Eric Zeisl (1905-1959) was establishing a successful Viennese career as a concert composer when Austrian Nazi sympathizers precipitated the annexation of their country to Hitler's Germany. Zeisl escaped at the last minute and thereafter made his living working in Hollywood films, then became a professor at Los Angeles City College while continuing his personal composing. Thereafter he frequently wrote works concerning Jewish life, religious observance, and history, and the fate of his people back in Europe.

In 1944 Zeisl received a commission for sacred music for a synagogue. At about that time he also learned that his father and other relatives had been taken and shipped to Terezin concentration camp, and then had been transported and murdered, probably at Treblinka death camp. He wrote this setting of the 92nd Psalm, therefore, as a requiem for his father "and other victims of the Jewish tragedy in Europe," insisting on the title although the Psalm has no reference to death. It is an important and high moving personal statement.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi