A new meaning for “Jewish music”

From February 1850 onwards a series of increasingly vituperative articles, attacking the opera Le prohète by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) following its debut (in German) in Dresden, began to appear in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. They were written by the friend, disciple, and correspondent of Richard Wagner (1813–83), the Dresden musician Theodor Uhlig (1822–53). They culminated in a series of six essays, Zeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Contemporary Observations), attacking Meyerbeer's pretensions to the creation of musical drama or beauty; as opposed, of course, to the compositions of Uhlig's hero Wagner. The first of these “Observations,” entitled “Dramatic,”¹ swiftly highlights the writer's objective; despite his success, the “false Prophet” Meyerbeer, as a Jew, can be no true German, and his music is a betrayal of German art. Uhlig cites three two- or three-bar snippets from the opera's last act, which he claims “belch out” (aufstossen) at us, for their allegedly unnatural word-setting and crudity of expression. These are scarcely representative of the opera as a whole (and no worse than similar examples that could be extracted from Wagner's Lohengrin). Uhlig then comments:

It is perhaps needless to say that none of the musical examples cited by Uhlig bear the slightest resemblance to Jewish music, either of the synagogue or the klezmorim. But when Wagner adopted Uhlig's formulation of a “Hebrew art-taste” in his anti-Jewish assault “Das Judentum in der Musik”³ (initially published anonymously in the Neue Zeitschrift as a “response” to Uhlig), he shrewdly refrained from giving examples or even attempting to define this concept in musical terms; instead he relied on traditional Jew-baiting principles. Just as a Jew cannot speak German properly, but can only produce a “creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle,” Wagner concludes that inevitably his attempts at creating song, which is “talk aroused to highest passion,” must be even more insupportable.⁴ Music produced by Jews, decreed Wagner, was thereby inherently corrupted into “Jewish music,” and hence a false art, even in the more sophisticated compositions of Felix Mendelssohn (whom Wagner oleaginously damns with faint praise).⁵ Moreover, Jews treat art just like any other commercial commodity and are only interested in exploiting the public's lack of taste by making money from it.⁶

Thus was initiated a concept of “Jewish music,” quite independent of Jewish musical traditions, and musicologically indefinable, that would lead ultimately to the bible of National Socialist musicologists, the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik,⁷ and, ironically by the same process, to the quasi-martyrological status in the present day of those musicians who, whether or not they had any interest in or knowledge of Judaism, perished as a consequence of their ancestry and Nazi Germany's criminal racial politics. The genesis of this concept must be sought, therefore, not in any definable characteristics observable in the music of those concerned, but in the remarkable success of Jews in making a reputation for themselves in the world of music in the period from the late eighteenth-century onwards, and the reception of this success among their contemporaries.

Advent of Jews to the world of art music

Taste and employment in the arts, in an age predating global publicity, were determined by patronage. It is therefore no surprise that while such patronage was monopolized in Europe by the Church and the aristocracy, Jews were not to be found in the realm of art music. They had no means of learning or acquiring its techniques, and in any case their semi-feudal status in most of the continent would not have permitted employment outside their permitted trades. Indeed the only notable manifestation of Jews in the world of musique savante before the eighteenth century was the brief period 1600–30 when the community of Mantua was indulged by the Gonzaga family and produced not only the composer Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–c. 1628), whose Monteverdian output included both secular madrigals and settings of Hebrew prayers (see Chapter 9), but a host of other Jewish musicians, singers and dancers.⁸

As a caste living at the fringes of Western European society, Jews were moreover held to be beyond the cultural pale, a people, as Voltaire put it, “without arts or laws.”⁹ Music of the synagogue was caustically derided by Gentile commentators who bothered to investigate it with comments such as “a Hebrew gasconade…a few garbled and conjectural curiosities,”¹⁰ or “It is impossible for me to divine what idea the Jews themselves annex to this vociferation.”¹¹ As to Jewish folk music, it was, like all others, overlooked by the cognoscenti. The cliché that the Jews were a “musical people,” commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century, would have seemed absurd at its commencement.

