Biography
Horenstein was born in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), into a well-to-do Jewish family; his mother (Marie Ettinger) came from an Austrian rabbinical family and his father (Abraham Horenstein) was Russian.
His family moved to Koenigsberg in 1906 and then to Vienna in 1911 and he studied at the Vienna Academy of Music starting in 1916, with Joseph Marx (music theory) and Franz Schreker (composition).
In 1920, he moved to Berlin and worked as an assistant to Wilhelm Furtwängler. During the 1920s he conducted the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He became principal conductor of the Düsseldorf Opera in 1928, and then the company's Generalmusikdirektor in 1929. He had to resign his post in March 1933 after the rise of the Nazi Party. His Düsseldorf tenure was the only permanent musical directorship in his career. Forced as a Jew to flee the Nazis, he moved to the United States in 1940, and eventually became an American citizen. He taught at the New School for Social Research while in New York City.
Read more about this topic: Jascha Horenstein
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