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.

Introduction

In his memoirs, the Russian Jewish poet and translator Leon Mandelshtam (1819–89) describes an 1840 visit he paid to the legendary Minsk cantor Sender Poliachek (1786–1869). A musical illiterate, Poliachek had won fame for his liturgical compositions that were said to evoke the “soul” of the Jewish past. Mandelshtam himself had fled a small-town life of religious traditionalism for Moscow, where he would become the first Jew to graduate from a Russian university. Yet he felt compelled to stop en route in Minsk to ask the venerable cantor a question: Where did this music of the Jews come from? Was it a product of the East, signifying that the Jews of Russia were descended from the medieval Khazars who had converted to Judaism? Or was it derived from Western Europe, proving that the Jews had migrated to eastern Europe from Spain and Germany, pushed on by the violence of the Crusades? Perhaps, Poliachek replied, since the Jews had lived under both Muslims and Christians, their music was a cultural hybrid: East and West had fused together to produce the distinctive “binational Jewish melody.”

The conversation did not end there. For the cantor then surprised Mandelshtam with a question of his own. Why, he wished to know, would such a nice and talented young man abandon his people to go live in Moscow like a Christian? Mandelshtam replied with a pithy rabbinic maxim: “Better to be last among lions, than first among hares.” Poliachek was unimpressed. He too had once felt the lure of Western music, he explained, before concluding that such a career would have ruined his distinctive Jewish voice: “A spring quenches the thirsty man if he is on dry land; let him be in the sea, and it is of little use. The moonlight dazzles your eyes at night; during the day it is but a pale patch in the sky. In my primitive national form I am distinct; mixed together with all the colors, I would become lost in the crowd.” Undeterred, Mandelshtam countered that the modern world did not scare him: “A country is only a miniature image from space; a year is only time in a smaller form; the same is true of virtue, which, similar to genius, lies above space and time, and fears neither foreign lands on the road of wandering nor temptation in the era of modern life.”¹

This exchange between the cantor and the poet neatly summarizes the main themes of the history of Jewish art music from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth. Before 1800, only a handful of European Jews had ventured beyond the confines of the Jewish community into the world of European art music. Many rabbinical authorities frowned on secular musical education as a dangerously seductive pathway to heresy. Even knowledge of Western musical notation was regarded in some quarters with suspicion. In turn, Christian Europeans looked on Jews as an alien culture whose musical practices threatened to contaminate Western art. Yet, at the same time, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jewish liturgical and folk music professionals – cantors and klezmorim – exhibited increasing interest in Baroque vocal genres, opera and operetta, and European court dances. The allure of art music proved quite strong. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, Jewish musicians flocked in extraordinarily high numbers to conservatories across Europe with profound consequences for both Western music and modern Jewish identity.

Mandelshtam's query about the historical origins of the music of the Jews and the cantor's expansive yet curious reply (Christian-Muslim “binational Jewish melody”) also point to the ambiguous place of “Jewish music” in the modern European imagination – both Jewish and Christian. From Richard Wagner's famous 1850 anti-Semitic essay “Das Judentum in der Musik” to the racialist theories of fin-de-siècle French and Russian critics, ideological fantasies about the essentialist character of Jewish music – and its indelible imprint in the works of composers of Jewish origin, and even in the styles of Jewish performers – surfaced repeatedly in European culture. Likewise, early twentieth-century Jewish nationalists produced elaborate musical theories of their own. Indeed, the entire project of modern Jewish art music can be characterized as an ongoing search for an answer to the question of how to define the genre of Jewish music horizontally – belonging to the “Oriental” East or Christian West – and vertically – as an autochthonous tradition extending from biblical antiquity to the modern times. Just as Mandelshtam's anecdote suggests, the modern dialogue with the Jewish musical past emerged as a constant theme across the first several generations of Jewish composers. For some of these artists, Jewish religious sonorities required delicate refinement to meet the new aesthetic dictates of Enlightenment rationalism in nineteenth-century Europe (“the era of modern life”). For others, modernity demanded a radical re-imagination of Jewish vernacular and liturgical traditions into a secular form of national art music (at once “primitive” and “modern”). Still other composers gravitated to modernism as a utopian quest to liberate all art and artists – from the particularistic confines of nation and religion (“above time and space”).

This chapter explores these developments through a chronological survey of the period between 1850 and 1925, highlighting major figures as well as shifts in cultural ideas of Jewish music and musicianship down through time. It is divided into three sub-periods: Hebrew Melodies: Virtuosity and Antiquarianism, 1850–1900; Aural Emancipations: Renaissance and Modernisms, 1900–17; and Revolutionary Echoes: Affirmations and Ambiguities, 1917–25.

Hebrew melodies: virtuosity and antiquarianism, 1850–1900

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the idea that a Jew might excel in the realm of European art music constituted an odd, if not unnatural, proposition. Over the next half-century, however, western and central European Jews began a dramatic ascent into the ranks of professional musicians. This socio-cultural trend, already visible in nucleo before 1800, swelled into a remarkable – and much remarked upon – pattern of Jewish virtuosos by the middle of the nineteenth century. Jewish child prodigies became the norm for the next seventy-five years, with hundreds upon hundreds of pianists, violinists, cellists, and other musicians concertizing across Europe at very young ages. Some of these notable performers went on to notable careers as composers, including the likes of Ignaz Moscheles (1790–1870), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88), and Anton Rubinstein (1829–94). Many others swelled the ranks of the new conservatory faculties, symphony orchestras, and other musical institutions that emerged as prime features of nineteenth-century European musical life.² All contributed to an image of Jews as singularly talented in the field of art music, though contemporary observers differed widely in their estimation of the sources and meaning of that talent.

In hindsight, historians have explained the rapid gravitation of Jews to art music and extraordinary professional success as stemming from the confluence of several factors: the long-established pattern of music as a hereditary profession in pre-modern European Jewish life; the relative openness of new cultural spheres that catered to a newly ascendant urban bourgeoisie with a strong appetite for secular entertainment; the concrete economic opportunities represented by these new cultural realms, which also attracted a considerable quotient of Jewish musical entrepreneurs, sheet-music publishers, concert impresarios, and critics; the broader pattern of Jewish embourgeoisement, reflected in the popularity of both childhood musical training and amateur chamber music performance as key features of European salon life; and the identification of many leading classical musical figures (though certainly not all) with the cause of political liberalism. In a larger sense, the Jewish movement into art music was a legacy of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which framed music as a secular activity, musical talent as an innate human gift irrespective of particular origin, and art as a path to moral self-cultivation and modern individualism.³

Significantly, what does not appear to have played a strong role in this process, contrary to popular perception, was the force of Jewish religious tradition or traditional rabbinic cultural values. In spite of its significance in pre-modern Jewish life, including in synagogue and wedding rituals, music remained a low-status profession with musicians occupying an ambivalent position in the social hierarchy of the Ashkenazic Jewish community.⁴ Nor, with a few notable exceptions, did most of these first few generations of nineteenth-century concert musicians evince much direct self-consciousness about their Jewish musical heritage or active compositional engagement with Jewish themes. Indeed, music beckoned precisely as an ostensibly unobtrusive path of acculturation and social advancement in mainstream European bourgeois society.

That religion was not the motivating force drawing Jews to classical music did not mean that art lacked spiritual significance. On the contrary, for many Jews – both professional performers and dedicated concert patrons – classical music constituted a veritable alternative religion. A case in point is the legendary Hungarian-born violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907). A pioneering force in European concert life and musical pedagogy, long a fixture of German musical life, and a close collaborator of Brahms, Schumann, and others, Joachim redefined the nature of violin playing and chamber music during his long career. A nominal convert to Christianity, he remained identified as Jewish yet practiced neither religion. Listening to Beethoven's music, he once wrote, was like listening to the “Religion of the Future” (Zukunftsreligion).⁵ In this way, absolute music – instrumental music without words – offered an attractive ideal of a universalist realm beyond language, religion, and national differences that otherwise defined so much of the Jewish experience in modern Europe. A later quip retold by the German Jewish humorist Alexander Moszkowski, brother of the noted composer and pianist Moritz Moszkowski, conveyed a similar sentiment: “[I have] no sympathies for any ritual aspects of our religion. Of all the Jewish holidays the only one I keep is the concert of Gruenfeld [a famous Austrian Jewish pianist].”⁶

When Jewishness did surface as a specific theme in nineteenth-century European art music it came clothed in the Romantic garb of a virtuous antiquarianism. Like Jewish visual artists of the day, Jewish composers looked backwards to biblical antiquity in search of religious themes suitable for a modern era of rational religion and improved Jewish-Christian relations. This trend might be said to have officially begun with the British Jewish composer Isaac Nathan's 1815 collection of song settings of the poet Lord Byron's “Hebrew Melodies,” a common touchstone for many later composers of Jewish-themed music, both Jewish and Christian.⁷ Like Nathan's work, these aural imaginaries often took the form of compositions that addressed the historic borderlines and commonalities between Judaism and Christianity, such as Felix Mendelssohn's oratorios Elijah (1846) and St. Paul (1836), Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy's opera La Juive (1840), Ferdinand Hiller's oratorios The Destruction of Jerusalem (1840) and Saul (1858), Joachim's “Hebrew Melodies” (1854) for viola and piano, Karl Goldmark's opera The Queen of Sheba (1875), and Friedrich Gerns-heim's Symphony No. 3 in C minor, “Miriam” (1888), inspired by Handel's Israel in Egypt oratorio.

Particularly notable exemplars of this pattern came in the works of two of the greatest pianist-composers of the nineteenth century: Anton Rubinstein (1829–94) and Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88). Born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement and baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant, Rubinstein went on to global fame as a concert performer, composer, and artistic celebrity. At the same time, he introduced a modern conservatory system into the Russian Empire that generated a unique social pathway for two generations of Russian Jewish musicians to achieve an unprecedented professional status and legal freedom in an otherwise tightly regimented, illiberal society with onerous legal restrictions on its Jewish population. In his art, Rubinstein opposed both the Romantic nationalism of his Russian contemporaries and the growing cult of Wagner. Instead he often stressed biblical themes such as in his various “spiritual operas,” including Sulamith (1883), The Maccabees (1884), Moses (1894), and Christus (1895). In the end, his oft-quoted self-evaluation came to summarize his estrangement from a musical world that increasingly insisted on assigning composers to national and religious categories: “To the Jews I am a Christian. To the Christians – a Jew. To the Russians I am a German, and to the Germans – a Russian. For the classicists I am a musical innovator, and for the musical innovators I am an artistic reactionary and so on. The conclusion: I am neither fish nor fowl, in essence a pitiful creature!”⁸

In contrast to Rubinstein's restless performance career, colorful personality, and complex personal identity, Alkan lived his entire life as a traditionally observant religious Jew who abandoned public performance. He rarely, if ever, left his native Paris, and for much of his later life lived as an enigmatic recluse. A graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, he emerged early on as one of the great pianistic talents of French musical life. He became close friends with Chopin, Liszt, and George Sand. Though he vanished from public view, Alkan produced a large body of technically demanding piano music that sits comfortably alongside that of Liszt and Chopin as some of the most expressive, technically forbidding piano music of the Romantic era. Alkan's piety surfaced in his work with the main Paris synagogue and his compositional efforts to set both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible to music. He framed his Jewishness nearly exclusively in terms of religious referents, chiefly in the form of synagogue texts – and occasionally liturgical melodies – transposed for voice and piano or integrated into biblically themed works such as his “By the Rivers of Babylon” (1859).⁹

The notion of re-harmonizing Jewish and Christian sonorities took a much different form in the music of nineteenth-century Jewish cantor-composers, who reshaped the Jewish liturgical repertoire to reflect the contemporary norms of Romantic style and Christian liturgical music. Chief among these was Salomon Sulzer (1804–90), “father of the modern cantorate,” whose career as a prominent cantor in Vienna stretched from the 1820s to 1880s. In his compendium Schir Zion, he created an enormously influential style of modern liturgy that amounted to a wholesale aesthetic reformation of Jewish synagogue music.¹⁰ Sulzer trimmed Jewish liturgical music of its perceived Oriental characteristics, such as melisma, extended recitative, modal character, and flowing meter, in favor of a style that conformed more to Christian church hymnody. He adopted fixed meters, four-part choral singing, and conventional European tonal practices for the arrangements of Hebrew-language prayers. His talents as a composer and cantorial soloist earned the respect, praise, and curiosity of the leading critics and composers of his day. Outside the synagogue, Sulzer's career also epitomized the other growing artistic links between central European cantors and the world of modern classical music. He was a well-respected vocal interpreter of Schubert's Lieder and served as professor at the Imperial Conservatory in Vienna.¹¹

Sulzer's pattern of liturgical reform spread gradually throughout European Jewish synagogue music, particularly in larger urban communities identified with the nascent Jewish Reform religious movement. Across England, France, and the Netherlands, cantors introduced four-part chorale-style singing, organ instrumental accompaniment, and standard Western harmonic practices.¹² Under the leadership of Cantor Samuel Naumbourg (1817–80), the Paris synagogue became a second major center for liturgical composition, and the composers Alkan, Halévy, and Meyerbeer all contributed choral settings of liturgical texts for use there.¹³ So too in Berlin, where Louis Lewandowski (1821–94) emerged as a formidable choral composer, putting his German conservatory training to use in building a repertoire of psalm settings that became staples of synagogue music in his generation and long after.¹⁴ The transformation of oral traditions into textualized repertoires through musical notation had a profound effect on the self-understanding of Jewish communities in nineteenth-century Europe. This was equally true of the Sephardic religious communities of France, Germany, and Austria, which followed the same pattern of assimilating orally based liturgical traditions into the stylistic conventions of the surrounding European musical culture.¹⁵

Alongside this Jewish recasting of cantorial music in terms of modern European aesthetics, nineteenth-century Christian composers turned to the Jewish musical corpus in search of source material with which to color biblical-themed works and other exotic Oriental fantasies. This phenomenon appeared most strikingly in the Russian Empire, where from Mikhail Glinka onwards, composers transcribed contemporary Jewish melodies for use in their compositions, frequently titled “Hebrew Melody” or “Hebrew Song.” These typically elegiac compositions by the likes of Rimskii-Korsakov, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and others evoked a lost Hebraic melos from antiquity sometimes contrasted implicitly with a calcified or degenerated present-day Jewish folklore.¹⁶ Though this philo-Semitic trend of Jewish folkloric melodies set by Christian composers continued on in later compositions such as “Chanson hébraïque” (1910) and “Deux mélodies hébraïques” (1914) by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), a key turning point emerged with the 1881 “Kol Nidrei” of Max Bruch (1838–1920). Bruch's setting of the traditional Yom Kippur prayer for cello and piano, inspired by his musical contacts with the Jewish communities of Berlin and Liverpool, achieved tremendous popularity as a concert piece and aural symbol of Jewish identity (so much so that Bruch, a German Protestant, has often been erroneously claimed as a Jew by birth). Its continued presence in the classical repertoire speaks to its potent appeal as a document of Jewish liturgical tradition refashioned as modern art music.

Even as Romanticism prompted composers to experiment with elements of Jewish musical folklore, the idea of a distinctively Jewish strain of modern art music did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century. It would take two further developments for the notion of “Jewish music” to emerge in European discourse: the rise of Jewish ethnic nationalism and a hardening of the racial lines in European thought. A decisive factor in this process was the appearance of the explosive modern anti-Semitic musical myth propagated by Richard Wagner. In his 1850 essay “Das Judentum in der Musik,” published anonymously in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, then again under his own name in 1869, Wagner presented a brutally racist diatribe against the alien Jewish presence in the world of European music and the other arts. For decades before Wagner's pamphlet the concentration of acculturated Jews in the classical music profession as both performers and composers – and the ambiguous relationship between composition and performance as ideational poles in the Romantic artistic imagination – had existed as a locus for anti-Jewish ideologies. So too did the medieval “music libel” of Jewish musicians as noise polluters of Christian harmony persist into the modern era.¹⁷ Wagner amplified these preexisting negative tropes, blending them with Romantic nationalism and modern racism to craft a new ideology of full-blown musical anti-Semitism.¹⁸ For Wagner, Jewish racial identity was inescapable in music. Further, since diasporic Jews possessed no common national language or authentic folk culture of their own from which to generate original art, they were doomed to be imitators, manipulators, and defilers of German, French, and other European music. He thus condemned Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer for their Judaic limitations as composers and mocked the idea of Jewish music.