The disdain evinced towards Jewish music was not only an expression of traditional Jew-hatred. Parts of the synagogue services had remained “icons” of those of the Temple, and still retained (and retain today) elements of chants, modes, inflexions, and rhythms not reducible to the ideas of harmony and form that musical theoreticians were beginning to systematize in the eighteenth century. This “otherness” was more simply dealt with by dismissal than analysis. It was also easy to equate this non-conformity with an immoral betrayal of the duty of music to purvey a noble Affekt; this “moralistic” distaste for music of the Jews can still be found underlying Wagner's “Judentum in der Musik.”¹² It is in this context that we must read the genuine surprise of Carl Zelter (1758–1832) at the talent of his new pupil Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) in an 1821 letter to his friend Goethe: “It would really be something special if for once a Jewboy [Judensohn] became an artist.”¹³

Nonetheless, from around the beginning of the eighteenth century we begin to see an increasing interplay between Jewish urban communities and the musical life of their hosts in western Europe. At the end of the seventeenth century, the synagogue at Altona issued a series of decrees deterring members from attending the opera at nearby Hamburg (where Singspiels – works of musical theater combining German singing and speech – in the early eighteenth century featured caricature Jews speaking in mauscheln, the crude word used by non-Jewish Germans to discuss Jewish-German speech mannerisms).¹⁴ In the same period Jews in Frankfurt and Metz began to complain about the inclusion of music from the theater in synagogue services,¹⁵ and wealthy Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam became noted musical patrons (and even commissioned settings for their synagogues from Gentile composers).¹⁶ It is scarcely surprising that early evidence of Jews as active in the world of Gentile music comes from the two urban centers, Amsterdam and London, within states whose constitutions were least prejudiced against Jews.

As with many immigrant communities seeking entry to society (even today), musical entertainment was a popular career option for Jews. For such a profession capital requirements are low and all that may be necessary for success is some talent (and perhaps chutzpah). The very exoticness of the aspirant may be in itself an advantage where an audience, freed from the restrictions of ordained taste, seeks novelty. We see a harbinger of this in “Mrs. Manuel the Jew's wife,” who caught the eye and ear of Samuel Pepys in 1667/8 (just some ten years after Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to England following the 1290 expulsion) – “[she] sings very finely and is a mighty discreet, sober-carriage woman.”¹⁷ Hanna Norsa (c. 1712–84), the daughter of a Jewish tavern-keeper, made the classic transition from stage success in 1732 (as Polly in John Gay's Beggar's Opera), to mistress of an aristocrat (the Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole's brother).¹⁸ David Garrick introduced Harriett Abrams (c. 1760–1821) as the title role in his 1775 May Day: or the Little Gypsy, causing a newspaper to exclaim, “The Little Gipsy is a Jewess…the numbers of Jews at the Theatre is incredible.” This was the start of a long and distinguished profession for Abrams as a singer and a songwriter – and also an early example of Jewish audiences in London “supporting their own.”¹⁹ The notable operatic careers of the ḥazzan (cantor) Myer Lyon (c. 1748–97) (who appeared at Covent Garden as “Michael Leoni” and was allowed Friday nights off for his synagogue duties) and his protégé and sometime meshorer (descant) John Braham (c. 1774–1856) arose from their singing at London's Great Synagogue; the unusual qualities of their voices are likely to have arisen from the synagogue musical tradition.²⁰ Yet another form of musical fame founded in the synagogue was that of the egregious Isaac Nathan (c. 1792–1864), son of a ḥazzan, who, cashing in on the trend for esoteric folk music, was able to publish his arrangements of synagogue tunes through his improbable partnership with Lord Byron, whom he persuaded to write the words for his Hebrew Melodies (published in 1815). Cannily, Nathan persuaded Braham to allow his name to be placed in the front page in return for 50 percent of the profits. Nathan's turbulent career led to his retreat to Australia, where his musical pioneering earned him the accolade of “the father of Australian music.”²¹

Jewish musicians of Germany and France

While after the 1820s we find few significant home-grown Jewish musicians in England, a new generation of Jewish musicians emerged on the Continent of a very different type from those who, from Norsa to Braham, had chanced their way up virtually from the pavements. Typically they were, like the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Beer, 1791–1864) or Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny (1805–47), the offspring of merchant or extremely wealthy German-Jewish families whose parents had provided them with a musical education as part of an increasing fashion for acculturation with their host country. Lesser lights in this category include Ferdinand Hiller (né Hildesheim, 1811–85), Julius Benedict (1804–85), and the Prague-born Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870), who became a close colleague of Mendelssohn.

