Israel Alter was born in Lvov (then known as Lemberg, today Ukraine) into a Hasidic family with many rabbis. He studied music in Vienna with cantors and teachers of singing and composition, including Cantor Yehuda Leib Miller. At the age of 20, he began serving as the cantor of the Brigittenauer Synagogue in Vienna. In 1925, he moved to Hanover, where he remained for about ten years and served as the last Chief Cantor before the Holocaust. Alter made several recordings in 1926, gave numerous concerts across Europe, and became a significant figure in the cantorial scene in Europe. He undertook an important tour of various cities in Western Europe with Moshe Koussevitzky (the chief cantor in Warsaw), where both served as cantors.
In 1935, Alter moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he served as the cantor of the United Hebrew Congregation until his retirement in 1960. He emigrated to the United States in 1961 and joined the faculty of the School of Sacred Music at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where he had an enormous influence on a generation of American cantors.
Between 1961 and 1971, Alter wrote and published the complete prayers for Shabbat, the High Holidays, festivals, and Selihot. According to Schleifer, Alter's natural voice was a baritone, but he sang in the tenor range. He mastered both the Eastern European and Western cantorial styles and incorporated both emotional and intellectual elements in his compositions.
Alter composed cantorial works and musical settings to Yiddish poems. His collections of transcriptions of nusach are considered standard works in the field. Alter is known for his meticulous attention to the texts he composed, his use of techniques such as "word painting," and melodic motifs like intertextual references (where a melody in a specific word is borrowed from another prayer, thereby "referencing" it).
Additional bibliography
Further information about Israel Alter can be found in a lecture by Prof. Eliyahu Schleifer given in November 2003, in a session of the JMRC Ashkenaz researcher's forum. The lecture was given in Hebrew and included several handouts of compositions by Alter. To listen to the recording of the lecture, and view the handouts, click here.
A lecture by Cantor Joseph Malovany, about the life and work of Israel Alter (including performances of several compositions) can be found here.
Visit 'Song of the Month' April 2010, to read and listen to Alter's song Moyshelekh Un Shloymelekh.
Videoclip of Alter's Chazi Kadish.
See here a list of songs written or composed by Alter. (the digital library of the university of Pennsylvania)
