ABOUT
THE ADLER PROJECT is dedicated to the Jewish refugee musicians who were exiled in Shanghai around the period of WWII, and to their Chinese students, many of whom became professional musicians and the foundation for classical music for the People’s Republic of China. My father, an orphan, was one of those students. Many Jewish people express their gratitude for the safe haven that Shanghai provided them. Yet, it is the subsequent generations of Chinese musicians who are grateful for the remarkable legacy their Jewish teachers have left for China’s classical music.
The Adler Project was started in 2017, initially as my personal quest to search for my father’s violin teacher, Ferdinand Adler, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish violinist. Little did I realize at the time, the journey of discovering a missing piece of my family history unveils the obscure history of Jews surviving the war in the Far East, and gives me a new and deeper understanding of China’s classical music in general.
There are several key figures and organizations that appear repeatedly in this project. All the blogs can be traced back to them directly or indirectly. So, I list them in the About section, as the foundational content that people can always refer back to. They include, of course, first and foremost, Mr. Ferdinand Adler, the namesake of this project; Sheng Mingliang, my father, a student of Mr. Adler; Wu Wenjun, my mother, who also studied with a Jewish musician, Mr. Gerrard Pincus, a pianist from Berlin; the State Conservatory Junior Program, where my father, uncle and many other war orphans got a chance to learn classical music and later became professional musicians; the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, formerly the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, where Ferdinand Adler served as concertmaster; the Central Philharmonic Society, where my parents and uncle worked for decades, and one of the embodiments of the evolution of China’s classical music, especially that of the second half of the 20th century.
My name is Fang Sheng. I am the elder son of Sheng Mingliang and Wu Wenjun. I am a professional translator, conference interpreter, personal history researcher, and writer. I am based in Toronto, Canada.