Wagner's essay was not the only such ideological expression regarding the links between Jews and art music to appear at mid-century. Franz Liszt's The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary (1859; rev. ed. 1881), though not entirely written by the composer himself, presented a similar tranche of anti-Semitic stereotypes.¹⁹ In Russia, England, and elsewhere, influential writers also proffered elaborated theories about Jewish musical talent.²⁰ Popular English novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby (1844), Elizabeth Sara Sheppard's Charles Auchester (1849), and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) further engrained the cliché of an innate Jewish musical talent in the Western imagination – but with a significant difference.²¹ Almost a mirror image of their anti-Semitic counterparts, these philo-Semitic theories often ascribed to Jewish composers a discernible Semitic character reflected in their compositions by linearity, ornamentation, or lyricism and a conversant weakness in terms of larger musical thematism.²² Yet for all the parallels and overlap between the various nineteenth-century anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic theories of Jewish musicality, Wagner's essay stood out for its lasting influence on European musical thought. Buoyed by Wagner's towering reputation as a composer and cultural figure, “Das Judentum in der Musik” cast a long shadow over the critical reputations and public receptions of multiple generations of European Jewish composers, notably Mendelssohn and Mahler.²³ It also distinctly impacted the ways later Jewish composers attempting to forge a national style of Jewish art music understood their own relationship to the Western tradition.²⁴

Aural emancipations: Renaissance and Modernisms, 1900–1917

After 1900, a new generation of Jewish musicians came of age in European musical life. With urbanization and secularization making ever-faster inroads into central and eastern Europe, the pattern of Jewish demographic overrepresentation in classical music only intensified. Jewish residents of Vienna were three times more likely to study music than non-Jews, while Russian Jews constituted roughly one out of every three conservatory-trained musicians in their country. Indeed, the conservatories of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, Odessa, and other European cities became extraordinary breeding grounds for a generation of Jewish violinists, pianists, and other musicians who would predominate in the concert world of the twentieth century.²⁵ Of particular note is the impressive roster of violin prodigies that emerged from the St. Petersburg Conservatory studio of Hungarian-born violinist and master pedagogue Leopold Auer (1845–1930), himself a student of Joachim. Auer's pupils included the likes of virtuosos Jascha Heifetz (1901–87), Mischa Elman (1891–1967), Nathan Milstein (1903–92), and Efrem Zimbalist (1890–1985). The careers of European Jewish virtuosos would in many respects parallel those of their nineteenth-century forebears. Highly mobile individuals in an age of war, revolution, and emigration, these musical celebrities came to be heralded as the international torchbearers for the cultural prestige of classical music and objects of affection for European audiences nostalgic for the vanishing world of the nineteenth century. So too would Jews continue to play a significant role in Western art music as publishers, critics, and scholars.²⁶

The post-1900 generation of European Jewish composers was the first to appear on the historical stage with an intensely ideological, self-conscious determination to break with the past. This revolutionary ethos took two distinct forms. In the Russian Empire, an explicitly Jewish national renaissance movement centered in the Russian Empire rejected the putative absorption of Jewish musicians into a universalist European culture. These Jewish nationalist composers called for the renewal of Jewish national identity through freeing a previously silenced Jewish voice within Western music. At virtually the same moment, a looser central European avant-garde school appeared, comprised of composers who aspired to emancipate music itself from the aesthetic conventions of nineteenth-century realism in favor of an abstract modernism. What linked these two cohorts – along with those Jewish composers who bucked both trends – was an acute awareness of the passage of European Jewry into a new historical era. In response to tremendous societal change, modernist nationalists and cosmopolitan modernists alike called for an immediate radical reconstruction of Jewish identity in music. Yet both found that the long shadows of the Jewish past continued to define Jewish identity in Western music.

In the Russian Empire, a number of conservatory-trained Jewish composers experimented with Jewish musical ethnography in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Inspired by the new spirit of secular Jewish nationalism, emboldened by the Russian, Finnish, and other national schools, and encouraged by Russian musical mentors such as Rimskii-Korsakov, Balakirev, and the critic Vladimir Stasov, these composers began to collect and arrange Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs, traditional liturgical selections, Hasidic spiritual chants, and klezmer dance tunes.²⁷ The key figure in this process was the Russian critic, ethnographer, and composer Joel (Iulii Dmitrevich) Engel (1868–1927). A Moscow Conservatory graduate, Engel presented a concert of Yiddish folk song arrangements in 1900 in Moscow that subsequently came to be regarded by many as the first-ever concert of Jewish art music. With the stature that came as one of Russia's leading music critics, Engel went on to advocate a Jewish national movement in classical music. He also published several influential song collections, and pioneered the use of early sound recording technology to document shtetl musical traditions in situ.²⁸

Engel was joined in his efforts by a group of young composers, among them Mikhail Gnesin (1883–1957), Solomon Rosowsky (1878–1962), Lazare Saminsky (1882–1959), and Moyshe Milner (1886–1953), who had all met in Rimskii-Korsakov's composition class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1908, these St. Petersburg musicians launched the Society for Jewish Folk Music (Obshchestvo evreiskoi narodnoi muzyki). The new organization pursued a campaign on multiple fronts to encourage explicitly Jewish art music composition, to promote Jewish cultural nationalism among Russian Jewish conservatory musicians, and to define through research and polemical debate the legitimate paternity and national contours of Jewish music. Engel was named the organization's first honorary member, and in 1913 he opened a branch in Moscow.²⁹

In the decade after 1908, the Society for Jewish Folk Music produced nearly 1,000 concerts across Russia and eastern Europe, launched branches in many cities, and issued a very popular songbook for schools and homes. Most crucially, they published a number of compositions by multiple composers that used Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs and klezmer instrumental dance melodies in vocal arrangements and small chamber music formats. Many of these early compositions reflected the tenets of Russian Romanticism and common-practice harmonies. The Russian influence could also be detected in performance practices and other extra-musical referents that signaled Jewish music to be simultaneously a recovered Jewish national voice, an enriching contribution to European culture, and a coveted object of Russian imperial patrimony. Building on Russian Orientalism and European antiquarianism, the Russian Jewish School also pioneered new techniques of Jewish auto-exoticism. Composers such as Engel, Ephraim Shkliar, Rosowsky, and Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) pioneered a genre of musical miniatures that sought to preserve the folkloric qualities of ethnographically sourced melodies in the lead instrumental voices with modern harmonic accompaniments and novel instrumentations.³⁰ Just as in other spheres of modern Jewish culture, many composers also imbibed the influence of pan-European modernism and French Impressionism. Composers such as Joseph Achron (1886–1943), Gnesin, and Alexander Krein (1883–1951) married the chromaticist experiments, intense tonal lyricism, and extended harmonies of modernist composers like Scriabin and Debussy to Jewish scales and intonational gestures.³¹ They also moved easily back and forth between the larger European artistic milieu and the world of modern Jewish culture. It was not uncommon for these composers to set both Russian Symbolist poetry and modern Hebrew and Yiddish lyrics to music. They thus positioned Jewish art music simultaneously as one genre within a larger universe of Jewish cultural expression and as a stream within modern Russian and European art music.

The young Jewish composers of late Tsarist Russia balanced an attraction to the new universalist aesthetics of modernist abstraction with a particularistic commitment to representing Jewish identity in music. A similar phenomenon appeared in the Sephardic musical realm in the form of the Alexandrian-born Turkish-Jewish composer Alberto Hemsi, who collected and arranged Sephardic Jewish song texts and melodies in his landmark collection Coplas Sefardies (1932–73). By contrast, the central European Jewish exponents of modernism dispensed with all Romantic folklorism and realism alike in favor of a new avant-garde ideology of tonal experimentation and formal abstraction. In the eyes of composers such as Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), modern art demanded that artists transcend ethnic or religious parochialisms. Yet this utopian goal proved difficult to achieve in practice.

Born in the Austrian Bohemian hinterlands, Mahler rose to become arguably the leading conductor and symphonist of the fin-de-siècle. As a composer, he drew acclaim for his music's psychological intensity, ruminative beauty, and tonal complexity. Yet he also faced a series of devastating crises in his personal life, including illness and infidelity. He additionally possessed a vexed identity as an ambivalent convert to Christianity and an ongoing target of anti-Semitism. His aching sense of inner conflict, emotional displacement, and powerful longing for transcendence permeated his deeply lyrical, expressionist style. Scholars have differed about the presence of explicitly Jewish influences in his brooding modernist textures. Yet there is little disagreement that Mahler's life and art epitomized the mixture of triumph and tragedy, inclusion and exclusion that characterized the larger experience of generations of Jews in the fin-de-siècle world of European classical music.³² He summed up his own fate with his famous remark: “I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”

Similarly, Schoenberg launched a musical revolution over the course of 1908 and 1909 with works that stretched tonality outwards in pursuit of what he termed the “emancipation of dissonance.” An Austrian Jew who converted to German Lutheranism, Schoenberg rejected realism for extreme chromaticism, unconventional rhythms, and eventually, the serialist approach of tone-rows. Paradoxically, Schoenberg extolled his anti-parochial aesthetic universalism as a German cultural achievement. This complicated utopianism represented a dialectical response to the dilemmas of Jewishness in art music. Yet it did not prevent European anti-Semitic ideologues from collapsing Jewishness and modernism into a single essentialist view of Jews as arch-modernists when it came to music. This anti-Semitic attack on modernism grew even stronger after the rise of Nazism. This prompted Schoenberg to publicly renounce his Germanism and Christianity and formally re-embrace Jewish religion, politics, and eventually musical thematics in his own idiosyncratic way.³³

The Jewish currents of nationalism and modernism were never completely sealed off from one another. A case in point is the Swiss Jewish composer Ernest Bloch (1890–1959). Bloch composed his first Jewish-themed works shortly before World War I. He soon attracted international fame. Indeed, to many Western observers, Bloch stood out as the “first Jewish composer.” Yet in contrast to the Russian Jewish composers, he opted not to draw directly on Jewish folkloric material in most of his compositions. In iconic works such as his Schelomo Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1914/1915), he avoided quotation from Jewish liturgical or folkloric music. Instead he spoke of himself as a composer whose Jewish essence simply bubbled up, flowing organically into his works. In this scheme of self-racialization or auto-exoticization, Bloch imagined his own “Jewish soul” to be an inescapable and defining element of his work. In works such as his Piano Quintet (1921–3), which employed a complex hybrid of expressionism and neoclassicism, avoiding any explicit Jewish quotations or musical markers, the quarter-tone intervals and Jewish scalar intervals gestured obliquely towards an East European Jewish melody. At times Bloch encouraged a Jewish reading of his work, while at other moments he bristled at this artificial demarcation of his music as Jewish and himself as a “Jewish composer.” This ambiguity points to both the possibilities and the perils of modernism for Jewish art music in the World War I era.³⁴

Other variations on Bloch's racialized Jewish modernism echoed across the Jewish musical world in important ways during the 1910s. In the Russian Empire, composer Lazare Saminsky denounced the “assimilated” Jewish composers who avoided their racial destiny. He urged his fellow Jewish composers to employ only purely Jewish liturgical melodies with an authentic biblical paternity instead of modern Yiddish melodies borrowed from surrounding non-Jewish cultures of eastern Europe.³⁵ The Zionist music critic Max Brod (1884–1968) argued influentially that Mahler's music must be understood in terms of the composer's Hasidic soul. In Ottoman Palestine, Russian-born musicologist and pedagogue Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938) conducted a massive scholarly project to collect the true specimens of Hebrew music – ancient melodies uncorrupted by millennia of exposure to the diaspora – primarily from the “Oriental” sections of the Jewish nation, those Jewish communities in the Arab Middle East. He articulated the concept of a musical Hebrewism – an ideological rejection of exilic Western culture for a reborn Hebrew aesthetic based on authentic elements indigenous to the Middle East. In polemical writings in Hebrew, German, and English, Idelsohn called for a global racial awakening among Jewish composers. Though few responded directly to his manifestos, his ideas still cast a long shadow over the fields of Israeli and diasporic Jewish art music for decades to come. Idelsohn's massive ten-volume Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies became a chief source of motivic material and artistic inspiration for Jewish composers of modern Israeli, European, and American Jewish art music.³⁶

Revolutionary echoes: affirmations and ambiguities, 1917–1925

The traumas of World War I and post-war revolutions had an explosive impact on Jewish art music. The displacement of individual musicians led to a collapse of many large-scale cultural projects, particularly in the Russian context. Yet the waves of emigration and resettlement also brought Jewish art music to new corners of the globe. So too did it lead to new attempts to institutionalize and propagate compositional efforts and novel forms of artistic collaboration. As a result, the period from 1915 to 1925 saw a great rise in the global profile of Jewish art music combined with increasing political pressures and ideological conflicts over its meaning.

For the Russian Jewish composers associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, the events of 1917 unleashed a tumultuous creative period. Emboldened by the Balfour Declaration's salutary effect on Zionism and early encouragement from Bolshevik revolutionary leaders, composers such as Engel, Krein, and Gnesin threw themselves into a new phase of activity. Socialist political themes commingled with settings of modern Hebrew poetry and modernist scores for the experimental Yiddish theater studios of Moscow and Petrograd. A new burst of chromaticist and harmonic abstraction in the first Jewish-themed piano sonatas and symphonic works by Krein and Gnesin signified a striking convergence between Russian revolutionary avant-garde, Jewish musical nationalism, and European modernism as a whole. Works such as Gnesin's 1919 Symphonic Fantasia à la Juif and Krein's First Symphony (1921) also signified a trend of expanding musical forms. By the mid-1920s, Jewish symphonic works were commonly found on the programs of Soviet orchestral concerts as well as in Vienna, Berlin, and New York.

Jewish popular composers in the Yiddish theaters of eastern Europe, London, and New York had long experimented with light operetta forms, mixing liturgical motifs with Yiddish folk songs and Wagner and Verdi arias to form a musical pastiche. The 1910s and 1920s witnessed a flurry of unsuccessful attempts to compose the first full-fledged Jewish national opera. These included London cantor-composer Samuel Alman's Yiddish-language King Ahaz (1912); Gnesin's unfinished Hebrew-language work Abram's Youth (1923), begun while he was living near Jerusalem; Milner's Yiddish-language opera The Heavens are Burning (1923), briefly premiered in Leningrad; Idelsohn's never-performed Hebrew-language Jephta (1921); and Jacob Weinberg's 1925 Hebrew-language work He-ḥalutz (The Pioneers), composed in Jerusalem shortly before the Odessa-born musician's departure for the United States.

No less impactful than war, revolution, and migration on Jewish art music was the rise of new technologies of music publishing and recorded sound. The first commercial recordings of Yiddish and Hebrew art songs began to appear in the Russian Empire and the United States in the late 1910s, along with an important early recording of Joseph Achron's “Hebrew Melody,” issued in 1917 by Jascha Heifetz. International music publishing earned the works of Jewish composers new audiences as reprint series and new editions carried the music across the world, inspiring other publishing initiatives in Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere.³⁷ These publishing efforts were hallmarks of a new phase of the institutionalization of Jewish art music prompted by the consolidation of the Soviet Bolshevik state and the boost in fortunes of the international Zionist movement. The Society for Jewish Folk Music was reorganized in 1923 in Moscow as the Society for Jewish Music. Parallel organizations appeared in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and eventually New York and Jerusalem.³⁸ In Riga, Vilnius, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, music conservatories were started to train Jewish concert musicians.

In central Europe, the modernist avant-garde began to cross paths directly with the Jewish musical movement. The Russian-born cellist Joachim Stuchevsky (1891–1982), already a fierce proponent of Jewish art music based on the klezmer repertoire of Jewish eastern Europe, launched the Verein zur Förderung jüdischer Musik in Vienna. At the same time, he served as first cellist of the Kolisch Quartet, where he befriended Schoenberg and performed the premieres of path-breaking modernist works by Berg and others. The Berlin-born Erich Walter Sternberg (1891–1974) wrote his first String Quartet (1924) in an Expressionist style with shades of Hindemith and Schoenberg. Yet he also incorporated a Yiddish popular song and the Shema prayer into the work. Similar cross-pollinations reflected a new interest in Jewish themes among modernists elsewhere in western Europe and the United States. In France, the bitonality of Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) included Jewish musical settings beginning with his 1916 Poèmes juives. The Russian-born Polish-French Jewish composer Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986) achieved renown for his mixture of neoclassicism with modernism, and Polish and Jewish folk influences, as evidenced by his Rapsodie hébraïque for orchestra (1933). In the United States, young Russian-born composers such as Lazar Weiner (1897–1982) and Solomon Golub (1887–1952) continued the development of a new genre of Yiddish art songs. In 1919 the Zimro Ensemble formed in revolutionary Petrograd by clarinetist Simeon Bellison (1881–1953) arrived in New York City after a round-the-world tour to raise funds for a Jewish national conservatory in Palestine. Their Carnegie Hall debut inspired Serge Prokofiev to compose his “Overture on Hebrew Themes” (1919).

