Peter Hermann Adler was born on December 2, 1899, in the Bohemian town of Gablonz (present-day Jablonec nad Nisou, Czech Republic). His mother was Else Rindskopf, born in 1876, and his father was the physician Berthold Adler, born in 1868.
From 1920 to 1924, Adler studied music at the Prague Conservatory and also received private instruction from, among others, Vítězslav Novák and Alexander von Zemlinsky. He made his conducting debut in 1923 at the National Theater in Brno (then Brünn) and subsequently served as music director at the opera houses in Gablonz and Teplitz-Schönau. From 1929 to 1932, he was music director of the Bremen Stadttheater before becoming a guest conductor with the State Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine in Kyiv in 1932. Later that same year, he accepted a guest appointment as conductor and director at the Hessian Landestheater Darmstadt. There, he directed productions of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, and František Langer’s drama Periferie.
As a Jew, Adler lost his position in Darmstadt immediately after the Nazis came to power. On March 10, 1933, a delegation of members of the Nazi Party, including members of the Landestheater ensemble, appeared before the theater’s general director and demanded Adler’s immediate removal as conductor of an upcoming performance of Fidelio. Shortly thereafter, Adler discovered that, as he indignantly wrote to the Hessian Nazi state president Ferdinand Werner, his apartment had been searched in his absence and all of his correspondence confiscated—“apparently for the purpose of finding material to support the ... false claim that, in light of my concert tour in Russia, I am a Communist ... You will understand,” Adler continued, “the sense of bitterness I feel when, quite apart from the racial argument, which is entirely sufficient for the purposes at hand, deliberate falsehoods are now also being employed in order to harm a musician who is not aware of having committed even the slightest impropriety in any respect.” His desperate appeal was unsuccessful. On March 20, 1933, Adler was placed on indefinite leave, and his contract was terminated in the weeks that followed.
The musician initially fled to the Soviet Union, where he served as principal conductor of the State Orchestra of Kyiv. In the spring of 1939, he emigrated to the United States via Southampton, England, arriving in New York aboard the SS President Roosevelt on April 23, 1939. Adler began conducting the New York Philharmonic in 1940. In 1949, he became artistic director of the NBC Opera Company, a position he held for the next decade. In 1959, he assumed the same role with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. From 1972 onward, he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, and from 1973 to 1981, he served as director of the American Opera Center at New York’s Juilliard School. Peter Hermann Adler died on October 2, 1990, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
1899 Jablonec nad Nisou (Gablonz)
1990 Ridgefield, Connecticut