Series Offers Top Musicians.”
“Suzanne Bloch, daughter of the late famous composer, Ernest Bloch, has adapted a charming voice as an ensemble instrument to use to her own lute accompaniment. She is the principal lutenist on the American continent and has had orchestral performances with Leonard Bernstein and Leon Barzin.”
Lucienne Bloch
From “The Spiritual and Artistic Odyssey of Ernest Bloch: A Centenary Retrospective” — Pages 33-34.:
Living with father was like living on top of a volcano. We were a close-knit family, but there were periods of quiet and periods of explosion, and every tremor affected us. To mention only the quiet moments would be to tell only half the story.
We lived in apartments and rented houses from the time I was born to the last twenty years of his life, when he finally found a home in Agate Beach, Oregon. Though we moved from place to place, the Bloch atmosphere was always there. Home was the sound of the music he composed played on the ever-present piano, the aroma of his pipe, the living room’s shelves of precious books, the life-size crucifix and the ever-present cat, Zizi.
He loved life, loved us, loved love. He enjoyed good food and good wines, always in moderation. Yet he had all the allergies possible, even before they were called allergies. When a doctor told him the only cure for him was to have his head cut off, he knew that that was true, for even in youth he was tormented by paranoia, by what he called his “antennas” which made him suffer the problems of the world. And to these he could not be indifferent.
For instance, in the late 1920’s, the first Leica camera was introduced on the market, a remarkable revolution in the photographic world. He bought one. Looking through the catalogue that described the accessories, he remarked with a look of anguish in his eyes: “I dread to think what will happen! If the Germans can create such a fantastic camera, what will it be when they start a new war! It will be horrible!”
We were never given a vision of a happy world. It was a jungle full of bitterness and hypocrisy. What made it possible to bear living was the insignificance of man in the universe, the beauty and wonder of nature, the greatness of a few human beings – their books, their art, their thoughts.
Ernest Bloch was very much like his music: periods of agitato frenetico, periods of pastorale. When he came home from a harrowing day at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Mother would call us to supper and whisper the warning, “Your father is in bad humor!” At the dinner table one of us might try to ease the tension with a comment from school. This opened a safety valve. Father would blow up with a torrent of diatribes against everything that happened that day, from the petty details of his job as director of the Institute, to the educational system in America, to the situation in the world. The refrain was always that “Nobody understands me, not even my family!”
After he had blown off steam and left us shaky, he would sometimes try to make up for it and call us into the living room to read to us out of one of his favorite books. There are many: those of J. H. Fabre, the entymologist, who was so poor that he had no laboratory equipment but could write his extraordinary books on insects by observing nature with incredible patience and wit. Sometimes the reading was from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or it was Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. One time, when he read out of Thus Spake Zarathustra, it moved me so much that I burst out crying. At such times EB would realize that he had given us too many mental burdens. He would try to cheer us with the hope that – in spite of the superficial education we were receiving in school – we still might make it in this world.
His pastorale mood is the memory of him I cherish most. We took long hikes with “le Papa” from the time we were able to walk. With his knapsack of fruit and Swiss chocolate, his camera slung over his shoulder, he would lead us into the country. He taught us all about mushrooms. We picked berries, climbed mountains. Enjoyment of nature was part of our lives, not only in Europe, but later in America – even in New York, when we went to Central Park every day before we knew enough English to go to school. We would sit on a bench and feed peanuts to the squirrels, and he would read to us about prehistoric times, pointing out the Ice Age marks on the rocks around us and taking us to the Museum of Natural History to see the fossils and dinosaurs.
Suzanne and I never went to high school. It was Father’s belief that, since we were both ready to follow our own fields of music and art, whatever else would round out our education could be found in our own reading.
This was our religious upbringing: I never entered a church until our visit to the interior of Notre Dame in Paris at the age of sixteen.
As a teacher, Bloch was anything but pedantic. Throughout his lectures he peppered his comments with quotations from Plato, Confucius, Voltaire, Napoleon, and Oscar Wilde. He could shift from a very serious mood to one of irony and humor.
