Simon Bucharoff

Simon Bucharoff (April 20, 1881 – November 24, 1955, born Simon Buchhalter) was an American pianist, composer and educator.

Life and career Bucharoff was born in Berdychiv, Russian Empire. His father was a cantor. His brother Isadore Buchhalter was also a pianist and educator who settled in Chicago. His family emigrated to New York when he was 11, where he began his piano studies with Paolo Gallico and Leopold Kramer. He returned to Europe and graduated from the Vienna Conservatory in 1902, having studied piano with Julius Epstein and Emil Sauer and composition with Stephen Stocker and Robert Fuchs.

He married Jennie G. Bluestone in 1902, and became a US citizen in 1904. He joined the Wichita College of Music in 1907, and in 1911 moved to Chicago and began focusing on composition. future US Vice President Charles Dawes was a patron,

In 1919, he changed his last name from Buchhalter to Bucharoff and moved to Europe in an attempt to further his composition career. After failing to produce an opera based on André Geiger's La Reine amoureuse with Pierre Maudru, he moved to Germany and succeeded in producing his next opera Sakhara in 1924.

Upon returning to America in the 1920s, his works received prominent performances by the New York Philharmonic and at the Hollywood Bowl. But he never found commercial success as a composer. He attempted to convince Eugene O'Neill to let him adapt The Emperor Jones to the opera stage. By 1934 he was living in Los Angeles, and the Great Depression found him unemployed. He was among many artists who entreated the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) to for grants and employment; Bucharoff wrote to Harry Hopkins directly.

In 1937 he began working as a music editor and orchestrator for Warner Brothers. Among the films he orchestrated were Devotion, Of Human Bondage, The Sea Hawk and The Big Sleep (all composed by fellow Austrians Max Steiner and Erich Korngold). Sakhara, libretto by Isabel Buckingham, premiered October 29, 1924, by Oper Frankfurt, Germany Jewel: The Everlasting Man Addio Wastrel

Choral:

Salute to a Free World Freedom on the March Hear My Voice, O Lord Jerusalem

Orchestral:

Four Tone Poems The Wanderers Song The Trumpeters Death (piano and orchestra) America Moses Prelude Valse Brillante Das Sterbe-Glöcklein Capriccio

For baritone and orchestra:

Parable of Nothin' and Somethin' O Ye Peoples and Nations Rejoicing Laugh and Laugh and Laugh

Books The Modern Pianist's Text Book