Helen Tobias Duesberg

Life

Helen Tobias was born in Suure-Jaani, Estonia on June 11, 1919. Tobias was the youngest daughter of Estonian composer, Rudolf Tobias, born seven months after his death. She studied music composition at the Tallinn Conservatoire, which is now known as the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, under Artur Kapp and Heino Eller. She graduated from the Conservatoire as an organist in 1943. She later studied at the Berlin University of Music as well.

During World War II, she met her future husband, William Duesberg, a journalist who was repeatedly imprisoned for writing stories critical of Adolf Hitler. Shortly after the war, Duesberg died of a heart attack in a Stuttgart courtroom while preparing to testify against several Nazi war criminals.

Tobias-Duesberg moved to the United States from Estonia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, in 1951. She began composing music and performing at several churches in New York City. She composed chamber, vocal and symphonic pieces, the most famous of which may be Requiem, which was composed for orchestra, mixed choir and soloists. During the Civil Rights Movement, she played the organ at Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. served as a guest preacher.

Meanwhile, she composed violin and cello sonatas, string quartets, song cycles, concertos, and a wide range of choral works. Her compositions have been performed on major concert stages in the U.S., Canada, and Europe as well as the Aspen, Ravinia and Spoleto festivals.

During a cultural backlash against classical music in the 1960s and '70s, American conductor Leonard Bernstein described Tobias-Duesberg as a female composer who "dares to be original and musical at the same time, while all the men run around writing intellectual cacophony."

Death

Helen Tobias-Duesberg died in Savannah, Georgia, on February 4, 2010, aged 90.

Selected works