The Enigma and Tragedy of Jacob Silberberg

Just after I submitted the last piece on Jacob Silberberg, within a few days I did some more research and discovered much more on him. Sometimes poking through copyright records can be unusually fruitful in research. This article will serve as an addition to the findings of the previous one. As I started researching various sheet music with Silberberg’s name on it, I kept stumbling across sheets crediting Alexander Silberberg, who was Jacob’s father. On the LOC site, there are quite a few sheets with his name. These pieces are rather standard for the time period (1860s-’80s), marches, polkas, galops, etc. It was quite remarkable to see such a nice array of pieces by Jacob’s father, including an entire folio of 10 dance numbers under his name. Under the title page introducing Alex Silberberg’s New and Fashionable Dance Music it states: As played with immense success by Silberberg’s orchestra We now can be certain that Jacob was immersed in music from the beginning. None of this could have been learned from the 1880 census alone, which lists Alexander as “musician.” It seems that Alexander brought the music tradition with him from Prussia. In the previous article, I stated that it was unclear how far back Silberberg’s connection with the phonograph goes, but after a bit of research it’s likely that it goes back much further than expected. In 2015, Archeophone put