Pieces of music mystery come together at last
Musician brings back composer’s works for performance
Paula Eisenstein Baker felt more frustrated than relieved when she finished her second book.
The musician had sold a publisher on the soulful, orchestral music of composer Leo Zeitlin, which hadn’t been played for nearly a century.
She could read the notes on the page. The problem was, she wanted to hear them.
“This is tragic,” Eisenstein Baker said to co-au- thor Robert Nelson, himself a composer. “We’ve got to figure out how to get this performed.” And so they have. “Palestina,” a concert featuring some of Zeitlin’s most famous compositions, is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Feb. 29 at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston.
Eisenstein Baker is 77. When she thinks about the rare performance, her eyes fill with tears.
Tseitlin or Zeitlin
As an undergraduate at Barnard College and a graduate student at Yale University, Eisenstein Baker studied Latin and Greek. But she was already working as a professional cellist when she and husband Stephen Baker moved to Houston in 1963. She had broad musical tastes and played everywhere from RodeoHouston to the
Houston Grand Opera. The compositions she was most interested in, though, had Jewish roots.
But pieces suited to the cello were limited. A family trip to Jerusalem in 1985, she thought, would be the perfect time to find the music she loved.
But as hard as she searched, she found nothing
The family’s next stop was Tel Aviv. As Eisenstein Baker rummaged through stacks of uncataloged material in a local library, she discovered a lovely piece for cello and piano titled “Eli Zion.” Gold. “It was so dusty,” she remembers, “I was sneezing. My hands were black.”
Eisenstein Baker performed the piece with success back home in Houston, but she was embarrassed that she couldn’t tell her audiences anything about the music or even the name of the composer.
She started digging. Early on, her research showed that he was probably Soviet violinist Lev Moiseevich Tseitlin. But as she investigated further, she learned there was another Russian musician with virtually the same name.
The second Zeitlin or Tseitlin was born in Pinsk (now Belarus) in 1884, studied music in Odessa and St. Petersburg, and eventually joined the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Before moving to the United States in 1923, he performed on both viola and violin and composed, conducted and taught in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania.
So which one composed “Eli Zion?”
Eisenstein Baker thought it was musician No. 2. In the U.S. he was known as Leo Zeitlin, with a Z, who joined the distinguished orchestra at the Capitol Theatre in New York. In 1925, he began composing and arranging and, by 1929, he had graduated from light classical and popular works to overtures.
Zeitlin was in the prime of life, personally and professionally, when he got sick and died in 1930. He was only 45.
When Eisenstein Baker began searching for Zeitlin’s obituary, she found plenty written but no mention of “Eli Zion.”
About the same time, Eisenstein Baker checked birth announcements — he and his wife had two American-born children — she also called cemeteries to see if she could find Zeitlin’s grave. By luck, she found the right cemetery on the first try
When she and Baker went searching for the grave, tromping around the Long Island cemetery with planes from John F. Kennedy International Airport buzzing over their heads, they finally found it behind a huge evergreen.
So that they could reach the grave and read the inscription, they had to bribe cemetery workers to trim a few tree branches.
“Then wasps came flying out,” she says. “It was a scene.”
But well worth the trouble.
There, on the engraved gravestone, were two measures from “Eli Zion.”
Elation and wonderment still fill Eisenstein Baker’s voice as she tells the story. As she discovered pieces of the puzzle, more questions popped up. A genealogist had sent her a list of the 328 Zeit- lins living in the U.S. She started calling the ones named Nathan.
On the third try, Eisenstein Baker found Zeitlin’s son. He helped her contact his sister, Ruth. And there, in a trunk in Ruth’s Santa Barbara, Calif., home, were stacks of her father’s music.
Ruth Zeitlin allowed Eisenstein Baker to copy all the music she wanted. The result was the first book she and Nelson wrote on Zeitlin’s chamber music. Their second book focused on Zeitlin’s overture, “Palestina.”
And that piece, with a full orchestra, is part of what Eisenstein Baker will hear at the JCC performance.
The concert will include a mix of Zeitlin’s arrangements and original compositions, three vocal solos and the sound of the shofar simulated by French horns.
“Every instrument he was writing for, he knew just what to do,” Eisenstein Baker says. “It’s delicious, just delicious.”
‘Fiddler’ meets the symphony
The concert will cost about $25,000 to produce. Today, Eisenstein Baker, Nelson and conductor Robert Linder are confident that grants, generous gifts and ticket sales will help them meet expenses, even if it will be snug.
“It’s important to bring back Zeitlin’s work,” Nelson says. “Too often composers who are quite
talented are unjustifiably neglected. We feel we’ve discovered some extraordinarily strong music, and it’s been sitting in a trunk.”
Nelson and Eisenstein Baker won’t be performing the night of the concert. Their eyes will be glued to the 50-plus musicians on stage, including conductor Linder, of Marble Falls.
When Eisenstein Baker asked Linder if he would hire the musicians and guide them through the music, he found he couldn’t say no.
“I love a challenge,” Linder says, “and this is going to be a labor of love. Think ‘Fiddler on the Roof ’ meets the symphony, but better. It’s going to be a significant evening of music.”
Nelson and Eisenstein Baker will be front and center, prepared to say a few words about Zeitlin, his music and his life.
He is no longer a mystery.