Emanuel Leplin

On October 13, 1972, the Little Symphony of the SFS Orchestra performed the second part of Leplin's Divertimento for Chamber Orchestra, entitled Firecracker.

In November 1972, Leplin was in an accident and he died on December 2. In the week following his death, the San Francisco Symphony, led by Seiji Ozawa, performed his five-minute piece Elegy for Albert Elkus. A note in the program dedicated the concerts to Leplin. Alfred Frankenstein wrote: "The 'Elegy' speaks gently and affectingly to the personalities of both men. It is warm and lyric in an idiom that suggests the Hindemith tradition. Spacious, beautifully phrased lines and rich sonorities are combined handsomely, an unpretentious statement that sings on the instruments easily, a natural and genuine inspiration. Ozawa and the Orchestra performed it with affectionate spirit and feeling."

Leplin wrote two more symphonies. In January, the conductor Josef Krips came to San Mateo, sat beside Leplin, and sang the entire 45-minute Second Symphony, pausing only between movements, and demonstrating that Leplin symphonies had continuous rhythm and melody throughout. When he finished, Krips exclaimed: "It's more complicated than Stravinsky!" (as noted in Kile Smith's Discoveries From the Fleisher Collection). The Second Symphony was premiered by SFS, Krips conducting, on 19, 20, 21 of January 1966.

Leplin's composition Music For Festive Services was premiered in 1965, with Darius Milhaud in attendance. Alexander Fried wrote of two passages: "Their beauty has mystic vision." In The San Francisco Symphony—Music, Maestros, and Musicians, Leplin's friend and fellow San Francisco Symphony musician David Schneider wrote: "I had known Emanuel since our early teens, and he was one of the most vital persons I've ever known."

On March 20, 1962, the Sacramento Symphony performed Comedy, with conductor Fritz Berens.

Jorda also conducted Leplin's next piece, Symphony No. One, which was commissioned by Agnes Albert and other friends of the Symphony for its 50th Anniversary season. SFS premiered it on 3, 4, 5 of January 1962. Subtitled "Of the Twentieth Century," it has a title for each movement: Illumination, Consternation, Contemplation and Adaptation. For the premiere, Leplin painted four pictures with a brush clamped in his teeth, which were on display in the Opera House lobby during the concerts.

Comedy was to be the second part of a four-part work called The Drama. The first part, Prologue, was written in 1960 and premiered by the Fresno Philharmonic, conducted by Paul Vermel. Tragedy and Epilogue were never written.

Also in 1960, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, under the auspices of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Inc. (now the League of American Orchestras), recorded Comedy. The conductor was Frank Brieff, who wrote as follows for The League 1959–1960 Recording Project for Contemporary Music catalogue:

Leplin was spared the paralysis of the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. This enabled him to hold a pencil and return to composition. While wife Anita was teaching elementary school in the Belmont, Leplin spent several hours each day composing, writing on a lapboard that rested on the arms of his wheelchair. In 1960, the San Francisco Symphony performed the first of his new orchestral works, Landscapes and Skyscrapers. It also displayed two of his paintings in the Opera House lobby. The feature article in the section "This World" of the San Francisco Chronicle (May 1, 1960) was titled "The World Premiere of Leplin's Compositions and Canvases," and ran photos of the two paintings.

In the summer of 1954, Leplin went to the High Sierra with several members of the San Francisco Symphony, including Robert S. Gottlieb.

In the fall of 1954, Leplin contracted polio during an epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent eight months in a negative pressure ventilator (an "iron lung"). While he was in a San Francisco hospital, The California Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Murray Graitzer, as well as members of SFS, performed a benefit concert for him. Darius Milhaud guest-conducted in spite of his well-known arthritis, in two of his own pieces, Mediterranean Overture and Air for Viola and Orchestra, which he dedicated to Leplin. According to one press citation, "All unions, including the musicians, stagehands, drayage, box office, etc. are giving their services gratis for the May 11th event. What Leplin doesn't yet know is that the radio engineers and the telephone company will run a direct line to his bedside at Maimonides, so that he will be among those present."

