Arie Abileah — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Arie Abileah was an Israeli pianist and music teacher, one of the first pianists and piano teachers in Israel; a professor of piano at the Conservatory of Geneva, at the Shulamit Conservatory in Tel Aviv and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Danc

e - one of the pioneers of classical music in Eretz Israel.

Arie Abileah was born Leib (Leo) Niswizsky, in November 1885 in the town of Ruzhany in the Grodno region of Russia (White Russia), th

e fifth of the six children of Feyga and Alexander Eliezer Sisel Niswizsky (1840–1906), a cantor (he published a book of prayers called "The Worshipper," in 1903). Two of his older brothers were also musicians.

Already as a child he s

howed considerable musical talent. His father, who was in Odessa, brought from there a two-hundred-year-old piano in the shape of a square table, which turned out to be the only one in town. When he was five he started playing the old piano an

d was found to have perfect pitch. He soon learned to read notes and loved to sing. At the age of six he held his first concert in a city of the Grodno district, and became famous as a child prodigy. With the financial help of Shereshevsky, a cigarette factory owner, who expressed his desire to support the gifted child, his father brought his son to Vilna to study at a music school. In Vilna, he received support during his studies: he was accepted into the home of a local family who hired him a teacher and admitted him to the music school. The Russian principal of the school, Teraskin, exempted him from tuition and closely monitored his musical education. At a school concert held on March 14, 1893, attended by many students (mostly Jews), the eight-year-old Abileah received high applause.

However, despite admiring his talent, the financial support of many of his supporters eventually ceased. The reporter of the Russian-Jewish newspaper Voskhod in Vilna wondered about the boy's future in an article on the pages of the newspaper. He moved to Warsaw, to his brother Ephraim, who was about five years older than him, and there studied at the conservatory on how to conduct military orchestras. When he was thirteen, his brother took him, at his request, to a Hanukkah festivity held by 

the Zionists that so affected him that he became a Zionist. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Vilna where he studied piano with Clara Khonovich (daughter of the photographer Khonovich), a recent graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He started making a living by giving piano lessons and sav

ing money to travel to study in St. Petersburg.

In early 1902, before he turned 15, he was admitted to the State Conservatory in St. Petersburg, and immediately received a scholarship from an anonymous donor. In St. Petersburg, he studied with the pianist Marie Benois (a student of Theodore Leszeticki ) and the composers Lyadov and Glazunov, and was one of the most prominent students at the conservatory at the time. In 1908, he was one of the founders of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, together with Yoel Engel, Josef Achron, Mikhail Gnesin, Lazare Saminsky, Susman Kiselgof, Alexander Zytomirski, Alexander Krein, Mikhail Milner, Solomon Rozowsky, Aryeh Friedman-Lvov and more. In 1909 he went to Vienna to visit his brother who served as conductor of the synagogue choir. Later, he went to Budapest, returned to Vienna, and finally traveled to Switzerland to complete his musical training with Bernhard Stavenhagen, Liszt's student, in the virtuosity class at the Geneva Conservatory of Music. In 1911, he married Fea (Fee) Geller, a native of Russia, in Geneva and within five years the couples were the parents of three daughters.

In 1914, he was appointed head of the piano department at the Geneva Conservatory, a position he held until 1922. He gave concerts and performed as a soloist with orchestras in Europe, in the company of the great musicians of the turn of the century. In the summer of 1921, in Switzerland he met with Moshe Hupenko, director of the Shulamit School of Music in Tel Aviv (the first music school in Eretz Israel), who invited him to join the teaching staff. Thus, after 13 years of activity in Western Europe, he left his job at the Academy of Music in Geneva and made aliyah to Israel. He sailed from Trieste, and in January 1922 arrived in Jaffa via Egypt. He settled in Tel Aviv and joined the Shulamit School, where he became of the founders of musical pedagogy in piano playing. At the same time, he opened a piano studio on Rothschild Boulevard earlier that year. Among his students were: composers Mordechai Seter and Herbert Brün.

Shortly after his arrival in Israel he conducted a piano recital. During the break, he was approached by the singer Yehuda Har-Melach (Bergzalz), an old friend from St. Petersburg, who made aliyah to Eretz Israel in the summer of 1920. Neither knew that his friend was in the country as well as both appeared under Hebraized names. The meeting led to collaboration between the two. Abileah joined the opera team that Har-Melach founded with the help of singer Arieh Friedman-Lvov (himself a friend of the two from St. Petersburg), in the role of orchestra conductor. During Passover 1923 (end of March), the play Gounod's "Faust", translated by Aharon Ashma, and accompanied by Abileah, was very successful (thus , the ground was laid for the arrival of Mordechai Golinkin, who made aliyah to Israel in the spring of 1923 and founded the Eretz Israel Opera). In April 1924, the famous violinist Josef Achron (who was member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg) arrived for a visit, and performed in Israel with Abileah in a series of recitals that included a long series of virtuoso violin pieces.