The trend to German culture in this class had commenced in the mid-eighteenth century with the advance of Enlightenment ideas amongst progressive Jewish thinkers, notably Felix's grandfather Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), which flourished amongst the wealthy Jewish elite in Germany and Austria who had associated themselves with Court and state finances. This movement inevitably accelerated as the French Revolutionary Army moving through continental Europe opened the ghettos and transformed the previous status of Jews, which had been virtually feudal, to that of (more or less) equal citizens. The education of the new generation of privileged Jews (for the mass of European Jewry was still extremely poor) coincided with a transfer of patronage in the arts towards the moneyed bourgeois – thus providing many opportunities for change, access, and career opportunities, notably (for Jews) in literature and music. In the fashionable Jewish salons of Berlin and Vienna of the early nineteenth century (among which the Mendelssohn and Beer families, and their Austrian relatives the Arnsteins and Eskeleses, were prominent), Gentiles from the worlds of the arts and politics mingled with the social newcomers, testifying to these changes. In the fashion of Romanticism, the exotic Jews, newcomers to cultured society, became a fashionable trend before the vogue of völkisch nationalism from the 1820s onwards began to disturb their status.

In these circumstances it is scarcely surprising that traditional Jewish music played little or no part in the musical upbringing of this generation. Felix Mendelssohn and his sister were brought up as Christians; most others of a German background (with the notable exception of Meyerbeer) converted to Christianity at some stage, as a matter of convenience if not deep belief. Moreover it was clear from an early stage that the traditional synagogue turned its back on contemporary Western culture. When the Vienna congregation commissioned a cantata to celebrate the Treaty of Paris in 1814 from the young Moscheles, the Pressburg (Bratislava) Rabbi Moses Schreiber issued a ruling that it was quite unacceptable for women's and men's voices to be heard together in a synagogue.²² It was left to the Jewish Reform movement to later populate synagogue services with quasi-Schubertian or Mendelssohnian strains such as those penned by the cantors Salomon Sulzer (1804–90) or Louis Lewandowski (1821–94) (see Chapter 12).

In France, a different route to musical careers was enabled by the confirmation of full citizenship to Jews following the decision of the National Assembly in 1791. This entitled those with the ability, even if from poor backgrounds, to attend the Paris Conservatoire; amongst those to take advantage of this opportunity were the opera composer Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and the piano virtuoso and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88) (neither of whom converted).

It is the latter who, in some of his Préludes op. 31 (1844), and in the melodies of his Sonate de concert for cello op. 47 (1857), created perhaps the first published artworks based on Jewish music.²³ That is not to say that other Jewish composers ignored such music. We know from correspondence that Mendelssohn, who it appears never so much as entered a synagogue, and his sister Fanny were fascinated by the music of the klezmer Joseph Gusikov (1806–37),²⁴ and that Hiller was to introduce his (non-Jewish) pupil Max Bruch (1838–1920) to the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) hymn Kol Nidre, which in 1881 the latter made into one of his greatest successes.²⁵ But, other than in the works of Alkan, we may seek in vain, despite the most energetic efforts of some scholars, to find a note of Jewish melody, or even idiom, in works of this generation. The search for such links ranges from Eric Werner's exotically optimistic attribution of a key melody in Mendelssohn's 1847 Elijah,²⁶ to the quite unfounded statement that the Passover meal scene in Halévy's 1835 opera La Juive “reflect[s] an awareness of traditional Jewish practice” and is “an authentic treatment…of ceremony”²⁷ (although indeed Halévy, who came from a practicing Jewish household, certainly knew how a seder ought to be conducted). Indeed the libretto of La Juive, in its presentation of the vengeful, money-obsessed, and secretive Eléazar, seems to truckle to the basest prejudices of Judaeophobia. Significantly, contemporary reviews of the opera do not relate the storyline in any way to the social situation of Jews of France in the 1830s (or even mention that the composer is a Jew), being more concerned with its attitude to the Church.²⁸

