Today we celebrate the birthday of the American composer David Schiff, who was born in New York City on August 30, 1945, but who now lives and works on the opposite coast in Portland, Oregon.

Schiff’s best-known work, a 1979 opera entitled “Gimpel the Fool,” is based on a story by the beloved Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer that tells the tale of Gimpel, a Jewish baker in Eastern Europe who takes everything at face value and so is lied to and cheated by everyone he meets. Rather than take revenge on everyone who has treated him so badly, Gimpel becomes a wandering holy man, convinced that when he dies, God will not lie or cheat him.

Schiff’s opera premiered in New York City at the 92nd Street Y in 1979, and shortly thereafter he arranged themes from it into an instrumental Divertimento, the first of many works written for clarinetist David Shifrin and Chamber Music Northwest in Portland. Writing for those musicians, says Schiff, his given him what he calls, “a wonderful sense of how Haydn must have felt as court composer at Ezsterhazy.”

The Divertimento from “Gimpel the Fool” draws on Jewish liturgical modes and Klezmer music, and its fourth movement references “Who Knows One?”—a traditional cumulative song sung on Passover. Like the story of Gimpel, the song is meant to be humorous, while still imparting an important lesson.