Josef Tal
Josef Grünthal was born in the town of Pinne (now Pniewy), near Poznan, German Empire (present-day Poland). Tal’s family moved to Berlin shortly after his birth, where the family managed a private orphanage. Tal’s father, Rabbi Julius Grünthal, became a docent in the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies and specialized in the philology of ancient Semitic languages.
After attending his first concert at the age of thirteen, Tal began taking piano lessons. Four years later, he was admitted to the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he studied with Max Trapp, Heinz Tiessen, Max Saal, Curt Sachs, Julius Prüwer and Paul Hindemith. Tal graduated in 1931 and earned a living as a piano teacher, an accompanist, and as a silent-movie pianist. In 1932 he married the dancer Rosie Löwenthal and their first son Rainer-Re’uven was born (later a member of Kibbutz Megiddo, killed in the Six-Day War).
Banned from teaching under the Nazi regime, Tal studied photography in order to qualify for a craftsperson immigration certificate to Mandatory Palestine. In March 1934, with a diploma in hand, he obtained the coveted visa and immigrated to Palestine with his wife and son. After working as a photographer in Haifa and Hadera, and after short periods of residency in Kibbutz Beit Alpha and Kibbutz Gesher, the family settled in Jerusalem in 1936, and in 1937 the couple divorced. In 1940 Tal married the sculptress Pola Pfeffer.
While assimilating into the German-Jewish artistic milieu of Jerusalem, Tal performed as a pianist, and taught piano, theory, and composition at the Palestine Conservatory in Jerusalem. In 1944 Tal authored the first music theory book in Hebrew.
In 1948 Tal was appointed Director of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, a post he held until 1952; a year earlier he had joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While there, he founded the Centre for Electronic Music in Israel and in 1965 he joined the newly established Department of Musicology, whose very founding he had been part of.
Tal continued to compose throughout the 1990s during which he also conducted a research project aimed at developing a new form of musical notation. The most recent of the many texts he had written are Musica Nova in the Third Millennium (2002), and a revision of his autobiography Tonspur (2005). During these years, his eyesight deteriorated and it became increasingly difficult for him to continue composing. Tal’s oeuvre consists of eight operas, six symphonies, and thirteen concerti, in addition to various chamber, solo, choral, and electronic works.
Tal was a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Among the many prizes he received are the Israel Prize (1970) and the Wolf Prize (1982). He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1985), and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985).
Josef Tal died in Jerusalem. His archive is housed in the National Library of Israel.