Despite all odds of a family who frowned on the choice of music as a profession, my father, obsessed with making music, took odd jobs to be able to afford lessons, and at the age of 14, encouraged by various teachers, entered the Vienna Music Academy. At 16 years of age, three of his Lieder were published; others followed, and in the years that ensued, Zeisl began to make a name for himself, with many of his over 100 Lieder being presented by stellar singers such as Alexander Kipnis. These early years were a prolific time of Lied composition, all so intrinsically tied up with Zeisl’s emotional life in Vienna, with the Austrian landscape, with friendships, and particularly with meeting my mother. My father’s parents were not as fortunate, and were later executed in the death camps, but my father and mother fled Vienna on ‘Kristalnacht’, 1938, and managed to escape to Paris, where Darius Milhaud sponsored Zeisl, whom the former thought to be a composer “du grand talent”. This period became a turning point in my father’s compositional style. Zeisl was asked to write the music for a memorial to the Austrian novelist, Joseph Roth, who had died in exile in Paris in 1939, and thus composed the incidental music to the play, Hiob/Job based on Roth’s novel by that name, the story of a Jew who suffers the pogroms and ultimately comes to America. This work was one of two experiences that were pivotal for my father’s return to his deepest roots, his Jewish heritage; and all Zeisl’s American works, where he emigrated in 1939, were impacted by this emotional and spiritual bond. I was born within a few months of my parents’ arrival in New York, a day before my father’s 35th birthday. Two years later, Zeisl was lured to Hollywood by MGM, to compose scenes for the film industry. However, whereas most of his composer friends were delighted with the warmer climate of Los Angeles, my father languished in the heat and had a severe allergy to the sun, a complete misfit in a desert clime, where cold brooks and water
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