By the mid-1920s, Jewish art music seemed to be on the verge of a new status in the larger world of classical music. Soviet and American critics wrote positively of a Jewish national school now emerging into view. In the United States, composers such as Saminsky, Bloch, Achron, and Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) pushed forward an artistic agenda that pledged equal parts loyalty to both European modernism and Jewish nationalism. In the Soviet Union, state support encouraged those composers who had remained. In central Europe, a larger Jewish cultural renaissance engulfed many composers and performers. British Palestine continued to attract a stream of Zionist immigrants and saw the launch of a music department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. For Jewish nationalist composers, the rise of a generation of international Jewish concert virtuosos who incorporated Jewish-themed compositions into their repertoires added to the prestige of their efforts to forge a distinct national school.

Yet the very factors that had stimulated the spread of Jewish musicians and musical ideas across the globe also contributed to their weakness and divergence. The politicization of musical life in the Soviet Union introduced discordant notes into the dialogue between avant-garde modernists, Bolshevik populists, and neo-nationalist Jewish composers. The success of Schoenberg, Bloch, and other more abstract modernists inspired envy and frustration among Russian Jewish composers committed to Romanticist folklorism. The currents of anti-Semitism in central Europe continued to unleash torrents of attack on the Jewish presence in European musical life. Opponents of modernism blamed Jews as the agents of Western music's atonal demise. In the Jewish community of Palestine, the economic stagnation and political violence frustrated attempts to build a substantial European-style concert music culture. A mass exodus of recently arrived Russian Jewish composers only added to the disruption in the development of a national musical culture.

These contradictory trends inspired mixed reactions among contemporary observers. By 1925, some critics and composers spoke of Jewish art music as a coherent nationalist project still in its infancy. They proclaimed the dawn of a new era in which de-assimilation would produce a new generation of creative artists and reborn sounds. Still others saw nationalism as a trap for Jewish composers. For them the enduring ambiguity of Jewish identity in Western music was an insurmountable fact. It was also a dangerous mark of difference in a classical musical world increasingly defined by racism and fascism. They feared the increasingly loud claims of anti-Semites about the political meaning of Jewish music in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Both anxiety and optimism, affirmation and ambiguity would continue to mark Jewish art music in the ensuing decades leading up to World War II and even afterwards. In the meantime, the larger intertwined fates of Jews and modern classical music would change dramatically in ways that few in 1925 could even imagine.

An overview of synagogue music reform

Rooted in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and Jewish emancipation, movements that had an important role in the development of modern Judaism, reform-minded Jews in central Europe began to develop ideas toward a modernized worship service in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In the course of these reforms, synagogue music underwent radical changes to make it appear more current and sophisticated to a public that was increasingly educated in Western art music, however not without the resistance of traditionalists. The ḥazzan was succeeded by what was now termed the “cantor.” With the shift in nomenclature came changes in the profession as well. The cantor possessed a thorough knowledge of liturgy like the ḥazzan, but had a more profound knowledge of music from outside the synagogue as well, and was able to write music and conduct, but his role throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would continuously change. Congregational singing in unison became a central part of Jewish worship; known in German under the umbrella term Synagogengesang (synagogue song), it emphasizes commonality and processes of exchange that are key elements of the reforms. Larger communities employed a (semi-)professional chorus (depending on the congregation, either mixed voices or male voices only, to avoid kol isha, the prohibition against women singing in the presence of men) and later sometimes hired instrumentalists as well.

Torah cantillation was only practiced in a very few Reform congregations in Germany, because the reformers believed that cantillation and biblical chant no longer had validity, as both were a “post-biblical invention.”¹ Besides, the Reform movement found cantillation to be antiquated and unattractive, and not in line with the current fashion of synagogue song. The elimination of selected elements from worship was common, indeed, as is also evident in the prayer Kol Nidre, which from the mid-nineteenth century onward was substituted by Psalm 130 or replaced with new texts that redigested its basic themes through key words and some original phrases, albeit using the traditional melody. If until the nineteenth century vocal music was mostly orally transmitted, from the early nineteenth century it began to be written down, thereby pressed into the “novel” scheme of notation and regular meter. Hence the improvisation inherent to ḥazzanut slowly vanished, replaced by rhythmically and structurally fixed melodies. Classical and Romantic styles began to infiltrate the structure and expression of synagogue music, raising questions concerning the authenticity of the new compositions. One of the most strident markers of a new musical identity, however, was the organ as accompaniment and solo instrument.

The orientation towards Western models of music had profound consequences for synagogue music, and became tied to new movements and branches of Judaism variously known also as Progressive, Reform, Liberal, or Neolog. The reform of synagogue music was a long and gradual process, bound up in complex ways with cultural, societal, and religious changes that originated in central Europe (in England it made little headway) and extended eastwards to Hungary, Bohemia, Galicia, Russia, and Poland, and spread to parts of North America, South America, and the Caribbean, and as far as South Africa.

The origins of reform in the early nineteenth century

During the first half of the nineteenth century musical reforms in Jewish worship services were limited to only a few synagogues in Germany. The banker Israel Jacobson (1769–1863), a vehement advocate of reforms who aimed at improving the social position of the Jews through education, opened schools in Seesen and Kassel in Westphalia. He also presided over the Royal Westphalian Consistory of the Israelites (1808–13), which in 1810 published an official pronouncement roughly equivalent to today's synagogue bylaws, which among other things details the role and function of music, promoting order and decorum.² For the Kassel school, Jacobson arranged well-known Protestant melodies to be sung to Hebrew texts, with the music set from right to left. The synagogue of his school for Jewish children at Seesen saw the installment of an organ in July 1810. The first reformed Jewish worship took place there with choral music following Protestant models.³ Upon moving to Berlin in 1815, Jacobson continued holding Reform services in his house with organ music and choral and congregational singing in German. These changes in synagogue music joined liturgical changes: German-language sermons filled the void of the abbreviated or omitted Torah readings. These services proved to be so popular that they continued in the much larger home of Jacob Herz Beer (1769–1825; father of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1791–1864).

After the Jewish community appealed to Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm III to close the private synagogue, on the grounds that the Reform schism was detrimental to the established rights of Judaism, the Prussian government banned the service, reasoning that prayer meetings outside of community synagogues were not allowed in accordance with existing regulations. Two years later, in December 1817, preacher Eduard Kley (1789–1867) brought the reforms from Berlin to Hamburg, where he co-founded the New Israelite Temple Association. Its synagogue, the First Temple on Brunnenstraße, was consecrated on October 18, 1818. The First Temple brought a completely new order to the worship service, including the official introduction of the sermon, German-language hymnal, and choral music provided by a boys’ choir with organ accompaniment for the first time in a synagogue open to the public (as opposed to school or private services); a loft had been specially built for the organ and choir. Cantillation practices, however, are not transmitted.

Moderate approaches: the cantor and his repertoire

Even as the First Temple on Brunnenstraße adopted the organ, early radical reforms elsewhere in Germany initially stalled due to the introduction of the instrument, which provoked controversies that will be discussed below, while other countries and communities embraced more moderate reforms. Beginning in 1819, the Viennese Jews began to demand modernization of their religious service. In addition to a preacher, a cantor, an organist, choir singers, and choirboys, the reformers wanted to build an attractive place for worship and to develop a prayer book, thus following the German radical reforms beginning in 1810. But the need both to work together with traditionalists and to deal with the opposition in the government forced the Viennese reformers to compromise on some of the earliest proposed reforms. In the end, no radical changes were introduced in Vienna, in contrast to Germany, due to protests from parts of the community. In fact, the Viennese Jewish community rejected the changes that were gaining popularity in Germany. Indeed, the most notable sign that Vienna's Jews compromised on their proposed reforms was the absence of the most radical marker of modernization, the organ. In 1821, some Jewish leaders had hinted that an organ should be used in Vienna, but resistance was fierce and the decision was not carried out. Still, in the following years, the formation of a high-quality musical program was of special concern to the community.

With the appointment of Salomon Sulzer (1804–90) as Obercantor of the newly consecrated Stadttempel in 1826, the Viennese reformers found their musical architect. Together with the preacher Isaac Noah Mannheimer (1793–1865), Sulzer developed what is commonly known as the Viennese rite. Although it differed from prevalent customs, the new service balanced traditional and modernizing elements while adhering to Jewish law. It was characterized by what the reformers viewed as greater decorum and aesthetically pleasing music. The new service included edifying sermons in German, while the Hebrew language and the traditional text of the prayers for the service were retained in a slightly abbreviated liturgy. Sulzer and Mannheimer also revised certain texts, regulated their Ashkenazic pronunciation, and adapted them to traditional prayer melodies. Sulzer preserved the custom of employing two assistants, but did not use them in the common style of the meshorerim (singers who traditionally serve to support the ḥazzan, accompanying him in parallel intervals and providing vocal interludes). He also worked with a chorus of Jewish boys and young adolescents.

Initially, Sulzer faced an almost insurmountable task. There was hardly any available liturgical repertoire that would have fit the new aesthetic and liturgical ideals. There was no immediate example on which to model his arrangements, perhaps with the exception of the work of the famous ḥazzan Israel Lovy (1773–1832) who at the time worked in Paris.⁴ Thus Sulzer had to create a suitable repertoire. He began by selecting traditional melodies of the Ashkenazic minhag (custom) and reinterpreted them by renouncing the coloraturas in the cantorial solo, and the imitation, absorption, or parody of late Baroque instrumental and operatic music, or dance melodies that had “pervaded” ḥazzanut. He adapted these melodies for solo and chorus in accordance with the harmonic rules of his time – later his application of major and minor tonality to melodies in original Jewish modes was heavily criticized.

Sulzer produced a significant written repertory of liturgical music, bringing into motion a musical development with a lasting effect on synagogues worldwide. By 1838, the first part of this endeavor was nearly finished: Schir Zion I. Although it initially existed only in autograph form, various communities in Europe were well aware of the collection in its early stages, among them Berlin, Copenhagen, and Stuttgart. By September 1840, the final version of Schir Zion I appeared in print, self-published by Sulzer, and perhaps motivated by increasing demand from congregations and ḥazzanim for his scores and the competing publication of the collection assembled by cantor and teacher Maier Kohn, Vollständiger Jahrgang von Terzett- und Chorgesängen der Synagoge in München.⁵

Schir Zion I consists of 159 cantorial solos and five- to eight-part choral pieces for Sabbath, the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, the High Holidays, Purim, and Tisha B'Av, as well as miscellaneous occasions such as bar mitzvahs and weddings. Sulzer included thirty-six traditional and eighty-six newly composed melodies. While Schir Zion displays a variety of musical practices and settings, Sulzer often treats the chorus as a nucleus of the congregation and the solos as an extension of the cantor's soloistic role in the service. The solos receive harmonic accompaniment through choral setting with a vocally light texture, while the congregational responses are rendered by the chorus, an approach criticized by Mannheimer, who wished for more congregational participation in the liturgy through singing. For the remaining thirty-seven numbers, Sulzer commissioned seven different composers, most of them not Jewish, among whom were Joseph Drechsler (1782–1852), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), and Ignaz, Ritter von Seyfried (1776–1841). As most of them were not familiar with the Hebrew language, Sulzer or another member of the Jewish community must have instructed them in Hebrew text declamation, or provided them with a text that indicated metrical patterns and also included translation. Unusual as it may seem, the contributions by non-Jewish composers do not stand alone and have immediate precedence in the Vollständiger Jahrgang von Terzett- und Chorgesängen der Synagoge in München.

Schir Zion I is one of the first attempts to balance reform and tradition in an artistically motivated edition of synagogue song. Sulzer remained rooted in the past by setting texts in Hebrew only, yet he departed by destroying the free rhythmic styles of ḥazzanut, forcing it into regular meter that does not fit Hebrew prosody. He provided clean-cut melodic lines without excessive coloratura, and refrained from repeating words, thus giving the meaning of the text the highest priority. Indeed, his sensible phrasing and word stress reveals his deep knowledge of the text. Yet he broke with the past when he began to harmonize these melodies largely according to the rules of Western tonality, thus compromising the modality of traditional ḥazzanut. Many of the settings relate to the choral style of the period, strongly influenced by contemporaneous secular and ecclesiastical styles. What remained traditionally Jewish was the stylized cantorial recitative and the responsorial alternation between cantor and choir or congregation.

As Schir Zion I became a great success in Europe and beyond, Sulzer conceived a second part, which finally appeared in print in 1865. It provided pieces for all occasions including special services, and offered some organ and harp accompaniment to serve as “a mediatory mission between the past and the future.”⁶ Only in the second volume of Schir Zion did the mature Sulzer approach traditional ḥazzanut for cantor and choir on a larger scale, as seen in many of the cantorial solos, but also in certain choral settings. To date, Schir Zion has gone through several editions.⁷ Numerous selections from the monumental Schir Zion were, and still are, sung throughout the occidental Jewish world, and served as models for countless Jewish composers.

Embracing moderate reform as a bridge from the old to the new, Sulzer made further proposals of a musical, liturgical, and pedagogical nature at the 1869 First Jewish Synod in Leipzig: the main pieces of the Hebrew service shall be sung in the same melody in all synagogues; multi-part choral singing and other musical performances are recommendable, but only where sufficient forces exist; singing in unison is preferable; instrumental accompaniment of synagogue song shall be adopted everywhere; secular music shall be excluded. The Kaddish prayer shall be spoken by the mourners only once and with the addition of a sentence that remembers the deceased relative; the weekly chapters of the Torah should be divided into multiple parts to be read across various days of the week; calling the community to the Torah, which should awake the word of God, shall be abolished. Sulzer also encouraged communities to teach Jewish pupils liturgical singing and proposed the establishment of schools for the training of cantors. Sulzer's proposals met with weak response, and only some of them gained acceptance. At the Second Jewish Synod in Augsburg, in 1871, his visions regarding the education of cantors were approved.⁸

Through his position as Obercantor, Sulzer also redefined the position of the ḥazzan, bringing concern and attention to issues of vocal technique. The new type of “ḥazzan” was schooled in traditional Jewish learning, Western music, music theory, and composition. Sulzer also introduced a declamatory style of singing, emphasizing the inner meaning of the liturgical word, in contrast to older ḥazzanut, which stressed the overall mood of the prayers or the particular liturgical occasion. It was Sulzer's style of singing that encouraged ḥazzanim from all over Europe to learn from him and ultimately disseminate his style far and wide. His students consisted of choirboys who worked closely with him and later became renowned cantors themselves, among them Alois Kaiser (1840–1908) and Moritz Goldstein (1840–1906), who later exerted significant influence on the Reform repertoires in the United States. Innumerable trained cantors came to Vienna to study with Sulzer, some at the request and expense of their own communities; the most famous of them were Moritz Deutsch of Breslau (1840–4), Louis Lewandowski (1821/23–94) and Abraham Jakob Lichtenstein of Berlin (1855), and Eduard Birnbaum of Königsberg (1874–7). Even eastern European cantors, particularly from the Odessa community, made their way to Vienna.

What is remarkable about the Sulzerian reforms is their reception and appeal. Sulzer's creative output became a model, and his compositions soon made their way across the ocean, becoming a standard part of the cantorial repertoire in many American synagogues. Even communities further east embraced some of the changes that took place in the West, most notably parts of Silesia, Cracow, Lemberg (Lviv), Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Odessa, and the St. Petersburg's Choral Synagogue. The extent to which the reforms were accepted differed from congregation to congregation. Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, was a major link between central and eastern Europe and thus served as a meeting point between Jewish cultures, enabling the community to easily absorb changes that took place in the West. The Jewish community in Odessa, one of the largest and most flourishing in all of Russia until the Bolshevik Revolution, was equally receptive to Western Jewish culture and was home to the first liberal synagogue in the Russian Empire, the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa, whose services had featured instrumental accompaniment since 1869. There is no doubt that Sulzer's approach to synagogue music was instrumental in creating a stylized and formal structure in these communities.

The organ and its controversies

As noted above, the reforms of the New Israelite Temple Association, and in particular the organ, set off fierce controversy within the community and beyond. The debates surrounding the introduction of the organ into the synagogue began with two responsa advocating it, Nogah ha-Ẓedek (Brightness of Righteousness, 1818) and Or Nogah (The Bright Light, 1818), and one rejecting it, Eleh Divrei ha-Berit (These are the Words of the Covenant, 1819). The Nogah ha-Ẓedek, published by the Austrian Talmudist and agent of the patrons of the First Temple Eliezer Liebermann, is a collection of the opinions of different European rabbis.⁹ Originally composed in response to inquiries by Jacob Herz Beer, the collection is controversial in many respects. For one, Liebermann exaggerated the importance of some rabbis; for another he only published those views that permitted the organ without setting too many conditions on its use.¹⁰ The advocates of the organ argued on the basis of Shulḥan Arukh (Oraḥ Ḥayyim 338:2 and 560:3) that organ playing by a non-Jew would be permitted for weddings or for the Sabbath. With regard to the general prohibition on music in the synagogue after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, they insisted that vocal music was allowed for religious purposes, and the reformers merely wished to extend this compromise to instrumental music. There was also a precedent for instrumental music in the synagogue from earlier periods, for example in Prague, Venice, Corfu, and Modena.¹¹ Finally, in Nogah ha-Ẓedek the organ is viewed as not explicitly Christian, since it is not played in all churches.