A music teacher from the Cleveland Institute told the story of EB’s having to attend one of those long-winded music teachers’ conventions, during which one speaker after another rambled on in a monotonous dirge about budgets, curriculum, et cetera. She watched Father’s expression with dread as he became more and more bored. When his turn finally came to speak, he stood up looking weary and gray. She was sure he would explode. Instead, his expression changed from irritation to a sudden smile. He said brightly, “We have heard enough on the subject of Musical Education. I will relieve your agony by giving you a short talk on Mushroom Picking.” There was great relief and laughter – and the meeting indeed ended with a fascinating dissertation on that theme.
He always preferred living away from cities, from the glamour of parties, receptions, and even concerts. His large library in his home amid the forests and beaches of Oregon sufficed him. Books on science, philosophy, medicine; biographies and volumes of letters by his favorite authors – all were read and reread with the thoroughness of a scholar. His typical pencil markings went in the margins, and sometimes an extra sheet of paper was added for more annotations and comments.
He was fond of sharing his enthusiasm for a book. I remember the time, a year or two before his death, when he bought seven copies of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen to send to friends.
One day I was looking through his books, fascinated by the pencil marks in the margins – exclamation points here, crosses there. Father was lying on his couch reading the Wall Street Journal, the gray cat at his side. I said, “You know, someone could write volumes about your thoughts and opinions just from the marks in your books!” He laughed and quipped, “That’s all very well, but sometimes I don’t have a pencil!”
When our parents died, their children shared the books. I was fortunate to get the collection pertaining to religion, ranging from the Old and New Testaments to books on the Buddha, the wisdom of China, Indian philosophy, the Koran, the Mormons, et cetera. Recently, while searching for material on a mural for a church in California, I came across exactly what I needed from my library. It was one of Father’s books, Les Prophètes d’Israël, dated 1892. He had written at the beginning: “Reread in Agate Beach, 1950.” Some of the marks were from his early readings fifty years before; some were new. On one page he scribbled at the top, “Laotse!”
This was typical of his deepest beliefs – that all religions have a common base, from the prophets of Israel to the great Chinese sages. It was his hope that someday man could live with his fellow men without fanaticism, without intolerance, but with respect for their common ideals.
– Lucienne Bloch Dimitroff, April 1980
More About Lucienne:
Lucienne Bloch was born in 1909 in Geneva Switzerland, and came to America with her family in 1917. She was the youngest child of internationally famous composer and photographer Ernest Bloch.
A multi-talented artist, Lucienne attended the Ecole National et Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris at 14, apprenticing with sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and painter Andre Lhote. Her close friend Benjamino Bufano also influenced her sculpture. In 1929, she pioneered the design of glass sculpture for the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory in Holland. When Frank Lloyd Wright saw her glass works and spoke with her in New York, he invited her to teach at his architectural school, Taliesin East.
But Lucienne had just met and began her apprenticeship with Diego Rivera on his frescoes in New York and Detroit. She formed a close friendship with Diego’s wife Frida Kahlo, and they became each others’ companion and confidant. In 1932 she accompanied Frida to Mexico when her mother became ill. She was also with Frida in Detroit when she had her miscarriage; Lucienne tried to cheer her up, in her usual way, by comparing their ails to the size of the sun, or the solar system.
A prolific photographer, Lucienne contributed many photographs of Rivera and Kahlo to biographical works about them. She took the only existing photographs of Rivera’s (controversially) destroyed mural at Rockefeller Center Plaza in New York City.
Lucienne married one of Rivera’s chief plasterers, Stephen Pope Dimitroff. Together they created Fresco murals all over the United States. From 1935 to 1939, she was employed by the WPA/FAP (Works Progress Administration/Federal Arts Project). She also worked free-lance as a photographer for Life Magazine, recording the desperate conditions of autoworkers during the labor strikes and protests that occurred throughout the U.S. during the formation of the automobile worker unions.
Bloch mastered all types of media; photography, fresco, woodblock cuts, lithographs, mosaics, egg tempera, watercolor, wood and glass sculpture, terra cotta, portraits in ink, gesso, and oil. She also illustrated numerous children’s books. Lucienne created nearly 50 murals across the United States for religious institutions, schools, hospitals, and businesses. She worked hand in hand, side by side with her husband of nearly 65 years on all of these projects.
Lucienne Bloch passed away on March 13, 1999, on her small farm in Northern California. Her granddaughter, Lucienne Allen, is finishing the autobiography they had been working on together for nearly 10 years. Lucienne Bloch was an inspiration to many artists in her lifetime and her artwork and photography continues to inspire everyday.