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Born: November 28, 1896 - Stryj, Austria-Hungary (today Ukraine)
Died: 1943 or 1944 - with his wife and child during a Nazi roundup of Jews in Wieliczka, near Krakow, Poland |
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Józef Koffler was a Polish composer, music teacher, musicologist and musical columnist. He studied from 1914 to 1916 in Lwów (today Lviv in Ukraine) and from 1918 to 1924 he studied music in Vienna with Paul Grädener (1914-1916), Arnold Schoenberg (1920-1924), and Felix Weingartner, and at the University with Adler (Ph.D., 1925, with the dissertation Über orchestrale Koloristik in den symphonischen Werken von Mendelsoohn-Bartholdy). He went on to Lwów, where he taught at the Conservatory from 1929 to 1941 and edited the periodicals Orkiestra (1930-1938) and Echo (1936-1937). Koffler was a protoplast of 20th-century avant-garde Polish music and the first Polish composer living before the World War II that applied Schoenberg's 12-tone composition technique (dodecaphony). Polish exile composer Roman Haubenstock-Ramati studied in 1920-1923 composition with Koffler in Lwów.
When German troops entered the town Koffler was captured with his wife and son and forcibly relocated to the ghetto in Wieliczka (Poland). His further fate, date, location and way he died are unknown. In 1943 or at at the beginning of 1944 he and his family probably were killed by one of the German Einsatzgruppen near Krosno (in southern Poland) where he was hiding after the liquidation of the ghetto in Wieliczka.
Most of Koffler's unpublished scores vanished in the turmoil of the World War II, when he died in the Holocaust. Only two works amongst his numerous compositions were published after the war. They were released by the Polish editing house PWM and are available today. They are: String Trio Op. 10 and Cantata Love Op. 14. Several of his works are were released on CD records. |