Following the Nogah ha-Ẓedek Liebermann wrote Or Nogah, in which he gives a lengthy and learned exposition of his own views in favor of changes, claiming that organ playing had been the Jewish custom in the Temple prior to the Christian adoption of the organ. In refutation of this book, the Hamburg rabbinate published the views of twenty-two prominent central European rabbis, Eleh Divrei ha-Berit. The collection also contained a declaration by the Hungarian rabbi and pioneer of religious reform, Aaron Chorin, revoking his former opinion published in Nogah ha-Ẓedek. The rabbis argued that playing a musical instrument is prohibited on Sabbaths and holy days, if only because it might need to be adjusted or repaired, which would constitute forbidden work (shevut). Other concerns raised in Eleh Divrei ha-Berit were the general prohibition of any music in the synagogue as a sign of mourning for the destruction of the Second Temple, and the prohibition against imitating the worship of other religions. The opponents of the organ saw in its introduction a Christianization of the service and, with that, a loss of Jewish tradition and identity.

It was probably because of these early debates that few other Jewish congregations in the subsequent three decades followed the Hamburg model. One exception could be found in the United States, in the originally Sephardic congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1824, some members of this congregation formed the Reform Society of Israelites to promote a shorter service, use of the vernacular, and choir and organ to beautify the service. But the older members of the congregation objected to the reforms. When, in 1841, the congregation – at this point no longer Sephardic in orientation – acquired an instrument (the first synagogue in the United States to do so) and used it at all liturgical celebrations, a dispute arose, and in 1844 the matter ended up in court. The decision ruled against the minority, who appealed the case; and the higher court affirmed the decision in 1846. The court held that being unable to decide the merits of this religious controversy, it must rely upon the judgment of the majority of the congregation. This affair led to the permanent breakup of the congregation.¹²

This example of an American congregation adopting the organ and other aspects of Reform was a rare case at this time. In other instances, efforts toward musical reform were only indirectly adopted at first. For example, at the Berlin synagogue on Heidereutergasse in 1837, violins were played at one service, and meshorerim imitated an orchestra. In this synagogue the installation of an organ was already being planned.¹³ Concrete plans only materialized several decades later, however, when the congregation expanded to the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße.

During the early 1840s, when the Bingen Jewish community announced its intention to acquire an organ, it triggered broader and more formal discussions at the Second Rabbinical Conference held in Frankfurt am Main, July 15–28, 1845, concerning whether the organ could be permitted in Jewish worship services and who should play it.¹⁴ These questions were once again debated under familiar banners of whether the organ was to be regarded as a neutral or a specifically Christian instrument, and whether it should be disallowed on the basis of the traditional mourning for the loss of the Second Temple.¹⁵ The discussion closed with the statement that the organ was a foreign element in the Jewish liturgy and thus not quite recommended. The conference nevertheless consented to its use on the grounds that it was needed to encourage the mood of devotion. It also established a new order of service in which the organ was to be integrated.

The unanimous decision at the Second Rabbinical Conference to permit organ playing in Jewish worship services – not only on weekdays but also on the Sabbath and holy days – did little to stop further debates. For example, later in 1845, a group of rabbis from Upper Silesia sent an address opposing the organ to Zacharias Frankel (1801–71), the chief rabbi at Dresden, who had seceded from the conference on the grounds that its reforms were too radical. Despite the continuing controversy, a number of Jewish congregations began to acquire a pipe or reed organ, among the earliest being in Koblenz and Heidelberg in 1845, Berlin in 1846 and 1848, Hildesheim in 1850, Mainz in 1853, the Berlin Reform Congregation in 1854, Mannheim and Alzey in 1855, and Leipzig in 1856.

The introduction of the organ in synagogues was debated in other European countries as well. In France, the Consistoire Centrale, in a ruling of May 1846, assented to the use of the organ in synagogues in the celebration of all “religious” and “national” occasions. Thereafter, the synagogues of Besançon, Lille, Lyons, Marseilles, Nancy, and Strasbourg acquired instruments. Austria-Hungary (with the exception of Vienna, at first), Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Sweden all followed, as did England and Switzerland. Though not every congregation used the organ on the Sabbath, it was at least played for weddings and other special occasions.

New debates began in 1861 with the plan for the construction of an organ in the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin. The arguments in this case are representative of discussions of the issue in individual communities. The congregation's board of directors collected various responses to the permissibility of the organ. Two responsa by local rabbis, Elkan Rosenstein and Michael Sachs, rejected and condemned the introduction of the organ. The Berlin congregation then solicited the advice of a larger committee that included the music directors Julius Stern and Louis Lewandowski, and five well-known rabbis who were all in favor of the organ.

Lewandowski's statement takes musical aspects into consideration for the first time, rather than depending on the premise of halakha (Jewish law). In his response, Gutachten betr. den Antrag wegen Bewilligung der Geldmittel zur Herstellung eines Orgelwerkes in der Neuen Synagoge (1862), Lewandowski states that there is no greater appropriate support for the newly introduced congregational and choral singing, because only the organ is in a position to “control and to lead large masses in large spaces.” Lewandowski's unambiguously positive attitude toward the organ as a synagogue instrument, and his strategically cunning arguments, may have had a strong influence on the decision to introduce it to the Berlin congregation.

The introduction of the organ in the Neue Synagoge at Oranienburger Straße in 1866 was the harbinger of a moment of change that became truly evident in June and July 1869, at the First Jewish Synod in Leipzig, headed by philosopher Moritz Lazarus and Rabbi Abraham Geiger. For the first time rabbis from all over Europe, the United States, and even the West Indies assembled to discuss the views and opinions of an “enlightened” liberal Judaism. The sole representative of the cantors and synagogue musicians in the synod was Sulzer, Obercantor at the Stadttempel in Vienna's Seitenstettengasse. According to the official report of the deliberations, in a well-received speech he argued in favor of the introduction of the organ.¹⁶ The synod accepted Sulzer's conclusions, and at the Second Jewish Synod in Augsburg, 1871, the decision was broadened with the addition that even Jews were permitted to play the organ on Sabbath and holy days. Sulzer's stance seems surprising considering his role in developing the so-called Viennese rite, a moderate revision of the liturgy and traditional synagogue music. The most notable sign that Vienna's Jews eschewed drastic reforms in their quest for modernity was the absence of an organ in their new synagogue. Although the Viennese Jews rejected the ideological changes that were gaining popularity in German-Jewish communities, the question of Reform was nevertheless constantly being renewed. Though blocked at first, the organ eventually made its way into Vienna's Turkish Temple¹⁷ and some Ashkenazic temples while the controversy continued.

Further repertoires

Sulzer's Schir Zion inspired other cantor-composers to enlarge and expand the repertoire for liberal or reformed synagogues. In 1843, the Synagogue de Nazareth in Paris hired Samuel Naumbourg (1817–80) in order to reorganize the worship service, which was in disarray after the death of Israel Lovy in 1832.¹⁸ Upon his appointment Naumbourg immediately began compiling an anthology of traditional liturgical songs. He also commissioned songs for soloists and mixed chorus from professional composers. Among the hundreds of settings published in the first two volumes of his Zemirot Yisrael of 1847 and the third volume published in 1865 under the subtitle Shirei Kodesh, there were two or three by Charles-Valentin Alkan, né Morhange, one by Meyerbeer, and several by Fromental Halévy (1799–1866). His 1874 anthology Aggudat Shirim posthumously included three more Halévy settings.¹⁹

When Sulzer's style no longer fit the ideals of the Berlin community, Louis Lewandowski, one of the first to serve a synagogue as music director, conceived new liturgical pieces. While Sulzer's Schir Zion, for example, reflected his own liturgical practice by linking choral music with virtuoso cantorial solos, Lewandowski limited himself to much simpler means, at least initially. In Kol Rinnah u-T'fillah of 1871, which predominantly features the cantorial recitatives Sulzer had neglected, Lewandowski based his compositions on the liturgical tradition of the Old Synagogue, specifically the eastern European melodies he learned from Berlin's cantor Abraham Lichtenstein. The choir parts were all written for two voices, and the ambitus, or vocal range, was relatively narrow. Thus smaller congregations could easily use his work as well. The artistic conditions at the Neue Synagoge on Berlin's Oranienburger Straße inspired Lewandowski to create an entirely new service with organ accompaniment in two parts, Toda W'simrah (1876/82), a collection of the entire liturgical cycle for four-part mixed choir, solo cantor, and organ ad libitum. In Toda W'simrah, Lewandowski reproduced the traditional melodies in a more classical form and gave greater attention to organ music.

Of the communities farther east, the Brodsky Synagogue is noteworthy due to its unique position as a satellite, musical and otherwise, of German-Jewish culture. There, David Nowakowsky (1848–1921) served from 1869 on as choral director and assistant to ḥazzan Nissan Blumenthal. Nowakowsky composed a considerable amount of music during his tenure, with an especially productive period around 1891, after Blumenthal's retirement. His successor Pinchas Minkowsky was more supportive of Nowakowsky's emerging style and included the repertoire in the religious service. Nowakowsky's output was vast; among his over 1200 works are oratorios, sacred chamber music, and choral works with instrumental accompaniment. Nowakowsky employed a variety of vocal combinations (with choral textures of five to eight voices predominating) and experimented with techniques of counterpoint and fugue. Only two volumes of his liturgical compositions were published during his lifetime, Schlussgebet für Jom-Kippur für Cantor Solo und gemischten Chor (1895) and Gebete und Gesänge zum Eingang des Sabbath für Cantor Solo und Chor, mit und ohne Orgelbegleitung (1901). For solo organ, Nowakowsky composed approximately 100 pieces of three basic types: music for the Jewish service, music for concert settings, and compositional exercises.²⁰

In the US, Alois Kaiser joined forces with two fellow immigrant cantors, Moritz Goldstein and Samuel Welsch (1835–1901), to compile, arrange, and edit a four-volume anthology of music for the American Synagogue, Zimrat Yah – Liturgic Songs, Consisting of Hebrew, English and German Psalms and Hymns, Systematically Arranged for the Jewish Rite with Organ Accompaniment (1873–86). Zimrat Yah contains compositions by all three compiler-editors, as well as a number of individual works from Sulzer, Naumbourg, and others – though often rearranged or re-adapted and given organ accompaniments where none existed in the original. Kaiser, who, beginning in 1866, served the congregation Oheib Shalom in Baltimore as cantor, established a solid role for the ḥazzan and served as president of the Society of American Cantors, which he founded in 1895. Commissioned by the Central Conference of American Rabbis (the rabbinical arm of the official Reform movement), Kaiser also created and edited a new unified hymnal, published in 1897, with adaptations from non-Jewish secular classical pieces by French, German, and English composers; some traditional tunes; and Kaiser's own contributions.²¹ The Union Hymnal went through several subsequent editions that reflect the changing aesthetics and tastes of American Reform; the third edition of 1932 by Abraham W. Binder (1895–1967), music director at the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in New York, leaned more toward traditional tunes.

Processes of change in synagogue music occurred throughout early modernity, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but never in ways as radical, visible, and lasting as in the nineteenth century. Several stages of reform took place simultaneously in different communities, ranging from extreme acculturation to assimilatory tendencies that preserved some traditions. Although the organ's use was not widespread and was embraced by some congregations that did not consider themselves reformed, it nonetheless became a symbol for the schism between Orthodox and Reform. Choral music of different styles and arrangements, however, became an integral part of many synagogues’ music.

By the early twentieth century the reform of synagogue music faced new challenges. If early reforms broke with older traditions by combining or replacing them with new and “foreign” elements, synagogue music in the subsequent century became increasingly pluralistic. While some communities adhered to the nineteenth-century repertoires, others embraced processes of a dissimilative nature by retrieving older traditions and integrating them into contemporary musical forms. The reasons that reformed music lost some importance in central Europe after 1945 are historic. In the US, however, social movements and folk music influenced Jewish liturgical music to grow in new directions, especially during the 1960s. An informal congregationally active mode of worship became popular, influenced to some extent by the worship style of Jewish summer camps with sing-alongs accompanied by guitar, in order to provide an ever-stronger sense of community.

Degrees of choice

The Weimar era in Germany (1918–33) witnessed unprecedented innovation in the arts, propelled by prominent musicians with varying degrees of Jewish connection and self-identification. Arguably the greatest pianist and cellist of the early twentieth century, Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) and Emanuel Feuermann (1902–42), respectively, taught in Berlin during the late 1920s. Bruno Walter (1876–1962), who was famous across Europe, conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Otto Klemperer (1885–1973) championed new music at Berlin's Kroll Opera. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Kurt Weill (1900–50) composed in accordance with their distinct thinking about music and its purposes.

Berlin was the epicenter of much of this musical activity. Indeed, “Weimar was Berlin. Berlin Weimar.”⁵ But in Berlin, German Jews could also choose to contribute to Jewish-only endeavors – part of what some have termed a Jewish Renaissance.⁶ During the 1920s, Jewish leaders in Berlin established the United Synagogue Choirs, the Society of the Friends of Jewish Music, and the Juwal Publishing Company for Jewish Music.⁷ And there were also those individuals who worked to bridge these two porous circles, entangling Jewish with more mainstream trends, through the reform of synagogue music and reevaluation of the Jewish prayer service.⁸ To this end, Heinrich Schalit (1886–1976), who took the position of music director and organist at the Munich synagogue in 1927, produced music both modern and anti-modern, building on tradition while responding to the groundbreaking compositional ideas of the time. Arno Nadel (1878–1943), composer, writer, and choir director of the Kottbusser Ufer Synagogue, saw Schoenberg's atonality as the perfect model in this respect. In 1923, he wrote, the “new music (especially Schoenberg!) attempts to free itself from the harmonic basis and to proceed in new contexts in ways similar to what we assumed of the ancient.”⁹ Weill and Weimar-era Zeitoper – opera that incorporated contemporary themes, popular music, and technology – served as similar inspiration for Hugo Adler (1894–1955), the chief cantor in Mannheim, in the composition of his Instructional Cantatas.¹⁰

But this musical invention was not without opposition. Anti-Semitism grew alongside Jewish involvement in cultural as well as commercial spheres. This hate was not of a single variety. For some, socioeconomic concerns inspired anti-Jewish attitudes.¹¹ For others, anti-Semitism was a cultural code. Jews were seen as a threat to social status, prestige, and cultural hegemony.¹² Even amid increasing anti-Semitism, though, German Jews enjoyed success and freedom, a freedom of choice. German Jews could participate in the era's general cultural creativity, embrace Jewish undertakings, or both, depending on their ideals.

German Jews enjoyed this tenuous freedom for slightly longer than Jews in Russia. James Loeffler, in this volume, has highlighted the contribution of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in St. Petersburg in 1908 (see Chapter 11). Government support of Jewish national culture, however, began to fade in the late 1920s. By 1931, the state exercised total control of Soviet cultural life. At this time, private organizations, such as the Society's Moscow branch, were officially dissolved.¹³ Individual artists were then subject to accusations of political crimes. Mikhail Gnesin (1883–1957), an original member of the Society, eventually lost close colleagues and even his own brother to arrest and execution. Gnesin himself sought a certain protection in composition centered on the folk music of other Soviet minorities, for a time shifting his musical agenda away from Jewish music.¹⁴

In the United States, on the other hand, attitudes toward Jewish identity in music were less overt. During the 1920s, a substantial block from within New York's International Composers’ Guild (ICG, 1921), which supported modern American composition, left to join the newly formed League of Composers (1923), including Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964), who grew up in America though he was Russian-born, and Lazare Saminsky (1882–1959), another former member of the Society in St. Petersburg. Though historical explanations of the split have focused on the first American performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, musicologist Rachel Mundy has recently brought to light the role of Jewishness in this rupture. She cites Virgil Thomson's reference to the new organization as “the League of Jewish Composers,” given the prominence of Jewish composers among the founding group.¹⁵ She ties this perception to a general xenophobia at the time. Though the US was heralded as the so-called land of immigrants, its government had actually sought to legislate against immigration in the early 1920s, particularly with the Immigration Act of 1924. Discourses surrounding anti-immigration in conjunction with a latent rhetoric of anti-Semitism played an implicit, if not explicit, role in American musical life during the 1920s and early 1930s. Aaron Copland (1900–90), who aligned with the League, was often depicted then as a “shrewd” commercial composer, recycling stereotypes of Jewish music making from the past.¹⁶ For many during and after the Nazi era, the United States would seem a haven from such discrimination. The reality was far more complex.