Where a “Jewish” sympathy may be found in the operas of Meyerbeer is not in their music, but in their storylines. Meyerbeer's Robert le diable came to the stage the year after the July Revolution of 1830, which ushered in a new era for France of bourgeois liberalism in reaction to the conservative world of Charles X. Nothing could have been more attuned to the new spirit than this brash, novel, and spectacular work, produced with the finest singers of the day, using all the technical resources of the Opéra stage; Meyerbeer became an instant Europe-wide celebrity, and remained as such with the similar successes of his further grand operas, all to librettos by Eugène Scribe: Les Huguenots (1826), Le prophète (1849), and the posthumously produced L'Africaine (1864). Uniquely, because of his wealth and authority, Meyerbeer had the opportunity to choose and shape his libretti; and it is no accident that each of his works in this form has a hero (in sequence Robert, Raoul, Jean of Leyden, and Vasco da Gama) who, for reasons of birth, religion, or belief is a neurotic outsider in his own society – Meyerbeer himself retained with his Judaism an excessive sensitivity to slights, both real and imagined, to his origins, as his diaries and correspondence reveal.

Reception of Jewish musicians

The German writer and convert Ludwig Boerne (1786–1837; born Judah Loew Baruch) wrote in 1832, “Some people criticize me for being a Jew; others forgive me for being one; a third even praises me for it; but all are thinking about it.”²⁹ This is the atmosphere in which all musicians of Jewish extraction operated throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Inevitably this was to affect their careers, status and public perception – and their music – in ways both direct and indirect.

“Jewishness” is not merely a matter of practiced religion, but also of yiddishkeit – the secular customs, use of Yiddish, shared humor, and mutual identification – which persisted as much amongst those who, like Felix Mendelssohn, were never circumcised, as those who, like Meyerbeer, remained (more or less) practicing Jews. Not least of the consequences was the tendency of such musicians, whether they attended church or synagogue, to associate closely with friends and collaborators of a similar status. Felix and the Mendelssohn family continued to have in their circle Moscheles, Benedict, Hiller, the violinists Ferdinand David (1810–73) and Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), the composer and writer Adolf Bernhard (né Samuel Moses) Marx (1799–1866) and many other Neuchristen; not only that, they can still be found in the company of many of their contemporary Neuchristen in the same section of the Dreifaltigkeit Cemetery in Berlin. Also striking was the connection of many Jewish composers to the successful music publisher Adolf Martin (né Aron Moses) Schlesinger (1769–1838) in Berlin (and to his son Maurice Schlesinger [1798–1871] in the Paris branch of the business). Schlesinger, who began his bookselling business in 1810, became the publisher of many of Beethoven's late masterpieces, made a fortune from his early “spotting” of Carl Maria von Weber,³⁰ and was Mendelssohn's first publisher. Schlesinger-owned music journals in Berlin (edited by A. B. Marx) and Paris naturally supported “house” composers.³¹ Apart from publishing Meyerbeer and Halévy, Maurice also published works of Liszt, Berlioz, and many other leading Parisian musical celebrities. He incidentally employed the impoverished Wagner in 1840–1 to write articles for his Gazette musicale and to make arrangements of opera arias; and indeed he was responsible for introducing Wagner personally to Liszt in his shop.³² It was perhaps this sense of an extra-musical cartel amongst his contemporaries that prompted Robert Schumann to comment in his wedding diaries that he was fed up with promoting Mendelssohn: “Jews remain Jews: first they take a seat ten times for themselves, then comes the Christian's turn.”³³

Apart from this clannish dimension of yiddishkeit, other factors demarcated these musical newcomers in the minds of their Gentile colleagues; notably, as regarded the German musicians, their often wealthy (or at least comfortable) origins. Whereas, for example, Wagner was only able to dream of traveling to Italy to study,³⁴ Meyerbeer was comfortably subsidized by his family to study and write his early operas there for seven years. Berlioz noted, “I can't forget that Meyerbeer was only able to persuade [the Paris Opéra] to put on Robert le diable…by paying the administration sixty thousand francs of his own money”³⁵ (an allegation that is in fact unfounded). Robert Schumann wrote to Clara Wieck of Mendelssohn in 1838, “If I had grown up under circumstances similar to his, and had been destined for music since childhood, I'd surpass each and every one of you.”³⁶

Not only this, but in the growing ethos of musical nationalism, Jews were difficult to “place.” When Meyerbeer's friend Weber had written, in 1820, about the former's Italian operas, “My heart bleeds to see how a German artist, gifted with unique creative powers, is willing to degrade himself in imitation for the sake of the miserable applause of the crowd,”³⁷ he could of course hardly have foreseen how such comments could be recast under the more strident nationalism of later decades, when the “Germanness” of the artist concerned might become the crux of the issue. Once again, it is Schumann, in his vituperative 1837 review of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, who gives a foretaste of the critique of Uhlig and Wagner: “What is left after Les Huguenots but actually to execute criminals on the stage and make a public exhibition of whores?…One may search in vain for…a truly Christian sentiment…It is all make-believe and hypocrisy…The shrewdest of composers rubs his hands with glee.”³⁸

