Israel E. Feldman (1 May 1896–24 August 1963), music teacher and impresario, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was the son of two Russian Jewish emigrants, Hyman Feldman, a shirt ironer, and Lena Feldman (maiden name unknown). He may have added the middle initial to his name as an adult. Feldman developed a passion for classical music as a child while accompanying his father to concerts, where they often stood in the gallery because they could not afford good seats. He began violin lessons at age seven and was invited at age fourteen to perform with the Franz Schubert Bund, a society of professional musicians that included members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was purportedly the youngest person at that time ever to have done so.

In 1912 while vacationing in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Feldman learned of an opportunity to study with Franz Kneisel, founder and director of the famed Kneisel Quartet and former concert master of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. One of hundreds who auditioned for the coveted position, he won the competition and studied for four years with Kneisel at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City, a forerunner of the Julliard School of Music. It was there that Feldman developed his great love of chamber music.

After graduating in 1916 with a diploma in violin, Feldman led a small musical group in Atlantic City before accepting in 1917 a position as a music teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Later that year after the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the navy and was assigned to the Norfolk naval station. Feldman led a seventy-five-member group of musicians and at age twenty-one was perhaps the youngest bandmaster in the service. A morale-building revue entitled Frolicking Tars, for which he wrote much of the incidental music, started a national tour of naval installations but had to be cancelled because of the influenza outbreak in 1918.

After leaving the service with the rank of chief petty officer in 1919, Feldman remained in Norfolk and opened a music studio where he taught violin to adults and children. He auditioned for the violin section of the Philadelphia Orchestra but declined the chair when it was offered because he realized that his true calling was teaching and developing other players' talents. Some of Feldman's many Norfolk pupils gained fame as professional musicians, including Harry Bluestone, a jazz musician and movie studio conductor; Howard Boatwright, a prolific composer and professor of music at Yale University; and Dora Marshall Mullins, who performed with the Feldman Quartet for thirty-eight years and taught violin at the Julliard School of Music.

Noting the dearth of live chamber music performances in Norfolk, Feldman founded the Feldman Quartet, made up of his students and other local musicians. The quartet gave its first public performance on 6 January 1930 of works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov, and others to a sold-out house at the Woman's Club. Feldman did not perform with the quartet but instead served as the mentor and supervisor for the musicians, critiqued rehearsals, and arranged all the music. Typically he rehearsed the group for more than forty hours for each two-hour concert. With financial support of local donors, Feldman began collecting chamber music scores. During the summer hiatuses from teaching and overseeing performances he visited his family in Philadelphia and made regular trips to the Free Library of Philadelphia, which had one of the largest collections of music scores in the world and from which he painstakingly hand-copied the individual instrument parts from original scores. Feldman amassed a large collection of music for his quartet to perform. To accommodate an expanding repertory, the group's complement of musicians changed as the program dictated. Regular concerts continued until the outbreak of World War II made performances impractical.

After the war, Feldman faced the challenge of rebuilding his audience in a vastly different Norfolk that included a large population of former service personnel to whom chamber music was an unknown art form. He reorganized the quartet, and on 10 November 1947 it performed works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gabriel-Urbain Fauré, and Johannes Brahms in the first of a series of annual concerts that lasted for more than forty years. The three or four programs per year became more adventurous and featured a diversity of compositions, both modern and old masters. As its performances became more popular, the group moved to a series of progressively larger venues and during the 1950s added a second night to each performance to accommodate the expanding audience. In 1952 Feldman created a ten-piece chamber orchestra and a twelve-member junior chamber music group of musicians all younger than seventeen. The quartet remained the core group. It toured the state performing at colleges and universities, and from late in the 1950s to 1973 it regularly performed in Washington, D.C., with many of its concerts broadcast live on radio. The quartet, the orchestra, and the junior orchestra all operated under the management of the Feldman Chamber Music Society, organized in 1937 and incorporated in 1948.

Israel E. Feldman, who never married, died on 24 August 1963 in Philadelphia while visiting his sister and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery, just north of Philadelphia in Montgomery County. The Feldman Quartet continued under the direction of the group's longtime violist and at their first concert following his death as a tribute performed two of Feldman's own compositions, Nocturne and an arrangement of the Hebrew chant "Eili Eili." In 1972 the Feldman Chamber Music Society donated $10,000 to the Norfolk Public Library, which opened an audiovisual department named in his honor. The quartet officially disbanded late in the 1980s, but the Feldman Chamber Music Society presented concerts of visiting chamber music ensembles in Norfolk into the twenty-first century.

Sources Consulted:
Self-reported birth date in World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1917–1918), Record Group 163, and World War II Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1942), Record Group 147, both National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; feature articles in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 15 Apr. 1951 (several portraits), 24 Feb. 1952, Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 11 Sept. 1953, Commonwealth 19 (Nov. 1952): 18, and Christian Science Monitor, 3 Jan. 1957; State Corporation Commission Charter Book, 224:319–321, Record Group 112, Library of Virginia; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 5 Jan. 1930, 11 Nov. 1947, 27 Feb. 1955, 31 Oct. 1963, 17 July 1972; Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 3 Mar. 1953; James R. Hines, "Musical Activity in Norfolk, Virginia, 1680–1973" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1974), with complete repertory (1947–1973) on 618–626; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Star, 24 Aug. 1963, and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Philadelphia Inquirer, both 25 Aug. 1963; editorial tribute in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 26 Aug. 1963.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Stephen A. Maguire.

How to cite this page:
Stephen A. Maguire,"Israel E. Feldman (1896–1963)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Feldman_Israel_E., accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.