Negotiation in segregation

In 1933, the Weimar era's promise of choice ended for those termed Jewish. On January 30, Adolf Hitler was officially appointed chancellor. His party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or NSDAP, continued to grow in power during the early months of 1933. With the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, Hitler had the state of emergency he needed to demolish parliamentary government. One of the earliest results was the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service of April 7, 1933, passed six days after a boycott of Jewish businesses. By means of the Law's Aryan paragraph, “civil servants who are not of Aryan ancestry” were to be dismissed. This measure effectively prevented so-called non-Aryans – defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent – from holding positions in the public sphere, at state-run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls, and theaters.

Even before this legislation, there were high-profile acts to exclude “non-Aryan” musicians. On March 16, Bruno Walter arrived for rehearsal at the Gewandhaus only to find himself locked out. Fearing he might have similar problems at an upcoming concert in Berlin with the Philharmonic Orchestra, Walter requested police protection for the event. His request was denied and it was made clear that his safety was in jeopardy. Walter Funk, the secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, explained that the concert could only take place with an Aryan conductor. And it did, with Richard Strauss in Walter's place.¹⁷ Walter canceled his German engagements and eventually emigrated from Austria to the United States.

At this time, Schoenberg was similarly forced to resign from his position in Berlin at the Prussian Academy and leave Germany. Many composers, including Schoenberg, ended up in the United States, mostly in New York or Southern California: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Ernst Toch (1887–1964), Ernst Křenek (1900–91), Paul Dessau (1894–1979), and Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942), among others. Some, like Korngold and Weill, in many ways prospered there.¹⁸ Korngold enjoyed success composing for films in Hollywood while Weill thrived with work on Broadway. (Both have, however, paid a price in reception, with condemnations of their participation in “mass culture” and accusations of “selling out.”)¹⁹ Others, such as Schoenberg, who earned a formidable reputation as a teacher if not a composer, endured a notoriously contentious professional relationship with the University of California, Los Angeles, and the city of Los Angeles in general.²⁰ Landau recalls visiting him during those years: “No kindness or any form of hospita[lity] expected me at Schoenberg's house. I felt like an intruder into the sanctuary of an embittered man.”²¹ Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), a former student of Schoenberg, struggled for different reasons in the United States. He emigrated only to fall victim to a comparable climate of intolerance, encouraged by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts. In 1948, he decided to return to the newly formed German Democratic Republic.²²

Though I stress the United States, displaced Jews were hardly confined to a single destination; they found themselves exiled in and out of Germany, far and wide, including, in one example, Shanghai, as the ethnomusicologist Tang Yating has recorded. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Jewish refugees arrived as a third wave to the Chinese city and brought with them musical traditions from the Reform service that would prove influential.²³ Ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman identifies the publication of books of Jewish repertory in the 1930s as an essential means for emigrants from Germany to reestablish and reconstruct cultural activities. He specifically notes their importance in Israel as well as North and South America.²⁴

The Nazi regime generally banned the music left behind by composers termed Jewish as well as music by those deceased, such as Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). With some degree of error, given a certain measure of disorganization and competition within Nazi offices, anything that could be called Jewish music disappeared from “Aryan” concert venues. Accepted Germans were only allowed a glimpse into the rich world of forbidden music in 1938, at the propaganda exhibition “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music), presented in conjunction with the first “Reichsmusiktage” (Reich Music Days) in Düsseldorf by Hans Severus Ziegler, the director of the German National Theatre at Weimar. Modeled after Munich's “Degenerate Art” exhibit, the music exhibition reused the German term “Entartung,” which blends in definition a Darwinian sense of the decline of the species with an immoral quality of degeneration or pollution.²⁵ Emblematic of the event was its booklet cover, emblazoned with what Michael H. Kater has described as “a monkeylike Negro,” wearing the Star of David and playing the saxophone.²⁶ This image hinted, not so subtly, at Ernst Křenek's opera Jonny spielt auf! (Johnny Strikes Up), a 1927 hit that incorporated the composer's understanding of jazz. Nationalistic writers at the time despised jazz for its link with Africans or African-Americans and the United States, its sexual power, and the unsuitability of jazz rhythms for marching. When Nazi scientists concluded that Jews had large proportions of “negroid blood,” enemies of jazz also had enough justification to link jazz with the Jews, connecting in some ways the non-Jewish Křenek with Jewish music.²⁷

Much of the music featured in Düsseldorf did have one other platform in Germany, beyond the exhibition: the Jewish Culture League. This organization, in which Landau worked until her emigration, was the musical and theatrical home for Jewish musicians, actors, and audience members that had remained for a variety of reasons. Michael Haas compares the League to four Austrian musical groups: the Hakoah Orchestra, Jewish Song Society, Symphony Orchestra of the League of Jewish Austrian Front Soldiers, and Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music, which eventually led the repertoire programming of the other three ensembles, though it was established last, in 1927. These groups were created before the League in Germany, with ties to the goals of the St. Petersburg Society. As Haas notes, however, all five organizations performed a restricted repertoire. Until its dissolution in 1939, a year after Austria's Annexation, the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music also met in protected circles in private homes, which were likewise venues of choice and necessity in Germany.²⁸ But the League in Germany, given its direct cooperation from the start with the Nazi government – on matters large and small, from repertoire to venue and promotion – offers a unique lens onto notions of Jewish music at the time, as well as an extreme example of the mediation surrounding Jewish music during this time of tremendous stress.

Kurt Baumann (1907–83), a former director's assistant in Berlin, and Kurt Singer (1885–1944), a physician, musicologist, and the director of the Doctors’ Chorus in Berlin, developed the initial plan for the League, to be set in Berlin, in the early months of 1933.²⁹ The Nazi administrator Hans Hinkel supported the plan for several reasons: the League operated within the Nazi propaganda machine;³⁰ the League functioned as a mechanism of local social control; and, with the requirement that the League perform Jewish works – backed by the censorship of so-called Aryan composers – the League represented a means for the regime to end Jewish cultural appropriation and perceived degradation of the German masterworks.

The assimilated League leaders, however, hoped simply to offer unemployed Jewish musicians a means of income and a place of solace. They thus did not initially focus on a Jewish repertoire. To some, such a repertoire was, in fact, at odds with their sense of Germanness and threatened to turn their Jewish organization into a ghetto. From the very start, German Zionist writers demanded that the League confront the changing situation of Jews in Germany and the need for a repertoire connected to Jewishness. The conflict here, which the heterogeneous Jewish public only compounded, in part, explains why League leaders did not follow the example of other organizations dedicated to Jewish music, such as the St. Petersburg Society. The League lacked support for similar work but also the time. In September 1936, after three years of debate about their repertoire and Jewish music, Singer convened, at the Nazi regime's insistence, the Jewish Culture League Conference. Though League branches had been established in most major cities in Germany by this time, the conference took place in Berlin, given the centrality of the original branch in repertoire programming.

In his presentation at the conference on Jewish liturgical music and Jewish folk song, Arno Nadel insisted that “authentic Jewish music” (echte jüdische Musik) was Jewish folk song, but especially music for the synagogue.³¹ Synagogue music was privileged above Jewish folk song, in part, because the authenticity of Jewish folk music, in the absence of a common Jewish nation, was questionable. Karl Adler (1890–1973), a leader in the artistic community in Stuttgart,³² in his speech on Jewish choral music, also confronted this absence when he argued that the only logical criteria for Jewish choral music were “the religious [tradition], the language, the land” (das Religiöse, die Sprache, das Land).³³ In so doing, he further indexed a Zionist position that Jewish music could not exist outside Palestine, a position that could have effectively rendered impossible the League's immediate performance needs. But Joachim Prinz (1902–88), a Zionist rabbi, in his speech at the conference on Jewish theater, had offered a solution: he contended that without a common land, the League could only have a “national-pedagogical” function – building “a bridge from a denationalized Jewry, living remote from Jewish prime sources, to Jewish life.”³⁴ In other words, the League could not perform authentic Jewish art, but could encourage Jewish awareness, which could foster future Jewish cultural activities in Palestine. In his presentation, Adler did not advance the same conclusion. Though he restated Prinz's basis for such a conviction, he also explained that he could “feel something” in the creations of Jews³⁵ – an insinuation that implies a sweeping definition of Jewish music as the composition of Jewish composers.

Anneliese Landau's speech on Jewish art song reiterated this Zionist position that Jewish music did not yet exist. But she also offered a practical course of action by accepting all art songs created by composers with Jewish roots as Jewish music. She then betrayed both of these positions by suggesting a sliding scale of Jewishness, as she discussed the songs of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). She explained, “These songs have nothing to do with the Jewishness of their composers. They grow from the atmosphere of the country in which they were written.”³⁶ In contrast she listed composers such as Joel Engel (1868–1927), Heinrich Schalit, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), and Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), and explained that, within the twentieth-century art song tradition, these composers created Jewish Lieder “in complete consciousness by Jews for Jews” (im völligen Bewusstsein von Juden für Juden).³⁷

Hans Nathan (1910–89), a professor of musicology and music critic,³⁸ in his speech, similarly distinguished between the music of various Jewish composers through the organization of his speech in two parts: “Jewish orchestra and chamber music” and “General literature.” Under the category of “Jewish orchestra and chamber music,” he again recognized Bloch and Schalit. Under “general literature,” he discussed composers of Jewish origin such as Mendelssohn and Offenbach, who he did not believe displayed Jewish musical inclinations.³⁹ Of Mendelssohn, he stated simply that the composer was the “purest German classicist” (reinster deutscher Klassicist).⁴⁰

Neither Landau nor Nathan explained the grounds for their separate categorization of Jewish composers – why for example the music of Mendelssohn, the grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), was not seen as Jewish art at the time – and the Jewish Culture League Conference ended with no definitive criteria of Jewish music. What the League ultimately performed then was the result of compromise. And in practice, the League actually performed and adopted certain works by non-Jewish composers as though they were Jewish, including, for example, several Handelian oratorios based on Old Testament texts and Schubert's setting of Psalm 92 to the Hebrew text.⁴¹

As conditions worsened for Jews in Germany, League leaders shifted their attention from notions of a national repertoire to a repertoire of entertainment and diversion. The debate on Jewish music would have to continue or begin anew elsewhere – as the German Jewish composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), for one, would ensure with his lecture “What is Jewish Music?” on February 29, 1940, at the invitation of the Jewish Music Forum of the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Musical Culture in New York. In March 1939, Wolpe had given a talk to the same organization, which was then called the MAILAMM (an acronym for the Hebrew for America-Palestine Institute of Musical Sciences). The MAILAMM was founded in 1931 by Joseph Achron (1886–1943), Lazare Saminsky, Solomon Rosowsky (1878–1962), Jacob Weinberg (1879–1956), and Joseph Yasser (1893–1981), and had some ties to the World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, which existed between 1936–40.⁴² The group was reorganized and renamed the Jewish Music Forum in November 1939. In “What is Jewish Music?” Wolpe challenged those who even asked the title's question, accusing them of attempting to justify their status as Jewish composers. He then explored a tension between spontaneous and formulaic approaches to the development of national music, based in part on his experience in Palestine after his emigration from Germany.⁴³ The debate on Jewish music had thereby shifted in an evolving context. But, within the League, this debate represents a unique look at ideas of Jewish music under pressure. This pressure worked in unique ways on the level of the individual as well.

Shifting focus

Just as repertoire negotiations changed during the early years of the Third Reich, so too did the compositional program of individual composers. During the Holocaust, we see evidence of this evolution in internment and exile. The composer Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), for example, turned inward by composing according to a more personal musical aesthetic during the early 1940s, while imprisoned in Terezín, along with the composers Pavel Haas (1899–1944), Gideon Klein (1919–45), and Hans Krása (1899–1944), the latter of whom composed the children's opera Brundibár in 1938, performed forty-four times in internment. Showcasing its artistic activities, among other techniques, the Nazi regime used Terezín, renamed Theresienstadt, as a “show camp,” to deceive foreign visitors, including the Red Cross, by artificially staging a better life for prisoners. The Nazis took this strategy to the next level in the propaganda film centered in Terezín, Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City, 1944).⁴⁴

Born in the Czech Republic in 1898, Ullmann studied law at Vienna University. During his student days, however, he also enrolled in Schoenberg's composition seminar. After ending his career as a law student, he worked with Zemlinsky at the Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague. He went on to excel as a conductor and composer, incorporating into his compositions a multitude of styles and ideas – the atonality of Schoenberg and exploration of the fringes of functional tonal harmony. After he arrived in Terezín on September 8, 1942, however, he became increasingly aware of his Jewish identity and arranged Hebrew and Yiddish songs. He also wrote the one-act opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Composed to a libretto by the poet and fellow inmate Peter Kien, the work presents the evil Emperor Überall (a stand-in for Hitler) and his manipulation of Death. Ullmann made the connections between life and music explicit with the inclusion of various musical quotations, including the Nazi anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”⁴⁵ Complementing, in some ways, the strangely positive American reception of Terezín,⁴⁶ Death ultimately ends the rule of Überall himself – a triumph for all in art, if not life.

For our purposes, Ullmann's seven piano sonatas are perhaps the most instructive. Ullmann wrote the first four before his imprisonment. The composer described the first, of 1936, as follows: “The principal subjects in three tonalities…[but] what apparently is happening is the linking of the twelve tonalities and their related minor keys. It seems that I was always striving for a 12-tone system on a tonal basis, similar to the merging of major and minor keys.”⁴⁷ The following three sonatas, which were similarly complex, were dedicated, respectively, to Hans Büchenbucher, the president of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany at the time; the Hungarian pianist Juliette Arányi; and Alice Herz-Sommer, an active pianist in Czechoslovakia and Germany before the war. The fifth sonata was composed in Terezín. This work, dedicated to Ullmann's wife, is joyful and, unlike the earlier sonatas, achieves a new tonal clarity. Ullmann completed the final sonata, dated August 22, 1944, just a few weeks before he was sent to Auschwitz on October 16 and murdered. The piece, dedicated to his children, has an uncharacteristic amount of autobiographical allusions, including references to Czech and Slovak national songs, Ullmann's earlier work, and arguably the composer's Jewish heritage with a Hebrew folk song.⁴⁸

Another composer who seemed to respond to a new, radically altered existence was Rosebery d'Arguto (1890–1943). This Polish Jewish composer and choir director, born Martin Rosenberg, had changed his name professionally, effectively distancing himself from his Jewish roots. In 1939, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which supported diverse musical activities, including an orchestra (most of the larger camps did – Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz).⁴⁹ Though musicians in Terezín performed works by Jewish composers openly, Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918–82), an invaluable collector of music from Sachsenhausen, maintained that works by Jewish and Polish composers were smuggled into the orchestra's repertoire in Sachsenhausen.⁵⁰ While it seems unlikely that the authorities would have been unaware of this effort, Kulisiewicz's recollection points to differences between the musical activities in the various concentration camps and ghettos as well as the different functions of music therein – positive and negative.⁵¹ After all, there was no uniform Nazi organization of music during the final years of the Third Reich.

