PERRYSBURG, Ohio — Sam Adler paused last week, between sips of green tea and bites of almond chicken. “I’ve tried to build bridges all my life,” he said.
Thinking about the news, he added, “I think perhaps that’s needed now here more, in America, than anywhere else in the world.” He should know; he’s lived through more, traveled more, and accomplished more than most of us might have in six lifetimes. For many of his neighbors, and the servers in the little Asian restaurant he likes in his leafy Toledo suburb, he’s merely a kindly, soft-spoken older gentleman with the trace of an accent and a cane.
They might be astonished to know that he is one of the most important and celebrated composers in the world, especially of sacred music for both Christians and Jews. If you met Sam Adler waiting for a flight in an airport, you might guess he is nearing 80 — though still every bit as mentally sharp as any 40-year-old.
Yet he’s far older than that. Next month, there will be a big concert in Berlin to celebrate his 95th birthday on March 4; earlier this month, there was another concert at the celebrated Eastman School of Music and another, at Bowling Green State University, where his wife, Emily Freeman Brown, the first woman to earn a doctorate in orchestral conducting, is professor, music director and conductor of the Bowling Green Philharmonia and Opera Theater.
“All this is certainly gratifying,” Adler said modestly, or as modestly as a man can who has 492 published compositions, and has won more awards than I could possibly list here. Nor is he really retired, except from teaching, which he did for years at Eastman, at the University of Texas and the prestigious Julliard School.
But if there’s anything more remarkable than his career, it is his life. Eighty-five years ago this November, that life was almost snuffed out by a sneeze when he was ten years old. That was in November, 1938, just after krystallnacht, when the Nazis destroyed synagogues all across Germany. Sam’s father was a cantor, and he and his little son crept into the choir loft of their Central Synagogue in Mannheim, Germany, to save the scores of the music sung during services.
The Nazis had set explosive charges that badly damaged the entire building; the destroyed organ was hanging over the balcony, and there was so much dust that 10-year-old Sam sneezed.
There were still SS men down below. “Go upstairs and shoot anyone on sight!” an officer barked. But before anyone could move, the cable broke and the organ crashed to the floor, blocking the door leading upstairs, and the Adlers just narrowly escaped.
The family then managed to be among the last Jews allowed to flee Germany, and arrived in New York in January, 1939, just months before the war, and the Holocaust that killed many of their family members, and would have killed them all too.
Flash forward to 1952, when Corporal Sam Adler, drafted into the army after earning degrees from Boston University and Harvard, had persuaded the military to allow him to form and conduct the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, which had just put on a concert for the retiring Supreme Commander of NATO, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike, who was returning to the United States to resume his duties as president of Columbia, told the young corporal that he thought his orchestra “was accomplishing more for German-American relations than anything I’ve encountered since the war.”
But he added, “Adler, I don’t like the uniform you are wearing. Come to my office tomorrow at 10 a.m.” Sam Adler saluted.
“The next day, I went, and he had his tailor make me a general’s uniform, a white dress uniform, with corporal’s stripes on it,” the composer laughed. “He didn’t think I should dress like any other enlisted man when conducting.”
Less than a year later, Eisenhower was President of the United States, and Sam Adler was in Texas, starting what would be a tumultuous and fascinating international music career.
That remarkable career is still going. Six years ago, he wrote and published a fascinating, well-reviewed book, Building Bridges with Music: Stories from a Composer’s Life. This June, a new edition with a new chapter is scheduled to be published.
But today, the boy who once came to America as a refugee from hate is worried about his adopted country. “Anti-Semitism is one of the oldest diseases in the world, and I don’t think you’ll ever be able to completely eradicate it,” he said sadly, commenting on a survey showing an unwelcome resurgence of that disease in America.
Though Jewish to his core, Adler is also totally ecumenical. In 1975, he was in Vienna when he got a call from Father Theodore Hesburgh, the legendary president of Notre Dame, who asked him to write a Mass for the Catholic university’s 100th anniversary. “I think you dialed the wrong number,” the composer said.
“He said he knew exactly what he was doing, and he wanted a mass that was a universal hymn of faith. The result was called We Believe, and “Father Hesburgh was extremely pleased with the work.”
Despite everything, Sam Adler is at least cautiously optimistic about the future. “Musical programs are a great tool for bringing young people of all kinds together,” he said.
My own musical knowledge doesn’t extend far beyond a treble clef, but I do know that Samuel Adler is one of the greatest Americans I’ve ever met. If our members of Congress aren’t pushing for him to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom, they should be.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
