Julius Bürger was an Austrian then American composer, pianist and conductor.

He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music under Franz Schreker

Franz Schreker

Franz Schreker was an Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, his style is characterized by aesthetic plurality , timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and...

, and was one of the group of Schreker's pupils - Alois Hába

Alois Hába

Alois Hába was a Czech composer, musical theorist and teacher. He is primarily known for his microtonal compositions, especially using the quarter tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones and twelfth-tones....

, Jascha Horenstein

Jascha Horenstein

Jascha Horenstein was an American conductor.Horenstein was born in Kiev, Russian Empire , into a well-to-do Jewish family; his mother came from an Austrian rabbinical family and his father was Russian....

, Ernst Křenek

Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...

, Karol Rathaus - who followed Schreker to Berlin when Schreker was appointed Director of the Hochschule für Musik.

He had a long association with the Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...

, New York dating from 1924–1926, when Bruno Walter

Bruno Walter

Bruno Walter was a German-born conductor. He is considered one of the best known conductors of the 20th century. Walter was born in Berlin, but is known to have lived in several countries between 1933 and 1939, before finally settling in the United States in 1939...

 recommended him as assistant to Artur Bodanzky

Artur Bodanzky

Artur Bodanzky was an Austrian-American conductor particularly associated with the operas of Wagner.- Career :...

. He was an assistant to Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer

Otto Klemperer was a German conductor and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the leading conductors of the 20th century.-Biography:Otto Klemperer was born in Breslau, Silesia Province, then in Germany...

 at the Kroll Opera, then following the Nazi ban on Jewish artists in 1933, returned to be based in Vienna, with visits to London to work for the BBC as an orchestrator. In February 1938 Bürger and his wife deserted a train to Vienna in Paris, and in 1939 departed permanently to America. His mother and five of his brothers were sent to Auschwitz, his mother being shot by the roadside and the brothers murdered in the camp.

Works, editions and recordings

• Stille der Nacht, for baritone and orchestra. Scherzo for Strings. Cello Concerto. Variations on a Theme of Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Legende, for baritone and orchestra. Toccata Classics
  Toccata Classics
  Toccata Classics is an independent British classic music label founded in 2005.The founder of Toccata Classics is Martin Anderson, a music journalist. The label was founded primarily to promote unrecorded works by lesser-known composers, including British composers...