Before his transport to Auschwitz at the end of 1942, D'Arguto acted as a choir director in Sachsenhausen, continuing in some ways his previous work. For his group, he composed “Juedischer Todessang” (Jewish Death Song), based on an old Yiddish song “Tsen brider” (Ten Brothers), which recounts the death of all the brothers but one. Though d'Arguto died in Auschwitz, Kulisiewicz survived and later made d'Arguto's song central to his performance career.⁵² Musicologist Shirli Gilbert notes the significance of the song within d'Arguto's ouevre: “It is interesting that the experience of incarceration led someone like d'Arguto – a non-practicing Jew who had gone so far as to de-Judaize his name – to write an explicitly Jewish lament.”⁵³

An even more complicated example of personal response is Gnesin's Piano Trio, op. 63, “In Memory of Our Murdered Children” of 1943. Loeffler calls the piece, which was composed in Russia, the “earliest and certainly the most significant Soviet wartime composition about the Holocaust.”⁵⁴ But the Jewishness of “our murdered children” remains enigmatic. Gnesin may have been aware of the Nazi mass murder of Soviet Jews in the Ukraine, which was at the time entering the collective consciousness of Soviet society.⁵⁵ The titular children, however, must have also included Gnesin's own son, Fabi, who had recently died. Musically, Gnesin did not incorporate elements stereotypically associated with Jewishness, remaining true in some ways to his earlier move away from Jewish music. But he did quote a well-known Yiddish folk song “Amol iz geven a yidele” (There Once Was a Little Jew). Loeffler ultimately insists, in this work, “Gnesin encoded his Jewish suffering inside the Soviet war experience.”⁵⁶

Other composers in the 1930s and 1940s, in varying states of exile in the United States, confronted Jewishness and/or their Jewish roots, or reached for music as some form of personal response or constructed comment. In Chapter 16, Amy Lynn Wlodarski discusses Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), which, along with his Kol Nidre (1938), could be explored along these lines. Kurt Weill offers another case in point. America had always figured in Weill's compositional imagination. Though he could probably have remained in Paris, where he moved in 1933, he eventually relocated to the United States in 1935. Weill had considered himself German and was generally secular, and had even been critical of the Jewish diaspora in central Europe, and Germany especially.⁵⁷ Though Nazi persecution forced Weill to reflect upon his Jewish ancestry, he did not return to his family's religion, as Schoenberg did in 1933. He did, however, begin work on The Eternal Road, along with the dramatist Franz Werfel (1890–1945), the producer Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), and the American impresario Meyer Weisgal (1894–1977). All four men agreed in May 1934 that the work was to be “a musical biblical morality play to express the spiritual origin, the earliest mythical history and the eternal destiny of the Jewish people to whom they belong.”⁵⁸ The piece also in some ways mirrored the Jews’ situation during the early years of the Third Reich: at the start of the play, a rabbi warns his congregation that they are about to be expelled from the country they had long since called home. In the music, Weill was true to traditions of Hebrew cantillation in instructions for the rabbi's scriptural recitation, a compositional strategy absent from his previous work in Germany. The piece premiered in January 1937 at the Manhattan Opera House and lasted, according to the perhaps unreliable New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, until three o'clock in the morning.⁵⁹

Toward the end of his life, Weill also contributed to commemorations of the Holocaust.⁶⁰ A famous result, We Will Never Die, was a memorial to Hitler's Jewish victims, with music by Weill, staged in Madison Square Garden in March 1943. The climax was a recitation of the Mourner's Kaddish, in memory of the departed.⁶¹

The intention of composers with works pointing to the Holocaust or their own Jewish roots is rarely clear, complicated by an insurmountable distance between a composer's biography and his music. But composers at this time did respond in various ways to a rapidly changing context. This response was hardly passive or inevitable, but often an active choice. I will not recycle here clichés of resistance, which often pepper discussions of music during the Holocaust. Notions of resistance, after all, often serve contemporary agendas rather than accurate historical reconstruction.⁶² But the compositional decisions I have featured, at the same time, cannot support simplistic accounts of victimization. Like the debate on Jewish music in the League, composers’ compositional shifts at this time underscore variety, change, and contestation in music connected to Jewishness. Jewish art music, 1925–45, bears the burden of its horrific historical context while undermining the essential thinking on which so much of it was based.

Early formation of the music

The Yiddish theater and its offspring, the Yiddish-language film, flourished as modern urban entertainment genres in a short historic period, from the 1870s through the 1940s, declining sharply thereafter. It was a popular theater form that, like parallel non-Jewish media systems of its time, relied very heavily on music, alongside drama and comedy, to divert, instruct, and sometimes arouse a working-class audience. More so than many other audiences, Jews were often in a situation of extreme economic, social, and political pressure at a time of massive modernization that involved widespread emigration, immigration, and discrimination.

The historic tidal wave that struck this entertainment system doomed the enterprise: the end of mass immigration to the United States, wartime destruction of a shared transatlantic cultural space with Europe, the creation of the State of Israel as a shift of focus, and the widespread integration of North American Jewry into mainstream popular culture. It survives as remnants, nostalgic or ironic musical materials woven into new formats for successive generations of Jewish revivalists and non-Jewish cultural tourists attracted to the rich material of the golden age of Yiddish dramatic arts. A handful of songs, not reams of stilted dialogue or the performances of great actors and actresses, have endured, reappearing as part of “klezmer,” in Yiddish-language training programs, or in printed and online songbooks, reference works, and blogs. Reconstruction and pastiche versions of theatrical material began in the 1970s and continue to offer current audiences some sense of this rich tradition.

Like so many streams of modern Jewish life, music of the Yiddish theater and cinema needs to be seen in at least four dimensions: 1) as the organic outgrowth of pre- and early modern Jewish expressive culture; 2) as an adaptation of co-territorial European and American performing arts genres, practices, and materials; 3) as a multiply sited Yiddish-culture form that featured both wide transnational circulation and strong regional variation; and 4) as a product of the newly emerging media of modernity, from sheet music and sound recording to radio and motion pictures.

Taking the background first, it is common to say that Yiddish theater grew out of the purimshpil tradition, a once-a-year relaxation of rabbinic rules that allowed for a carnivalesque popular exposition of repressed parody and irreverence.¹ Door-to-door troupes demanded access to homes and handouts, in return for skits and songs nominally based on biblical stories, including the Esther theme of the Purim holiday. The plots featured cross-dressing, heavy-handed humor, and topical satire about issues and character types of the day under the cover of seasonal Jewish expression. But much more of Jewish life than the purimshpil was distinctively performative, even choreographed. Women's chanting of got fun avrom at twilight as the Sabbath departed,² the swinging of a chicken over a man's head while chanting a scriptural passage, in performance of the kapores ritual before Yom Kippur, the knocking on the window of the synagogue assistant chanting am koydesh to rouse men to prayer³ – these and many other dramatized embodiments of ritual obligations, all based on melodic intonation, were precursors of more formal stagings. Explicit and self-consciously theatrical songs and satire were the specialty of the badkhn, a master of ceremonies at weddings, who was in league with hereditary instrumentalists, klezmer musicians, to set the mood for the ritualized celebration that was a major set piece of personal transition and communal solidarity. The linkage between the theatricality of everyday Jewish life and the evolution of modern forms of drama and cinema is not arbitrary. Plays, and eventually movies, continually drew on this wellspring of well-known gestures and sounds to create a flow of credibility and emotion between the creators and receivers of popular theater.

As the eastern European Jews grew ever more urbanized, their ears opened to the emerging soundscapes around them. The increased regional mobility offered by rail travel and the transatlantic passage of populations allowed for the development of new tastes and the influence of a whole range of musical inputs. The wandering players collectively called the broder-zinger (named for the crossroads city of Brod) had their ears open. Opera, but more particularly its younger sister operetta, infiltrated the cities and towns in various national forms. As the birth of the Yiddish theater is usually located in Moldavia, it is worth noting the figure of Ciprian Porumbescu (1853–83), whose ears and ambitions parallel those of the founders of the Jewish system he influenced: during his studies at the Vienna Conservatory, Porumbescu was inspired by the new operettas of composers including Strauss and Offenbach to adopt modern techniques of the genre in the telling of stories that derived from Romanian culture and history. Here we see the ways that mainstream European performing arts trickled out to the East through locally available intermediaries that Jewish musicians – singers, actors, composers – could use as models. The founders of Yiddish theater and its music absorbed all these influences, as is evident from their memoirs. Above all, Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), the “father of the Yiddish theater,” aspired to building a respectable “national” drama in Yiddish along Porumbescu's lines, even as he assimilated the wildly eclectic singing and theatrical resources of his ragtag group of actors and musicians. Boris Thomashefsky, the domineering actor-producer of New York, also sang, as did so many actors of the early Yiddish stage, the line between the two skills being thin at best. In his memoir, he relates how he began in boyhood as a cantorial choirboy (meshoyrer), but was advised by the Italian music director of the Kiev Opera to do opera-house training. Another choirboy, Sigmund Mogulesco (1858–1914), who wrote some of the most important early songs while being famous for his comedic genius as “the Jewish Charlie Chaplin,” recalled his patchwork musical upbringing via Jewish sacred and non-Jewish mainstream entertainment. Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1951), the great professionalizer of Yiddish musical theater, tells of writing marches and waltzes for the provincial Russian military garrison in his hometown, a formative phase of his early career training.

The growth of city amusements such as wine cellars, beer gardens, and cabaret made it possible for newer ethnic formats to thrive. The birth of Yiddish theater is pegged at 1876 and located in a wine-garden in Iaşi, Moldavia, at a time when Jewish contractors had leisure and money while servicing the military during the Russo-Turkish war. Slowly these slapdash attempts at modern entertainment grew into more mainstream popular theater venues and genres. The musical tastes and impulses of the early founders transferred almost immediately from Romania and Ukraine to New York with the enormous wave of emigration of the 1880s, eventually spreading to all immigrant enclaves, from Capetown to Buenos Aires to Melbourne. Linking the older and more modern styles, as well as several continents, were the sense of improvisation, transience of material, eclecticism of sources, and blending of pathos, pratfalls, and sweet melodies.

In many ways, this profile of the Yiddish theater fits squarely into the cross-cultural heading “popular theater,” as Joel Schechter describes it: “Popular theatre forms lend themselves to adaptation, reinterpretation and changes of content because they originate in unwritten and improvised performance traditions.” And, tellingly, “popular theatre performers who depend on the audience for support also usually speak for the audience by voicing its social concerns.”⁴ As in many world popular theater traditions, from Europe to Africa to Asia, music provides a two-way channel flowing from performers to audiences and back as both sides share similar aesthetic, as well as cultural and political, values. This allows for considerable musical conservatism, but also a hunger for novelty, particularly in the conditions of urbanization and modernization that marked the Yiddish popular theater more than those of more rural forms of global entertainment.

Sources of the music

This music has been preserved in two formats: the commercial sheet music, produced mainly by publishers in the Lower East Side of New York, and the manuscript folios of music directors and theaters, now housed in archives (principally at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research). As definitive as the print versions look, they offer little performance information, being limited to simple voice and piano transcriptions (sometimes with added violin part) of what would have been played by a pit band. These music products formed a central node in a chain of marketing that started with sales of pianos on installments to immigrant families and music lessons given primarily to the girls of the household, and extended to gramophone players for cylinders and records, which offered leisure-time, domestic reinforcement of the repertoire, and ideals of live performance. Much of this material came directly from theater productions, as indicated on the packaging of the sheet music and recordings. Small-scale marketing synergy was part of the propagation of a coherent ethnic musical subculture.

The music directors’ handwritten versions varied markedly from these commercially standardized products. There were no full scores for conductors, so just individual instrumental parts and the occasional piano score survive. This gives some sense of orchestration, which varied considerably. Sets of parts, often signed out by particular theater companies, allow us to trace the flow of show folios from place to place on the Yiddish circuit. We learn that pieces might have been played in Krakow by possibly non-Jewish trumpeters of military bands, or that “this opera was performed nine times” (with dates given) in 1894 in Chicago. There is a good deal of scattered explicit and implicit data that sheds light on performance style, often in marginalia, and a considerable amount of non-Jewish music, ranging from orchestrated galops in Romania to “My Rainbow Coon” and “Ol’ Man River” in New York. One 1899 assemblage includes a very mixed bag of sources: Rossini, von Suppé, Russian and Romanian folk tunes, and “Chinese” and “Neiger” melodies.

Music of the early period

We have almost no record of the great variety of music churned out by the street musicians and vaudevillians of Yiddish-speaking cities. The only surviving text of an extended skit (“playlet,” in American vaudeville parlance) survives as the program of a show of 1895, preserved possibly because the libretto ends as an advertisement for a dry goods dealer who paid for the publication. Tsvishn indianer (Among the Indians), by I. Minikes, contains several song texts, but no tunes are specified. The songs are as satirical and burlesque as the plot, which finds two peddlers in what was then the western “Territories” of the Midwest, trying to sell suits to a canny farmer's wife, a black field hand, and American Indians.⁵

If this was the normal proletarian entertainment of the streets, it seems hard today to understand why the pejorative Yiddish term shund, or “trash,” was widely applied to the “legitimate” theater productions of the early era. Two types of writers had a stake in their scorn: high-minded critics, and dramatists who wanted to follow the trends of European modernist “art” theater by decreasing the comedy and music quotients of their plays. But popular theater audiences care little for “trash talk.” What interests them is the embodiment of their own values and aspirations, and also the fascination of a star system, a modern addition to earlier Jewish genres. A classic example is Boris Thomashefsky in Alexander; or, the Crown Prince of Jerusalem (1892),⁶ written by the indefatigable Joseph Lateiner (1853–1935; Lateiner penned some 200 shows), which set the tone for the passionate fandom and gossip that swirled around the leading singer-actors of the day in New York. Personality and lyrics even trumped musicality, as early recordings of songs from the Yiddish stage show. The actors who initiated the roles, and revealed their sketchy vocal training, sometimes recorded them. The associated sheet music from the heyday of the New York scene begins with modest covers that describe the contents. Line drawing, sometimes archetypally depicting imagined scenes of biblical times or the immigrant home, gave a general sense of context, but by 1910, sheet music covers were increasingly laid out to stress the centrality of the performers or the actual action of the play, in photographic form, to emphasize the lived experience of the theater world. The frequent depictions of the songs’ composers reveals how seriously they were taken as creators of beloved songs and associates of star actors and producers.

As indicated above, there are no standard performing editions of shund plays, so versions do not even agree on the cast of characters, let alone a fixed list of songs, not to speak of interpolations such as one instruction to include “Janke dudil [Yankee Doodle] in G.” The published sheet music folios with multi-song lineups similarly did not give a sense of the total musical layout of a standard show, and many popular vehicles never produced these spinoff products. As an example of how music worked scene by scene, Lateiner's Shloyme Gorgel (Shloyme the Throat), which came to New York at the beginning of the immigration wave (1882), is useful, since it is documented by a published version of the text that appeared in Warsaw in 1907. Lateiner's method included adaptation of non-Jewish plays (German, Romanian) by inserting songs, dances, and comedy to match the portrayal of the characters, who were given Jewish names and concerns. The music was similarly eclectic. Plays about musicians, like this one, about a down-and-out cantor, or another Lateiner vehicle, Dovids fidele (David's Fiddle, of 1897), about a klezmer-turned-classical violinist who bests his arrogant nouveau-riche brother, allowed authors to include a full range of music of many genres. They also created long-lasting stereotypes of musicians, cantors, and other social types, many of whom got to sing or dance – the matchmaker, the shlemil, the yeshiva student, the crude Americanized immigrant, the tough street kid, the sweatshop worker – that carried over into Jewish-American fiction, television, and even Broadway and Hollywood.

Despite the seemingly ramshackle method of play construction, the songs in the published version of Shloyme Gorgel are well placed to define characters, enhance narrative, and provide sentiment, all combining to produce an effect of yidishkayt, downhome Jewish folksiness. For example, Shloyme sings the first song in a courtroom for his daughter Hadassah, who has been unjustly imprisoned. This number achieves three dramatic goals: 1) Gorgel, previously depicted as a rambling drunkard, is shown to have a better nature, as well as impressive cantorial talent; 2) Hadassah recognizes her long-lost father through the music, offering the general move of sentimental recognition, a major trope of the European melodrama, to be located ethnically through musicality; 3) the situation of Jews in a Polish courtroom plays up the plight and strengths of yidishkayt more generally. These broader themes recur repeatedly, as in the love duet for the couple Solomon and Shifra, who sing about the hypocrisy of the world, or when Shloyme sings a solo satirizing wicked women, but ending by praising the virtuous, long-suffering working wife. This echoes the scriptural ideal wife “whose worth is above rubies,” so comes from the heart of Jewish tradition, but the line “such as you won't find among the rich folks” moves the model into a more modern, political space. These and other songs masterfully appeal to the proletarian urban audience of the Yiddish stage while at the same time supporting Jewish ideals and experiences. Meanwhile, knockabout comic songs, dances, and the almost obligatory closing wedding (a double one here) afford the opportunity to introduce ritual and entertainment genres from across the Yiddish world's spectrum of expressive culture, from prayers to klezmer, drunken ditties that satirize the nations and anti-Semites of Europe to appeals to God to ease the suffering of the Jews.⁷

While all stage music of the early era was eclectic, as mentioned above, some playwrights strove to “elevate” the discourse, beginning already in the 1880s with the historic music dramas of Abraham Goldfaden. In his seminal work Shulamis (c. 1880) and the important follow-up Bar Kochba, Goldfaden tried to show that even while drawing on Verdi and other non-Jewish sources, he could create dramas set in ancient times that expressed lofty sentiments and sustained the national, didactic tone of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) modernizing movement of which he was a part.⁸

Music of the second phase of Yiddish theater

Joseph Rumshinsky is credited with bringing a more professional training and tone to the Yiddish operetta. In his many works and very popular songs, as well as his training of actors, singers, choruses, and orchestras, he set benchmarks for the developments of the 1920s and 1930s in theater and film.⁹ His memoirs, a major source for understanding the evolution of Yiddish theater music, describe a moment that crystallizes his attitude towards the scene he was determined to change. He has encountered the great Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, the doyenne of Polish Yiddish drama: “Madame Kaminska…gave me some music from the opera Shulamis. It was on torn scraps of paper, with stains and erasures. I found it very upsetting.”¹⁰ Nevertheless, it is not easy reconstructing Rumshinsky's own work. One opus of his more than 100 productions, Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride, 1922), has been fully worked up in a modern critical edition by Michael Ochs and can represent this phase.¹¹ The show, set in Russia just after the Russian Revolution, discusses such weighty topics as whether life for Jews is better in Russia or the US (with characters from both places carrying on romantic relationships), and the usual playing-out of family relations. Elements of both traditional and modern Jewish life allow for a rich variety of musical input. Ochs had a wide and varied set of sources to draw on for his work of assemblage and editing. Three commercial recordings were pressed of just one love duet, as part of a set of fourteen recordings of seven different numbers. Two sheet music folios made the music available outside of the theater, for further home performance. These commercial sources, along with a variety of lead sheets, orchestral parts, typescripts of lyrics, a piano-vocal score, a radio script, and the libretto, as deposited for copyright, form parts of the puzzle that Ochs has worked with. The linguistic mix needed for these shows is also considerable, as it includes five languages, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew, with English words assimilated into the Americanized characters’ dialogue and songs. Stitching all this together is Rumshinsky's carefully constructed musical language, doubtless enhanced by his stable of stars, who combined the versatility and flexibility with material of the older phase of theater music with a book and music that were no longer improvised on the fly, but still culturally multiple and emotionally rich enough to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated ears of a mass audience.

