Jacobo Ficher — composer, violinist and conductor with roots in the Russian Empire
Jacobo Ficher, in Russian Yakov Fisher, was born on 15 January 1896 in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, to Alexander Ficher, a trombonist in the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, and his wife, Iente Mirl (Elena), née Gotz. He began to study the violin at five; his lessons were interrupted when his mother died, but he resumed them in Odessa and went on to graduate from the St Petersburg Conservatory. In Petrograd he became concertmaster of the orchestra of the state opera, and his first compositions date from those years. In June 1920 he married Ana Aronberg, then a piano student at the Odessa Conservatory.
He left Russia by way of Poland, and on 10 February 1923 he and his family arrived in Buenos Aires, where they eventually became Argentine citizens; their son Miguel was born that June. At first Ficher earned his living as a violinist, but he soon turned mainly to composition and conducting. On 22 October 1929 he was one of the founders, with Juan José and José María Castro, Gilardo Gilardi and Juan Carlos Paz, of the Grupo Renovación, which became the leading organisation promoting new music in Argentina and in 1933 was admitted to the International Society for Contemporary Music as its Argentine section.
Over the following decades Ficher wrote nearly 140 works, among them symphonies, concertos for violin, piano and flute, chamber music, operas, ballets and songs, and he took part in founding several important Argentine musical organisations. He often conducted the premieres of his own works, as at the Teatro Colón in 1954. He taught composition and received many prizes in Argentina and abroad; in 1957 his saxophone quartet won second prize at a festival of contemporary Latin American music in Uruguay, and in 1969 he was elected to Argentina's National Academy of Fine Arts. Writing in 1940, the composer Lazare Saminsky described him as one of the two leaders of the Grupo Renovación.
Ficher died in Buenos Aires on 9 September 1978, aged eighty-two. His papers are preserved in the Jacobo Ficher collection, and his music has been revived by scholars and performers in recent years.
"Left Russia in 1919 by way of Poland and arrived in Buenos Aires on 10 February 1923 with his wife, the pianist Ana Aronberg; later an Argentine citizen."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine)
Born in Odessa in 1896, the son of a trombonist of the Odessa Philharmonic, he trained in Odessa and at the St Petersburg Conservatory and was concertmaster of the opera orchestra in Petrograd before leaving Russia.
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Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.