1. Abileah has done much to promote chamber music in the country. As early as 1923, he organized for subscribers a short series in the 'Herzliya' Gymnasium hall, for the first time in the history of the settlement. The series, which included three concerts (in which Abileah himself also performed), offered rich and varied programs - chamber music, vocal music and piano pieces. In a review written in 1923 by Zachs about one of the concerts at the Herzliya Gymnasium, he described Abileah as "having a first-class musical technique, full of fire and temperament, arousing genuine elation, intense and soft emotion, a tremendous musical blaze exploding in a storm of fervent and enticing passion reaching heights of tragic transcendence and subtle poetic lyricism." At the end of that year, Jacob Weinberg wrote:

From the first melody played at the concert, it was clear that A. Abileah was both an important pianist and, in general, a very important musical artist. The power of his playing projects a very exciting, well-developed artistic talent, unusual clarity and lightness through the clear resonance of palm and fingers. Listening to the artist is to enjoy moments of contentment. A. Abileah's musical counter-melody is impressive. He was especially successful in melodies in which technical and musical spheres are equal, such as Chopin's barcarolle and in a few excerpts from Schumann's carnival.

1. Abileah asked to bring the composer, music critic and veteran folklorist Yoel Engel (founder of the Jewish Folk Music Society in Russia) to Israel, as he believed that his aliyah "might transfer the center of gravity for research and creative activity in Jewish music to Eretz Israel," and established a special committee for this purpose with Har-Melach. Their efforts bore fruit, and in 1924 Engel made aliyah to Eretz Israel. Against the background of the increase in the number of artists and music teachers who came to Israel from 1924-25, Jacob Weinberg established the "Association of Palestine Musicians" in Jerusalem, (similar attempts to establish music associations to organize concerts and musical performances were made in Tel Aviv in the early 1920s). Among the members of the founding committee were A. Abileah, Rivka Burstein-Arber, Mordechai Golinkin, Moshe Hupenko, Mordechai Zandberg, Miriam Levit and Solomon Rozowsky. The association was founded on April 18, 1925, in collaboration with musicians from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. The Assembly elected Rozowsky chairman, and Jacob Weinberg and Mordechai Zandberg (Jerusalem) as members of the First Executive Committee, A. Abileah, Levit and Menashe Rabina (Rabinowitz) (Tel Aviv), Gita Donia-Weizmann, Rachel Kruglyakov and Arieh Friedman-Lvov (Haifa). Soon after, about one hundred and fifty members joined the association (many of them new immigrants), and it began to organize monthly lectures and concerts.

In 1926, A. Abileah went on to perform concerts in Europe and the United States. He performed as accompanist to great artists such as the violinist Joseph Szigeti (for three years), the violinist and composer Joseph Achron, the cellist Morris Marshall, and the singer Anna Meitchik, and more. He also taught in the United States.

In 1932, he returned to the country and continued to work as a pianist and teacher. In October 1933, Emil Hauser founded the Eretz Israel Conservatory in Jerusalem (later the Academy of Music and Dance. Jerusalem), and in his second year of study, Abileah joined the teaching staff and worked there for years as a piano teacher. He settled in Jerusalem in a modest apartment on the border of the Katamon neighborhood, where he lived until the end of his life (and where he also taught piano). According to music critic Moshe Gorali, since his being active at the Jewish Folk Music Society in St. Petersburg, "he has remained faithful to the Jewish musical movement in playing, teaching and interpretation. His students received an education that integrated the general musical culture into Judaism." In addition to being a professor at the Academy, he served as Chairman of the Association of Artists and Teachers of Music, and initiated a series of chamber concerts, held in Jerusalem for years by the Department of Chamber Music and the Association of Artists and Music Teachers.

In the years before the establishment of the State, A. Abileah was one of the most prominent pianists in the country, performing for many years in concert halls and on radio (first on "Kol Yerushalayim," and after the establishment of the State, on "Kol Yisrael"). According to Moshe Gorali, A. Abileah was Chopin's interpreter and an expert on Russian music, and his appearances on radio testified to his erudition in piano and in musical education.

Arie Abileah died in Jerusalem in 1985, when he was close to a hundred years old.

From: Wikipedia [Hebrew]