How to go
What: The Springfield Symphony Orchestra performing the music of Samuel Adler, Dan Welcher and Tchaikovsky
When: 8 p.m. May 1
Where: Kuss Auditorium
Tickets: Visit springfieldsym.org or call (937) 328-3874.
Meet the composer
Sam Adler will talk music at 5 p.m. April 30 in room 300 of Wittenberg University’s Krieg Hall as part of the SSO’s Symphony 101 (admission is free) and again before the concert at 7:15 p.m. May 1 in Turner Studio Theatre.
SPRINGFIELD — Had things transpired differently 71 years ago, Samuel Adler’s photo, however dated it might be, wouldn’t be featured on all the posters for the Springfield Symphony Orchestra’s last concert of the season.
In fact, there wouldn’t be a Sam Adler.
At least not this Sam Adler.
Composer. Teacher. Jew.
When asked whether he’d be alive had he and his family not fled Nazi Germany in 1939, Adler doesn’t beat around the bush.
“No.”
But the way history played out, Adler — a composer of note who will be coming here on May 1 to oversee the SSO perform his “Symphony No. 1” — has shown what would have been so senselessly lost to hate a lifetime ago.
Here’s a man who went on to be taught by the legendary composers of yesterday to teach the respected composers of today to teach the promising composers of tomorrow.
Here’s a man whose work has been analyzed in doctoral dissertations.
Here’s an immigrant who returned to Germany as an American GI shortly after the war and ended up finally winning the hearts and minds of the people using a language they could respect — music.
But for Sam Adler, who’s made the most of his 82 years, it all comes down to what happened when he was 10, when his family escaped almost certain death.
“The optimism in my music comes from it,” he reasoned. “After all, I’m a survivor.”
Adler was given a second chance at life — the rest has been up to him.
“I’ve enjoyed every minute of life,” he said. “I don’t know how many people can say that.”
The May 1 concert initially was to have featured a visit from composer Dan Welcher.
But when he ended up having to cancel, the SSO looked to the venerable Adler, the guy who mentored Welcher in the first place.
Look at it like the SSO now being visited by Yoda instead of Luke; Master Po instead of Grasshopper.
For the past 13 years, Adler has lived near Toledo, so it’s not even that far of a drive.
Besides, it’s a much easier commute than what he’s accustomed to, flying weekly from Ohio to New York to teach composition at Juilliard.
That, mind you, is actually his retirement job.
“Retirement’s not cut out to what it’s supposed to be,” Adler explained. “I warn everybody about it.”
He technically retired from the Eastman School of Music in 1995, where he had taught since 1966 and chaired its composition department.
He admittedly enjoys working with young people — they, in turn, keep him young.
He lives on a golf course in Perrysburg, where his wife conducts the orchestra at nearby Bowling Green State University, but that’s about as close to a traditional retirement as this guy gets.
“I’m not a golfer,” he confessed, “but it’s a quiet neighborhood. That’s what a composer needs, is silence.”
Then there’s that.
“A composer really can’t retire,” he added. “Retirement for a composer is an unheard of thing unless they stop writing.”
One of his own mentors, Aaron Copland, did, in fact, stop writing when he hit 70.
Another of his mentors, Paul Hindemith, “wrote to the last moment,” Adler said.
Adler’s status as an elder statesman, according to SSO music director Peter Stafford Wilson, makes him the perfect way to end a season that dared to spotlight contemporary music with visits from the composers themselves.
“What better way to draw it all together?” Wilson said.
While Adler’s first of six symphonies isn’t exactly contemporary anymore — it premiered in 1953 and was taken around the world by the Dallas Symphony — it’s rooted in the melody of Copland and the edginess of everyone else the SSO has featured this season.
“Harmonically,” Wilson said, “it’s of a different world than what we’ve been playing.”
By Adler’s own admission, it takes a long time for a composer to come into his own, especially when your teachers include the likes of Copland and Hindemith.
“At one time,” Adler said, “you rebel against them. At other times, you venerate them so much that you begin to copy them.”
This symphony is both.
“It’s very forward-thinking in a piece from the 1950s,” Wilson said.
Adler, who went on to write such influential books as “The Study of Orchestration,” wrote the piece not long after he got out of the U.S. Army, having been drafted in 1950.
“I went in as a real soldier,” he said. “I was a real soldier for 16 months.”
Then he became something more.
With relations souring between the German people and the GIs occupying them — “The Germans saw us as sex-craved people and drunkards,” he said — the Army looked to the one guy who at least spoke the language.
Adler organized a civic choir and performed parts of Handel’s “Messiah” for Christmas.
The sold-out concerts made news across Germany.
Another concert followed, and that was followed by Adler’s creation of the military’s Seventh Army Orchestra.
Dwight Eisenhower called it the greatest thing to happen to Europe since the war ended.
Citing the orchestra’s “great psychological and musical impact on European culture,” Adler was awarded the Army’s medal of honor.
But he was still glad to get discharged, and you’ll hear that in his first symphony.
“It’s a young man who is happy to be free from the Army,” Adler said. “This is a very optimistic piece. I couldn’t be happier in those moments.
“It’s a piece by a young man who felt his moxie.”
Arguably, he still does.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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