ABOUT
Stella Lerner is a musician, composer and educator, with academic degrees in music, linguistics and special education. She was born in Russia, where she received her master’s degrees in musicology and linguistics summa cum laude on the verge of her immigration to Israel in 1990. / Stella Lerner is a Russian-born Israeli composer.
Lerner’s works have been performed and recorded by Israel’s finest artists, received critical acclaim and presented in major concerts of the Israeli Music Festival (which commissioned and premiered orchestral versions of her songs) and in Lieder and chamber music recitals in Israel, Europe and the United States. Lerner’s most distinctive contribution to the Hebrew-Israeli Lied resides in her convincing and fascinating interpretations of Leah Goldberg’s poetry. These Lieder – many of them published by the Israel Music Institute with singable English translations – received a wide-embracing audience in Israel and abroad and form part of the repertoire in vocal departments in music academies around the world, in master-classes and in international singing competitions and is frequently played on the classical music channel of Israeli radio.
In 2016, the Israel Music Institute released the album Stella Lerner: Poetic Songs (see links below), presenting a selection of her Hebrew Lieder, sung by the internationally renowned soprano Sharon Rostorf-Zamir. Stella Lerner's work appears on the CD Forever to Remember by the record label- American Romeo Records. Reviews of the CD appeared in professional journals in London and New York, where Lerner's work received positive attention alongside other works.
Lerner’s music also received international acclaim. In 2018, Oxford University dedicated a special event to her songs, including a recital of her Goldberg Lieder, sung both in Hebrew and in English with Sharon Rostorf-Zamir (soprano) and Marc Verter (piano), and a symposium with the participation of literary scholars (Prof. Adriana Jacobs, Prof. Philip Bullock, Dr. Avshalom Guissin, and Prof. Harai Golomb), as part of the University’s “Oxford Song Network: Poetry and Performance” series.
The international exposure of her music continued in subsequent years. Thus, it featured prominently in three concerts in the international festival KOL – Jüdische Musik in Germany, and soprano Asta Kriksciunaite, among others, performed her songs in concerts held in various places in Lithuania throughout 2018-2020. In 2022, again, two concerts dedicated to Leah Goldberg's poetry took place in her native Lithuania, focusing on Stella Lerner's settings to Goldberg's poems. It was also in 2022 that Lerner's music was chosen to be included in a special concert entitled "Between Mahler and Other Expressionists" within the Upper Galilee Chamber Music Festival.
While Lieder remain central to her output, her music encompasses a variety of styles and genres, ranging from jazz standards, Jewish liturgical music to musical monodramas for actress and piano. Her work The Scroll of Aaron for Voice and Piano Trio was premiered recently at the Jerusalem Music Centre and at Ha-Teiva in Tel Aviv, an event covered in a special report in Ha’aretz. Lerner’s monodramas for actress and piano, also published by IMI, receive unique interpretations by actress Michal Bat-Adam and singer-pianist Hagai Yodan, in their joint project If I were Music. This project was presented during the last two years at the Bialik Library, at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music’s subscription series, and at other venues. The Israel Music Institute is releasing a CD album dedicated to this project.
In addition to her artistic activity, Lerner developed a unique method for employing music in special education, based on creating “musical portraits” that express the child’s unique emotional world. Her therapeutic approach received professional recognition. Her study Musical Portraits as a Therapeutic Tool was introduced in several academic forums, and she was invited to present it in two conferences of the Israel Musicological Society (2009, 2016). A research paper entitled “Exploring a Music-based Intervention Entitled "Portrait Song" in School Music Therapy: Stella Lerner's Song-based Approach", by Dr. Rivka Elkoshi, explores the important educational and therapeutic contributions of Stella Lerner's original "portrait songs" to the fields of special music education and music therapy. The article was published in the international magazine "Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy".
My Story
I would like to share some of the main features of my artistic worldview that have inspired my choices of texts and genres.
​
One of my greatest fascinations in life is the singing human voice, which for me reaches its highest expressive achievements through its creative dialogue with the art of written poetry. Indeed, the human voice is the most powerful means of expressing our inner world, drawing as it does on resources of body, mind, soul, consciousness, intellect and emotion. It is only through the voice that music can join forces with a verbal text, especially a poetic one. It has always been my wish to contribute to a fusion between lyrical poetry and art music: on the one hand, the power of the word, concrete and abstract at the same time, and on the other hand the power of music to give the words added intensity and meaning, enhancing the verbal text above and beyond its specificity and referentiality. Music being my own creative medium, I felt the urge to join the marriage between the arts of poetry and music with my own contribution through poetry-inspired musical composition. In the Lied, the genre of the art-song, the two arts can bring out the best in each other, to discover and illuminate in each other potentials, which remain hidden, kept in the dark as it were, when music and poetry are kept apart. Rarely is the cliché about the whole surpassing the sum-total of its parts more convincing than in the Lied.
​
Indeed, the through-composed poetic–musical Lied can reflect a mental and physical life-celebrating truth. I would love to cherish and savour the moment in which I experience a physical change under the impact of a powerful poem; to give genuine musical life to my poetry-evoked experiences and sensations.
For me, composing music for a poetic text is a pleasurable search for the musical resonance of the lyrical poetic word, thus creating a new entity, in which a previously familiar reality transforms into a symbolic one, while being, perhaps paradoxically, more tangible than before.
​
Last but not least, Leah Goldberg (1911–1970): what motivated my choice of her work as the major (though not the only) source of poetic inspiration for my Lied-writing? Why have I chosen to resonate with her words, to decode seemingly simple, even naïve codes hidden in her poems?
​
The answer is, perhaps, that "life itself" partly accounts for my fascination with her personality and spiritual and emotional world. I was born and bred not far from her native Russian-culture-dominated locale. I, too, was drawn to the Hebrew language and culture, though genuinely remote from my native country, language and culture. Perhaps my choice of Leah Goldberg (and, to a lesser extent, also other Hebrew poets and poetesses, notably Zelda), though obviously emotive and intuitive, was also mindful and more carefully considered than I could realise at the time. Poems that I chose to inspire my music started resonating in me immediately when I encountered them on the printed page. They immediately took shape in me as music inseparable from the words; as if Goldberg's words were 'begging for' being set to music. Another link between her and me is our shared closeness to the poetry of the great Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). Each of us, in her youth, was drawn to the emotional content and verbal music of Akhmatova's poetry, and this shared experience played a significant role in the mental union between Goldberg's Hebrew and my own newly created idiom of Israeli music. Indeed, Leah Goldberg's work has become a permanent presence in Israeli poetry and culture, despite the undeniably European nature of its roots and, consequently, its hallmark.
​
To sum up: both of us made a choice to be creative artists in an adopted Hebrew language and culture, which is harsh and hard to the poet, the composer and the singer; but through art this Israeli idiom can acquire easiness and directness, even lightness, that 'easily rolls in one's mouth' and, through the ear, deeply penetrates one's heart.
