Ruth Schonthal, who died July 11 at 82, was a composer and teacher at New York University and the Westchester Conservatory of Music.

Among her more than 100 compositions were three operas and numerous orchestral works. Stylistically, Schonthal was known for incorporating folk songs and the classicism of her native Austria with modernist rigor learned under Paul Hindemith, with whom she studied at Yale.

For a 1996 piece commissioned to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, she scandalized her German hosts by incorporating the Horst Wessel song, the official anthem of the Nazi Party that is banned by German law.

Schonthal was a child prodigy, and began musical studies at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin in 1929 at age 5, the youngest student ever admitted. Her father was a wealthy industrialist with far-flung welding interests; the family was part of the Viennese Jewish community.

After the Nazis came to power, Schonthal, like other Jews, was forced to leave the conservatory, and her family sought refuge in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1938.There, she studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and had her first published composition, a sonatina for piano. In 1941, when conditions in Sweden seemed to deteriorate, the family moved to Mexico, where Schonthal continued her studies. When she was 19, in 1943, she appeared at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City as a soloist at the premiere of her own composition, the “Concierto Romantico.”

While in Mexico, Schonthal supported herself by playing piano at nightclubs, and she developed a talent for improvisation. She met Hindemith when he was on a Mexican tour, and impressed him enough that in 1946 he arranged for a scholarship for Schonthal to attend Yale. She married the painter Peter Seckel in 1950 and the couple settled in Atlantic City, New Jersey, together with Schonthal’s son from a brief earlier marriage.

Schonthal was busy raising a growing family, but she also taught and occasionally performed, and she wrote advertising jingles. In the 1960s, she composed several song cycles, and became far more prolific after being appointed adjunct faculty at NYU in 1974.

Schonthal specialized in song-cycle settings of classic poets, including Wordsworth, Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats, and Lorca. Among her larger-scale works were a piano concerto (1977) and operas, including “The Courtship of Camille” 1979, with a libretto taken fro A.A. Milne’s play “The Ugly Duckling”, and “Jocasta” (1997), a retelling of the Oedipus myth from the point of view of Oedipus’s mother, Jocasta, (who wants to stay married).

While her works were occasionally performed in America, Schonthal was better known in Europe. In 1980, she undertook a concert and lecture tour of Germany, the first time she had visited the country in more than 40 years. The city of Heidelburg awarded her a medal in 1994. At the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria, an exhibit lists Schonthal among the Jewish musicians exiled during Nazi rule. Next to her name is a button which, when pressed, plays her first-published sonatina.

Ruth Schonthal
Born June 27, 1924, in Hamburg, Germany; died July 11 in Scarsdale, N.Y.; survived by her husband, Paul Seckel, and three sons.