In 1953, Leplin founded the San Jose Junior Symphony, now called the San Jose Youth Symphony and in 1953 and '54 he conducted the first three performances of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. On summer Sundays, Leplin played with SFS at Stern Grove.

Leplin conducted a concert by the American Federation of Musicians in San Francisco on August 26, 1949, featuring his own works along with those of Schubert, Beethoven, and Bartók. Alfred Frankenstein wrote: "Leplin came out quite well, both as a creator and interpreter. His peppery, intense and brilliantly orchestrated set of three dances was especially impressive...(the Beethoven symphony) was an assured, breezy, well-considered interpretation...on the whole intelligently conceived and knowingly executed."

In 1947, the San Francisco Symphony went on a transcontinental tour, performing 56 concerts in 57 days. Leplin's orchestral piece Comedy was chosen to be a featured work of this tour. Leplin first conducted Comedy in San Francisco, and at the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, on May 23. Alexander Fried wrote, "It is a speedy, whimsical, tight-knit score. Its strong points are its adroit, tireless energy, its high-strung impudence and its spicy, tingling mixtures of orchestral sound." Samuel T. Wilson wrote of the April 21 performance in Columbus, Ohio: "Mr. Leplin thinks clearly, concisely, and naturally in modern musical idioms. His instrumental writing is notably lucid and direct...an exceedingly effective essay...indications were that Mr. Leplin has definite gifts as a conductor." Of the performance in Sacramento, Mila Landis wrote: the composer "conducted Comedy with great zeal...(it) proved to be stimulating...it issues a peremptory challenge for interest and attention."

Leplin spent the years 1943–46 in the United States Army. Upon his return from Paris, Leplin formed his own string quartet, directed a woodwind quintet, and rejoined the Symphony at the request of Monteux as a violist, and began composing works for orchestra, and painting oils of San Francisco, its skyscrapers, museums, and bridges, and the Japanese Tea Garden. He also painted scenes of Monterey Harbor and the Carmel Valley.

Viola Luther Hagopian, author of Italian ars nova Music: A Bibliographic Guide to Modern Editions and Related Literature, wrote: "This talented young man directed the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the Civic Auditorium, December 16 (1941) in his own composition Prelude and Dance. The music critics give him very high ratings as to his music and conducting. He is possessed of a wonderful personality and the gift of composing, playing and teaching. Emanuel Leplin will some day be rated amongst the world's greatest artists."

Leplin wrote four more orchestral works in the 1940s: Galaxy, for two solo cellos and orchestra (1942), Cosmos for violin and orchestra (1947), Incidental Music for Iphegenia of Sophocles, and Birdland (1948).

Leplin attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of California, Berkeley Department of Music, where he studied with E.G. Strickland and Albert Elkus. He studied composition for two summers with Roger Sessions, in 1936 and 1937. In 1939, he won the George Ladd Prix de Paris competition, earning a two-year fellowship to study in Paris. Rather than study with the popular Nadia Boulanger, he chose Darius Milhaud. Milhaud was one of the Groupe des Six (Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, Louis Durey), who wrote rhythmically and harmonically animated pieces such as the Scaramouche Suite for two pianos, and, while in Brazil, Le bœuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof of The Nothing-Doing Bar).

Emanuel Leplin (October 3, 1917; San Francisco, California – December 1, 1972; Martinez, California) was a composer, conductor, and painter active mainly in the second half of the 20th century. He was born in San Francisco, and joined the San Francisco Symphony as a violist in 1941, conducting it in two of his own works, in 1941 and 1947. In 1954, he contracted polio, and afterward, was unable to hold a brush or compose using anything below his neck but the first three fingers of his right hand. With these fingers he composed three symphonies, a violin concerto, and many other works for orchestra and chamber groups.