Those listeners were now fully tuned into mainstream American popular music, knew increasingly less Yiddish, and probably had less patience for European themes and performance styles. By the mid-1920s, it was a second or even third generation of immigrants who were taking their parents and grandparents to the theater. With the closing of mass immigration in 1924, the American audience was ever more distanced from its roots. This was increasingly the case in Europe as well, as Sovietization shifted Yiddish culture into new channels¹² and assimilation in the large cities of Poland downgraded Yiddish tradition and elevated more cosmopolitan forms of cabaret, film, and pop song. Polish Jews also played a large role in the newer forms of mass marketed media for mainstream audiences, as did the American Jewish songwriters of the era of American standards, or their French and German counterparts in Western Europe. Even in the USSR under state socialism, the most important creators of the hugely popular mass songs, largely disseminated through films, were Jews who came from a generation that shifted its creative work from Yiddish to dominant linguistic, political, and musical trends.

The culminating phase of the 1930s

With no new influx of immigrants, the shutting down of ethnic recordings by the music industry due to the Depression, and the looming danger to the Jews of eastern Europe, one might imagine that Yiddish theater music and its rising partner, Yiddish film, would collapse. Yet the 1930s saw the culminating phase of the projects set in motion from the 1880s–1920s. Goldfaden plays did not disappear from stages. New Yiddish “art theater” productions found more modernist music to supplant the shund-era patchwork and circumvent the Rumshinsky-founded mainstream. A generation of immensely talented songwriters such as Alexander Olshanetsky (1892–1946), Abraham Ellstein (1907–63), and Sholom Secunda (1894–1974) sprang up who often saw their songs premiered in shows ranging from revues to dramas. Secunda wrote the song that became the greatest crossover hit from Yiddish to mainstream American popularity, “Bay mir bist du sheyn.” People in Poland sang songs written in New York, the flow mainly going from the US to Europe. For this period, film music is the most interesting area to watch. Jewish-American independent film began around 1918, paralleling only the African-American effort in pioneering the idea of ethnic subcultural cinema. With the advent of the “talkies,” Yiddish could take its place in both the aural and the visual imaginary of Jews worldwide, and music played its role in selling the concept. Alongside filmed versions of well-known stage plays, with their attendant melodrama and downhome music cues, the Yiddish musical emerged as an extension of the Rumshinsky enterprise. Younger songwriters jumped at the opportunity to create film scores. Meanwhile, in Poland, despite severe economic and political turmoil, the local Jewish talent pool found ways to produce a set of homegrown movies in Yiddish as well. Comparing the two sides of this transatlantic system and their overlap is instructive.

On the Polish side, the surviving film (many are lost) that has become most emblematic of Yiddish cinema is The Dybbuk (1937), an adaptation of the canonical play by S. An-sky (1863–1920) first seen in the early 1920s and widely translated and paraphrased in many media in various countries ever since. The movie's director, Michał Waszyński, had pioneered talkies in Poland and claimed to have studied with both Stanislavsky in theater and F. W. Murnau in film. On the set for The Dybbuk, he could rely on the skills of leading designers and technicians, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, hence had worked in Weimar cinema. So as deeply as The Dybbuk delves into the fast-fading provincial Jewish life and as much as it relies on vernacular language, religious custom, music, and body movements, it is the work of a remarkably cosmopolitan crew and outlook that ranges from Stanislavsky acting and Polish literature through German expressionist cinema. Upon its release, the film was widely seen and reviewed not just by Jews, but also a general Polish audience and critics. When the movie reached America, the New York Times felt it needed to write a review, and found the movie “incredible in its way as a documentary film of life among the pygmies or a trip to the Middle Ages.”¹³

More than in the original play, music draws the audience into Polish-Jewish life, beginning with the newly added prologue featuring the great cantor Gershon Sirota, who is heard, but not seen on camera, due to his religious scruples. The dreamy main theme, a setting of “The Song of Songs,” recurs as a leitmotif of the doomed romance of the couple, and there is a conventional score as well. A klezmer band accompanies the Hasidic rebbe at his Sabbath gathering. Beyond even these already highly evocative music cues, a host of other gestures to small-town folklore give The Dybbuk a deeply local atmosphere that Jewish-American cinema tends only to gesture at. Nevertheless, it is the choreographed beggars’ dances of Judith Berg that stick in most viewers’ minds, and they come out of Warsaw art, not shtetl custom. The folklorization by composers, choreographers, set designers, and art directors is part of a “national” project that on the one hand goes back to the great Polish-Jewish writer Y. L. Peretz, but on the other, has a certain kinship to Goldfaden's ideals, much as Peretz disliked the early Yiddish theater's approach.

A Polish-Jewish film that takes a less sentimental, but still outsider, approach to the small-town past is Freylikhe kaptsonim (The Jolly Paupers, 1937), from the same time frame as The Dybbuk. As played by the great comedians Dzigan and Schumacher, the looniness of a couple of shtetl Jews who think they have discovered oil is portrayed satirically, almost menacingly. The music ranges from a young couple's romantic Yiddish theater song to the garbled cantorial wailing of the two hapless heroes (taken from a madman they meet in an asylum) pitting generations against each other in a commentary on modernity that in some ways parallels the subtext of The Dybbuk, with its focus on the breakdown of the old religious ways and the ascendance of youthful eroticism, even if expressed in much deeper, demonic ways than the satire of The Jolly Paupers.

The Yiddish films shot in the US stand apart from these European concerns. By the late 1920s, American Jewish popular culture had shifted into a more nostalgic view of the “Old Country” than is apparent in the early immigration-era entertainment. Recreating scenes from European life on flimsy sets in New Jersey, filmmakers used older musical styles, from folk songs to the then-popular cantorial bravado, as a foil to scenes of Americanization. It was easy for them to rely on older melodramatic plots and conventions, particularly about family life. Scores could cue tear-jerking moments of reunion or rejection in conventional fashion. But the movies also offered the possibility of lively musical comedies with up-to-date, if ethnically tinged, romantic or humorous songs by Rumshinsky or his main successors, Abraham Ellstein and Alexander Olshanetsky.

The film that is usually cited as the culmination of all these trends is Yidl mitn fidl (Yidl with His Fiddle, directed by Joseph Green, 1936), starring a group of American actors fortified by a large Polish-Jewish cast and technical team. It was shot on location in the town of Kazimierz Dolny, with its classic central marketplace and surrounding Jewish neighborhood, before moving out to both the Polish countryside and the big city in a panoramic presentation of European Jewry on the very eve of its destruction. It is a film that is impossible not to view ironically today, as a poignant time capsule that is at the same time very American in its music and sensibilities. Ellstein's score makes accurate nods to local non-Jewish folklore in the opening sequence as well as to traditional Jewish melodies, grounding the utopian aspirations of the movie musical in the lived reality of small-town Poland. At the film's end, the klezmer characters will board a boat towards American stardom, paralleling Hollywood's happy-ending solution to the preceding tangles of emotion and, in this case, the burdens of ethnicity. It is a format that could, and did, appeal to both sides of the transatlantic Jewish movie-going public.

Music could both support and challenge nostalgia, suppress or champion modernity in Yiddish cinema. The Cantor's Son (1940), starring the glamorous Moishe Oysher, who uncomfortably juggled popular song and cantorial careers, takes homesickness to the extreme by showing its immigrant singer returning to his hometown in Europe to reunite with his childhood sweetheart, despite success and a woman in New York's Jewish nightclub and radio scene. Throughout, the hero refuses to sing pop songs, sticking with cantorial and old-fashioned musical fare. In conservative films of the period, issues of assimilation and intermarriage are worked out musically. As the viewership for Yiddish-language cinema was aging, filmmakers were more likely to stay with earlier styles and issues than to Americanize the music enough to try to compete with Hollywood and attract a younger audience. Ambivalence could also creep into the use of older musical layers, as in the film Uncle Moses, a withering indictment of sweatshop-boss control of the garment industry and union pushback, and the first Yiddish sound film to take on hot-button up-to-date issues – but not current Jewish-American music. The main theme, tied to the protagonist, a boss who lords it over his immigrant compatriots, is the prayer Ovinu malkenu, learned from his old-world rabbi. While this might create an equation of religion = oppression of the working class, the sentimentality of the tune carries through to the very end, almost mitigating the dark side of Uncle Moses. Along with the klezmer and badkhn at the boss's wedding, the completely old-fashioned insider make-up of the plot calls to mind J. Hoberman's helpful summary of the situation: “If individual films often precipitated a conflict between tradition and modernity, the Yiddish cinema in toto can be seen as something of an extended family quarrel.”¹⁴ But the younger generation has no counterpart musical themes of any importance.

In this period, music plays its part in softening the edges of in-group hostility more than it supports strife. A fine example comes in a 1924 disc called A yidisher heym in Amerike (A Jewish Home in America) – one of those recorded theatrical scenes that extend the range of the topic beyond stage and cinema. The daughter of the house enters with her boyfriends, who play a lively version of a pop song, “Yes sir, that's my baby,” on piano and ukulele. The father demands that they stop and sing a cantorial number with him, no less than the august “Hayom haras oylem” from the Rosh Hashanah (New Year) service. They dutifully chime in with voice and instruments – somehow they know how to function as a synagogue choir – and domestic peace is restored.

Decline and revitalization

Just as African-American “race film” withered in the 1940s when black musicians were integrated into Hollywood vehicles, most Jewish-American talent had long since migrated into the mainstream musical niches open on stage and film, achieving remarkable upward mobility at a time when Jews were socially restricted in many other avenues of public life. Still, this increasing comfort with American life also allowed for the theatricality of stage and screen to filter into the burgeoning Jewish entertainment of the “Borscht Belt,” a catch-phrase for a variety of weekend and summer vacation venues that gave work to musicians, actors, and comedians. The last Yiddish film of the older era, Catskill Honeymoon of 1950, offers a glimpse of the eclectic and sometimes unexpected acts presented to dinner-table audiences. As Hoberman puts it, the film “dissolved Yiddish movies into canned vaudeville.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, the movie played long in Jewish neighborhoods. Framed as a golden anniversary party, the movie thus directly states its appeal to an aging audience. There is a biting Yiddish parody of “The Anniversary Waltz,” an Al Jolson hit song of the period set to an old Euro-Argentine waltz. Catskill Honeymoon's sixteen night-club numbers, simply staged as acts at Reeds Gap Hotel, include some archaic Yiddish comedy numbers based on stuttering or local dialect (Litvak vs. Galitsianer, an American theme decades old), some tame American torch and sentimental songs, a bit of opera, but little Yiddish music outside a couple of Ellstein-style items from an earlier era. It closes with a tribute to Israel, in Yiddish and English, graphically illustrating the shift of sentiment towards the new Zionist-based song and dance numbers that would further eclipse Yiddish as an expressive language.

Carryovers continued in the work of the 1940s–50s recording and night-spot entertainers such as Mickey Katz, the Barton Brothers, and Irving Fields, who riffed parodically and often satirically on the ambivalence of postwar Jewish-American life. Their records resounded in homes despite some communal disapproval. It is important to think of these artists as inheritors of a long lineage of in-group musical commentary on immigration, post-immigration, discomfort with American reality, and generational friction. Early Yiddish-language broadside songs, sold on the streets as early as the 1880s, gave way to comedy recordings in the form of skits with songs that carried on vaudeville traditions that have largely been lost and provide a link with the post-World War II styles and, latterly, recent revivals of those sensibilities.

By the 1970s, young Jewish-American musicians from a variety of backgrounds and training converged on the remnants of Yiddish music. Although the early klezmer revival, as it came to be called, relied heavily on the sound recordings of the 1914–32 era and thought of the repertoire as European music performed mostly in the US, as time went on, the theater and cinema sources began to emerge as a source, particularly in the work of Hankus Netsky, whose Klezmer Conservatory Band was influential. The band's vocalist, Judy Bresler, from a Yiddish theater family, consistently sang older material from stage and sheet music sources, as did other singers across the US who eventually exported the material to their European students. At workshops and institutes worldwide, on websites and recordings, the rich tradition of Yiddish theater and cinema music continues to make a meaningful contribution to contemporary music.

Introduction

Art music in the Yishuv¹ and in Israel was a latecomer to the nineteenth-century tradition of national schools. Yet it was unique in that it was established solely by immigrant Jewish composers from central and eastern Europe. Nearly all of them were anticipatory refugees who escaped the Nazi and Fascist governments in these regions.²

The history of art (as well as folk and popular) music in the Yishuv and in Israel was closely linked with the momentous process of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken and modernized literary language among Jews in the country. Hebrew became a principal tool for the unification of the immigrant society. Singing in amateur choruses in turn became a powerful method for spreading the use of the Hebrew language and especially the Sephardic accent, which was officially adopted in the early years of the twentieth century.

Methodological aspects

The history of art music in the Yishuv and in Israel is methodologically a unique case in the history of national schools in that it could be documented and studied from its onset; that is, we know “how it all began.” Archives of works by Israeli composers have been meticulously collected and deposited in central libraries, mostly at the National Library in Jerusalem, at the Israeli music archives of Tel Aviv University, and at the publishing house Israeli Music Publications. The enormous size of the repertory of Israeli art music may be judged through Alice Tischler's valuable catalogue.³

Incipient attempts, 1910–1929

Musical life in the small Jewish community under Ottoman rule was motivated by the need of immigrants to get together, singing in choirs or playing in amateur orchestras. In 1910 the singer Shulamit Ruppin (1873–1912) founded a music school in Jaffa. Based on the model of the Berlin conservatory, the curriculum included individual tutoring in piano, violin, cello, and voice, as well as theory classes, a choir, and a pupils’ orchestra. Additional schools soon opened in Jerusalem and Haifa. The European model of professional music instruction was thus transplanted from central Europe to the Yishuv, and then to Israel up to the present day.

World War I caused a severe crisis in the Jewish community. Recovery soon began with the establishment of the British mandate over Palestine. The 1920s were marked by over-ambitious endeavors, above all the Palestine Opera, which the conductor Mark Golinkin (1875–1963) founded in July 1923. Despite facing formidable economic difficulties, Golinkin produced seventeen mainstream operas in four seasons, with special emphasis on the Jewish-themed operas La Juive, by Fromental Halévy, and The Maccabees, by Anton Rubinstein. Golinkin insisted on performing all of them in Hebrew translation, but the Russian-speaking singers hardly spoke any Hebrew and the audience was unable to follow the awkward translations. The project collapsed in 1927, though Golinkin maintained sporadic productions later on. The state of the opera did not allow for the production of He-ḥalutz (The Pioneers, 1924) by Jacob Weinberg (1879–1958), the first Hebrew opera composed in Palestine, and the work in its entirety was to be premiered in New York. A naïve, idealistic opera, it was strongly influenced by the Russian orientalism of the Mighty Five.⁴ Nevertheless, in this period ad hoc ensembles, mostly outdoors, performed orchestral concerts of light classics relatively frequently, with audiences of thousands attending.

The emergence of art music in the 1930s

The Nazi takeover triggered the largest wave of emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine. The Jewish population of Palestine increased from 156,000 in 1928 to 445,000 in 1939.⁵ This immigration wave included experienced and motivated concert audiences, a large group of performers who had lost their positions in leading European orchestras, and more than forty well-trained and mature composers,⁶ that is, the entire tri-partite structure required for dynamic, creative musical life. It also resulted in an inverted process of absorption by which the number of immigrant musicians far exceeded that of the receiving professional community.

Many of the immigrants brought along their fine German pianos. With a ban on taking money out of Germany, the sale of the pianos provided ready cash for their first steps in the country, indirectly supporting the transplant of Hausmusik culture. Many children started their music instruction on these instruments, which are still found in Israeli homes to this day.

