Ruth Schonthal (1924 – 2006)
Ruth Esther Hadassah Schonthal was born in Hamburg of Jewish ancestry. She began composing at the age of 5 and started studying music in Berlin, but her family had to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s, settling in Stockholm. She continued to study piano and composition, but later travelled with her parents to various places, including Mexico City, where she performed her own piano compositions at the age of 19.
In 1946, Ruth Schonthal was able to study composition at Yale with Paul Hindemith. She married in 1950 and lived in New York City and then New Rochelle, balancing her time between composition, piano playing (including bars and clubs), and teaching. One of her students was Stephanie Germanotta (Lady Gaga).
Ruth Schonthal’s compositions include opera, works for orchestra, chamber music, and music for piano and harpsichord. This Sonata Concertante for clarinet and piano dates from 1973:
This Nachklange (“Reverberations”) was composed between 1967 and 1974 for “piano with added timbres.” This is commonly known as a “prepared piano” in which the sound is altered by various objects inserted in or sitting on top of the piano strings.
In an interview she described the origin of Nachklange:
I wrote a piece called Reverberations, which is supposed to be a portrait of Germany and what happened to it, the destruction and all, to a country with such a humanistic background. I wanted to create something with a spiritual quality that was destroyed like a bombed-out cathedral. The piano was no good for that, so I experimented and put all kinds of objects on top of the strings. Nothing was safe and I ended up with an orchestration on the strings which gave me that shattered-beauty effect that I was looking for.