Erich Walter Sternberg (; May 31, 1891, in Berlin – December 15, 1974, in Tel Aviv) was a German-born Israeli composer. He was one of the founders of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Biography After graduating with a law degree from Kiel University in 1918, Sternberg began studying composition with Hugo Leichtentritt and piano with H. Praetorius in Berlin. From 1925 Sternberg visited Palestine annually and moved there in 1932, along with other Jewish musicians who fled Germany prior to World War II. His life was devoted to composition and teaching of composition. In 1936 he helped Bronisław Huberman found the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and promoted the Palestine chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Sternberg married Frieda Pinner (Berlin, 1918), Ilse Tanja Wellhöner (Tel Aviv, 1936), Ella Thal (Tel-Aviv, 1949). Music career Sternberg's works in the 1920s and 1930s were expressionistic in style and reflect the influences of Hindemith and Schoenberg. He also incorporated traditional Jewish musical idioms into his use of dense polyphonic textures. Examples of this can be seen in his salient use of the augmented 2nd and cantilation motifs in the piano cycle Visions from the East, a programmatic work concerning the Jews of Eastern Europe, and in his String Quartet no.1, where he quotes both a Yiddish song, Bei a teich (‘The River’), and the formula for the prayer Shema Yisrael. In Berlin, Sternberg received praise for his compositions and many of his pieces were performed by leading ensembles and performers in that city. His String Quartet no.2 was performed by the Amar Quartet and Yishtabakh (‘Praise Ye’) by the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1929 he composed Yishtabakh, a work for Baritone soloist, SATB chorus, and chamber orchestra. The work was awarded the Engel Prize in 1946; an award Sternberg earned again in 1960. Sternberg found it difficult to overcome the trauma of displacement from his German heritage and never felt entirely comfortable in Israel. He was never offered a permanent position at the Palestine Conservatory or the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, although he occasionally taught there as a guest lecturer. In Palestine, Sternberg's compositional expression returned to nostalgic Romanticism in his large-scale orchestral works while simultaneously preserving a more modern harmonic vocabulary in his piano and chamber music compositions. For example, his symphonic variations Shneim-Asar Shivtei Yisrael (‘The Twelve Tribes of Israel’, 1938), reflects the powerful rhetoric of late Romanticism with obvious influences from Brahms,