Five Capriccios for Piano

Žiga Hirschler, composer and music critic, was born in Velka Trnovitica by Bjelovar on March 21, 1894, and died tragically in the concentration camp of Jasenovac in the autumn of 1941. His institutional musical education started in 1910 in the school of the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb, as regular pupil of composition and orchestration in the class of Vjekoslav Rosenberg Ružić. Five Capriccios for Piano (Cinq Caprices), composed by Žiga Hirschler, was inspired by the mythical beings of ancient mythology; it was dedicated to the pianist Antonia Geiger Eichhorn and printed in 1920. The choice of topic (mythical beings) and the piano texture with its characteristic arabesques reveals the author’s fondness for the Impressionist idiom…