And of course the extraordinary success of Jewish musicians was bound to excite pure envy. Following the successes of La Juive and Les Huguenots at the Paris Opéra, the truculent opera composer Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) (whom Meyerbeer was in fact to replace as Kapellmeister in Berlin in 1842) was satirically said to have been observed weeping at the mummies of the Pharaohs at the Louvre, complaining that they had let the Jews go free.³⁹ Mendelssohn's appointments as musical director in Düsseldorf (1833) and later Leipzig (1835), and the appointments of both Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn at the more liberal court in Berlin of Frederick William IV after 1843, signified their influence in Germany, where the support of Meyerbeer enabled the production of Wagner's Rienzi in Dresden in 1842, and the indifference of Mendelssohn to Wagner's offer of his Symphony in Leipzig in 1836 was another source of the latter's sense of grievance.⁴⁰

What Jewish musicians contributed to European musical life was indeed to some extent associated with a change of public taste to grandeur and sensation. The works of Meyerbeer, whose musical innovation was to combine the colorful orchestral romanticism of Weber with the vocal pyrotechnics of Italian opera, fitted well with this trend. So did the pianists who became, in the words of Heine, “a plague of locusts swarming to pick Paris clean” in the 1830s and 1840s, many of them as juvenile prodigies – amongst the Jewish-born exemplars being Jakob Rosenhain (1813–94), Julius Schulhoff (1825–98), Louis Gottschalk (1829–69), and Anton Rubinstein (1829–94) (who partnered Halévy's student Jacques Offenbach [1819–80] in the latter's debut Paris recital as a cellist in 1841). It may be that the status of Jews as “newcomers” freed them to some extent both from allegiance to the supposedly more refined tastes of earlier generations, and from the dictates of the self-appointed bearers of the standards of “true art” of German nationalist romanticism, so as to meet the demand and taste of the expanding audiences of the bourgeois. Perhaps this is part of what suggested Wagner's accusation of commercialism (the word “Judentum,” in the title of his tirade, in colloquial German of the time carried not only the meaning of “Jewry,” but also “haggling”.⁴¹

But on the other hand the serious and scholarly approach of Mendelssohn, Moscheles, and their school – to whom, in fact, the music of Meyerbeer and the piano virtuosi were anathema – scarcely fitted this characterization of commercialism. Mendelssohn himself was indeed a prime mover in the rehabilitation of the music of the great German masters, Bach and Handel, and Moscheles was a pioneer of the “historical recital,” including performances on the harpsichord.⁴² To Wagner, and to other advocates of new music, however, such “classicism” was as much a threat as the popularity of grand opera in alienating the affection of potential audiences for their own art. Wagner indeed succeeded in coupling this dedication to tradition with his more traditional Jew-baiting approach in a repulsive metaphor of the decaying flesh of German art dissolving into “a swarming colony of insect-life.”⁴³

Despite all the above, however, only in Germany is there significant evidence of Jewish musicians and their music being a source of contention for their contemporaries. Berlioz in an 1852 article derided the notion of “Hebraic elements” compromising Mendelssohn's music.⁴⁴ In Britain, Mendelssohn became an honored guest in his ten visits, and his descent from Moses Mendelssohn was noted with approval. Indeed after his death he was incarnated in thin disguise as the Chevalier Seraphael, in the very popular novel Charles Auchester (1855), by the teenaged Elizabeth Sheppard, in which his Jewishness was cited as the source of his musical genius.⁴⁵ In the concert halls and opera houses of London and Paris, music that Jews wrote or played was not distinguished as a separate category. Only later in the century, with the birth of political anti-Semitism as a mass movement, and Wagner's later return to the fray in 1869 with a lengthened version of his attack (this time published under his own name), began the transformation of the notable musical achievements of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and their generation into a stick with which to beat them. And not until the end of the century, and partly in reaction to this development, would Jewish musicians, notably the activists of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, begin at last a musical exploration of their own ancestral heritage.