the Holocaust. After the war he moved to Paris where, following many years of isolation and loneliness, he committed suicide in 1970. Berlinski constructed the work so poems are narrated between movements written for the solo piano. This dramatic work was first performed at Washington's United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a few weeks before Berlinski's death. Awards and tributes Berlinski received many awards, honours and fellowships. The first major award was a MacDowell Fellowship which he received in 1958. This assisted him in undertaking extensive musicological research. In 1984 the American Academy of Arts and Letters honoured him with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award, the citation reading: "Herman Berlinski is among the few 20th-century composers who have produced a significant body of music for the organ ..." In 1992 he was granted the Shenandoah University and Conservatory Medal of Excellence, followed in 1995 by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Guild of Organists. In the international arena, the then Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Order of Merit which he received from the President in 1995, followed by the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit which he received in 2001. The award letter for the Commander's Cross cited Berlinski as having been a builder of "many lasting bridges over the Atlantic", significant recognition from a former enemy against whom Berlinski had fought during the Second World War. Considering the way Belinski had been treated by French authorities following his demobilization from the French Foreign Legion in 1940, leading to his urgent departure for the United States, it is ironic that he was decorated by the French Government with a Croix du combattant volontaire 1939–1945 after this award was created in 1954. Summary The obituary by Martin Anderson published in The Independent began: Herman Berlinski's deep involvement with Jewish liturgical music meant that his compositions didn't get the attention they deserve on the wider stage of concerts and recordings. Parallels can be drawn between Berlinski and other composers whose reputations have been built so strongly on one part of their output that other equally important aspects have been ignored. For example, Franz Liszt's fame as a pianist and his enormous output of virtuosic works for this instrument have distracted attention from his orchestral tone poems and symphonies, choral works and oratorios, chamber music and lieder. The picture is similar with Max Reger whose organ works have long been