The basic professional infrastructure of musical life was formed as early as the 1930s. In 1933 the Palestine Conservatory was founded in Jerusalem with instruction on all instruments and advanced classes in music theory, composition, music history, and ethnomusicology. In March 1936 the British administration founded the Palestine Broadcast Service (PBS), alternating English, Arabic, and Hebrew broadcasts daily. The PBS included a relatively large music department, with a small ensemble that soon developed into the radio symphony orchestra (nowadays the Jerusalem Symphony). The crowning achievement arrived when international violinist Bronisław Huberman (1882–1947) accomplished his pioneer herculean project of creating the Palestine Orchestra (since 1950, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) in December 1936. Huberman's goal was to establish a first-rate orchestra built mostly of refugee Jewish musicians from Europe, for whom he secured immigrant certificates from the British administration. In that way he saved about seventy musicians and their families from Nazi extermination.

The conductor of the first festival concert series was the venerable Arturo Toscanini, who donated his performances as a powerful and well-publicized anti-fascist demonstration. The members of the orchestra founded multiple chamber ensembles, mostly string quartets, which were eagerly received by the discerning central European audience. The orchestra started a subscription program that was sold out, keeping the ensemble active throughout the horrible years of World War II. All this provided the infrastructure for the creation of art music. It is remarkable that despite the generally classical-romantic musical taste of the audience and Huberman's insistence on training the new orchestra of immigrants with mainstream repertory, the Palestine orchestra performed as many as 116 new compositions by immigrant composers during its first ten seasons, thus encouraging the creation of a symphonic repertory.⁷

The vision of the East versus the heritage of the West

The immigrant composers were faced with the awesome challenge of forming a new creative community under severe economic conditions, the need to recuperate from the trauma of sudden displacement, and the threat of the war that in its first stages imperiled Palestine itself. The majority of composers arrived from Germany, as well as from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania, which were strongly affected by German culture. The few composers from Russia and Poland received their advanced training mostly in France.

The emigration of Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984) will illustrate the process of resettlement. Born in Munich as Paul Frankenburger, Ben-Haim graduated from the Munich Academy as a pianist, composer, and conductor, and in 1924 became First Kapellmeister of the Augsburg Opera. He composed more than eighty Lieder as well as chamber and orchestral works. In 1931 the newly appointed Nazi director of the opera did not renew his contract. In 1932–3 he composed his monumental oratorio Joram to a book by Rudolf Borchardt, clinging to the long tradition leading from Bach's Passions through Mendelssohn's Elijah and Brahms's Requiem.⁸ After Hitler's takeover in February 1933, Ben-Haim decided to emigrate, and in October of the same year he settled in Tel Aviv. The move terminated his operatic career, and he devoted himself mostly to composition and teaching. His first action was to take intensive Hebrew lessons and to initiate the new genre of Hebrew art song with compositions set to verses from the Song of Songs and poems by leading modern Hebrew poets such as Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik (1873–1934) and Rachel (1890–1931). He soon returned to large forms with a String Quartet (1937), and with the first Symphony composed in Palestine (1940). In the Symphony Ben-Haim continued in the Mahlerian manner, representing and responding to the world around him. The Symphony opens with a modified quotation of the opening of Mahler's Second Symphony (Example 15.1), which represents the composer's past.

Example 15.1 Paul Ben-Haim, Symphony No. 1 (1940), excerpt.

The exalted slow movement quotes a motif from the song “I Will Lift up My Eyes,” which Ben-Haim had arranged a year earlier for the singer Bracha Zefira (discussed below), signifying the longing for a new reality in the East. The third movement introduces an extended instrumental quotation from Joram as a painful symbol of his displacement, followed by a rhythmic motif based on the Israeli hora dance, which sinks back into a dark military march.

None of the composers who immigrated to Palestine during this period knew one another prior to their arrival, nor did they form any unified group with an accepted leader. They confronted two opposing forces:

1. 1. The powerful collective pressure of Zionist ideology created the Vision of the East, which acted on composers both from outside through reviews, and from their internal obligation to create a new Israeli style (discussed in detail below).

2. 2. The equally powerful Heritage of the West, within which the composers had been trained, and which governed the repertory of performing ensembles and audiences’ taste. For the immigrant composers this served as a cushion softening the trauma of resettlement.

Josef Tal (né Grünthal, 1910–2008), who emigrated in 1934 from Berlin, the center of the avant-garde in the Weimar Republic, went at first through a financially difficult period in Palestine, initially working as a photographer in Haifa and then making an unsuccessful effort as a farmer on a kibbutz. His first composition written in Palestine (1937) was an austere Passacaglia for cello solo in which he merges J. S. Bach's structural techniques with Arnold Schoenberg's atonal harmony. Likewise, the first composition of Haim (Heinz) Alexander (1915–2012) in Palestine was a Chaconne for piano (1948) based on the Baroque ostinato model and incorporating chromatic, dissonant harmonies. Ben-Haim's first composition in Palestine was the dreamy, delicate Nocturno for piano, which continues the long line of piano miniatures by Schumann, Chopin, and Debussy. The Paris-trained Verdina Shlonsky (1905–90), the only woman composer within the first generation, composed her Five Sketches for piano (1947) under the strong influence of Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc.

The quadripartite model

The attitudes of the “founders” of Israeli music may be classified into four categories. One should bear in mind that composers did change their attitudes in the course of their compositional activity and even operated in simultaneous tracks:

1. Collective-National: This model was created by Alexander U. Boscovich (1907–64). Born in Cluj, Transylvania, Boscovich came to Palestine for the performance of his suite Jewish Folk Songs (1937) and decided to stay.⁹ The principal points of his ideology were that the composer should act as representative of the people (in Hebrew, Shliach tzibur) and avoid any personal, romantic expression; that music must express the time and place of its creation, which in the particular case of Palestine – and Israel – is the arid landscape of the country and the “dynamic” soundscape of its spoken languages – Hebrew in Sephardi accent and Arabic; that it must be based on the melodic motives of maqāms (the foundational modes of indigenous Middle Eastern music) and avoid tonal harmony; and that it must turn away from European Jewish music (including his own music composed in Cluj). His most representative work was Semitic Suite (1945), whose title stressed the local, Mediterranean nature of the composition. It was composed for piano and immediately orchestrated. Boscovich requested that the pianist play with a percussive, inexpressive touch. Example 15.2, from the opening movement, Toccata, illustrates the dominating four-note repetitive pattern within a fourth, played above a non-harmonic, organum-like drone.

Example 15.2 Alexander Boscovich, Semitic Suite (1945), excerpt.

Still, Boscovich did not intend to compose Arabic music, and in his ideological essay he noted that an Arabic and a Jewish shepherd on adjacent hills would perform differently on their flutes. Boscovich coined the term “Mediterranean music,” which related both to Eastern, Arabic music and to music of the Mediterranean basin, as opposed to German music. The concept was disseminated by critic Max Brod (1884–1968) and used – only once – by composer Menachem Avidom (Mahler Kalkstein, 1908–96) for his Mediterranean Sinfonietta (1951). Yet the oft-quoted term “Mediterranean Style,” or, worse still, “Mediterranean School,” often invoked as allegedly dominating early Israeli music, is misleading.

2. Popular-National: This attitude was cultivated by Marc Lavry (1903–67), who composed tuneful music that aimed at blurring the dividing line between art and popular music. He especially cultivated the hora, which originated in Hasidic dance in the 1920s and was marked by short, rhythmically symmetrical phrases, syncopated rhythms, and a narrow melodic range (Example 15.3).

Example 15.3 Marc Lavry, Three Jewish Dances, movement 3, “Hora” (1951), excerpt.

Lavry utilized well-defined musical symbols in his folk opera Dan hashomer (Dan the Guard, 1945), to a libretto by Max Brod according to a play by Sh. Shalom. The opera contrasts the personal story of the love of two kibbutz members at the time of the Arab Revolt (1936–9) with the collective story of the kibbutz. Hora dances symbolize the young pioneers, traditional prayer modes represent the elders, and Puccini-like arias express the suffering young lovers. The foundation of the State of Israel (1948) inspired a group of works in the popular style, such as Ben-Haim's Fanfare to Israel (1950) and Israel Suite (1951), Alexander's Six Israeli Dances (1950), Avidom's Mediterranean Sinfonietta (1951), and Boscovich's Little Suite (1954).

3. Individual-National: In his introductory essay for his symphonic variations Twelve Tribes of Israel (1938), the composer Erich Walter Sternberg (1891–1974) rejected all outside pressures on composers to utilize models such as “Russian tunes, synagogue cantillations, or local folklore; one should rather talk in the language which emanates from oneself.”¹⁰ Sternberg's musical characterization was based on post-romantic harmony and orchestration, including a quote of the opening motive of Brahms's Symphony no. 4, and grand Mahlerian gestures that he considered befitting the representation of biblical tribes. Josef Tal insisted that his music was “Israeli” by virtue of the fact that he lived in Israel and spoke Hebrew. Quotes of motives with a strong Jewish identity provided the national elements of this attitude. For example, the second movement of Tal's early Piano Sonata (1950) applied syncretism in the way he incorporated a quotation of a simple modal folk song by his friend Yehudah Sharett, which he set as an ostinato below dissonant, atonal harmonic gestures. Tal composed seven operas on Jewish subjects, three of which were in German for German opera houses.

Still, the Individual-National attitude often led to a deliberate avoidance of national symbols. In 1957 Tal composed the dramatic scene Saul at Ein Dor. Despite the biblical verses that are the sole source of text, Tal wrote, “from the start it was decided that I would avoid any quote from traditional liturgy or any use of the conventional ‘national’ music and would rather compose atonal music in my own way.”¹¹

The most extreme representative of the Individual-National attitude was Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), the only composer of the first generation whose resettlement process failed. Wolpe escaped Germany as a persecuted communist and settled in Jerusalem in 1934. There he split his educational and musical activity into two very different worlds. As a composer he was the most extreme avant-garde in the country, employing austere modernist techniques in his strictly dodecaphonic Four Studies on Basic Rows (1935–6) and the Passacaglia on an All-Interval Row for piano (1936). In 1935 Wolpe and his circle of loyal students founded a local branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music. At the same time he realized his communist ideals through founding workers’ choruses in the kibbutz movement and composing simple socialist songs, such as “Es wird die neue Welt geboren” (A New World Was Born, 1934). He felt isolated within the traditionally minded faculty of the newly founded Conservatory and he could not stand the political tension during the Arab Revolt (1936–9), and in December 1938 he emigrated for the United States.¹² His departure deprived the avant-garde group of its most dedicated representative. Ben-Haim, who came from Richard Strauss's sphere of influence, and Hanokh (Heinrich) Jacobi (1909–90), who was Hindemith's student, were opposed to dodecaphonic writing, and Sternberg, who supported Schoenberg, himself resorted to tonal writing in his large symphonic works, so that dodecaphonic writing remained in the minority in Israeli music.

4. Cosmopolitan: There were composers who avoided any national or Eastern connotations in their works and were completely embedded in the Heritage of the West. The cosmopolitan attitude gathered momentum after the foundation of the State of Israel, when the country finally opened to the West after many years of forced seclusion. An extreme example is Menachem Avidom's Philharmonic Symphony (1957),¹³ which is a set of well-contrived fugues and counterpoints in neo-classical style, completely unrelated to his Mediterranean Sinfonietta (see above).

First encounters with Eastern music

Simultaneously with the waves of immigration from Europe there arrived large groups of religiously motivated Jewish immigrants from Yemen. The rich tradition of Yemenite music was eagerly studied by scholars, first by the pioneer ethnomusicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938), who devoted the first volume of his extensive Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies (published between 1914 and 1933) to the Yemenite tradition.¹⁴ Yet his transcriptions into Western notation provided the immigrant composers with no more than a mere rudimentary impression of the melodies, with the crucial parameters of timbre and intonation entirely lacking. The first encounter with the actual music of the Jewish Eastern traditions came with Yemenite singer Bracha Zefira (1910?–90). Orphaned at the age of three, she was raised by foster families of different ethnic groups, whose traditional songs she fully absorbed. Later she trained at the Jerusalem Conservatory and briefly at Max Reinhardt's Theater School in Berlin. Her ambition was to penetrate the established concert audience. She first performed with improvising pianist Nahum Nardi, and from 1939 she commissioned vocal arrangements with ensembles of Western instruments from most of the immigrant composers. She first collaborated with Ben-Haim, Ödön Partos (1907–77), Lavry, Alexander, and Jacobi.¹⁵ The combination of Zefira's unique Yemenite timbre and pure Sephardic Hebrew accent with the piano and with ensembles of members of the Palestine Orchestra created the first true East-West syncretism to become popular with the largely immigrant audiences. Ben-Haim quoted most of her songs in his symphonic and chamber works; for example, he incorporated the entire Persian song “Laila lo nim” (Sleepless Night) in the finale of his Piano Concerto (1949). Quotation was the chief device for introducing Yemenite songs into art music. Whereas the melodic identity of the song was preserved, the original intonation and timbre were lost.

In 1950 the singer and choreographer Sara Levi-Tanai founded the Inbal Dance Theater, which presented Yemenite customs and traditions on stage. Yemenite composer Ovadia Tuvia (1920–2006) served as its Musical Director. The composer most involved with the Yemenite heritage was Mordechai Seter (1916–94), who quoted Yemenite songs in several of his works of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Yemenite Suite (1957, rev. 1966) and the oratorio Tikkun hatzot (Midnight Vigil, 1962). Partos quoted two of the songs he had heard from Tuvia in his Visions for flute and string orchestra, yet he modified the perfect fifth of the Yemenite melody into a tritone, betraying his attachment to his Hungarian heritage and the legacy of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály (Example 15.4).

Example 15.4 Ödön Partos, Visions (1957), excerpt.

Composers invent the sounds of the East

Attempts at realizing the Vision of the East were made by a few composers of the first generation. Two salient examples are the Sonata for solo violin by Mordechai Seter (1954) and “Bashrav” (1953) for solo violin by Abel Ehrlich (1915–2003).¹⁶ Seter and Ehrlich's intention was to adhere to pure melodic lines, avoiding harmonic accompaniment. Ehrlich even starts “Bashrav” with quarter tones. In the second section, nevertheless, the violin adds double-stops and chords, and its playing style is influenced by Bartók's Sonata for solo violin, which Yehudi Menuhin had performed in Tel Aviv in the early 1950s. The first movement of Seter's Sonata is based on alternations of a fast ornament and long drawn-out notes; it creates two-part dissonant combinations that are powerful and original, yet hardly Arabic.

The second generation

The second generation included composers born in the 1920s. Foremost among them were Yehezkel Braun (1922–2014), Ben-Zion Orgad (né Büschel, 1926–2006), and Zvi Avni (b. 1927). All three shared a common background: they were born in Germany and immigrated to Palestine with their families as very young children, they went through economic hardships and military service as youngsters, and they received their professional music education relatively late, partly with the founders, partly as autodidacts.

Yehezkel Braun was the most sincere and individual in his reaction to ideological pressure. He has stated: “I was driven to despair by two things: the very thinking about music and thinking what and how to compose, composing while thinking. It caused me pain and terrible emotional suffering. One bright day I said to myself: the hell with all that, I will write whatever I hear [in my inner ear]…My principle is to think in sounds, not in concepts, not in emotions, not in ideas.”¹⁷ Further on Braun describes the extremely varied soundscape that shaped his personality: songs of the Yemenite women that he heard as a child on the streets of the settlement Rehovot, gramophone records of operatic arias that his parents collected, the flute playing of the Arab shepherds that he heard as a young farmer in a kibbutz, and finally the composers he especially admired as a music student: Haydn, Bartók, and Brahms. As a prolific and spontaneous composer Braun moved from one inspiration to another, with Bartók's influence dominating his early solo concertos, inspiration from Brahms in the Music for a Double Trio (2001) and the Hexagon for string sextet (1998), and an imaginary orientalist world in the highly inspired Iturim limgilat Ruth (Ornaments to the Book of Ruth, 1966) (Example 15.5).

Example 15.5 Yehezkel Braun, Iturim limgilat Ruth (1983), excerpt.

By contrast, Ben-Zion Orgad continued the collective-national attitude. He took his inspiration from the prayer modes, the cantillation formulas (te'amim), and the soundscape of the synagogue. An especially powerful example is his large-scale cantata Mizmorim (Psalms, 1968), in which five vocal soloists and two choirs present two psalms simultaneously, with clusters of orchestral sonorities in the background. In the orchestral Movements on A (1965), Orgad departed from archaic prayer motives, which he merged into atonal, dense Western-type sonorities. Orgad's personality was extroverted. As Superintendent of Music Education he disseminated his ideology of modern Jewish music through numerous lectures and workshops with music teachers and students.

Zvi Avni has been a prolific composer who has maintained his roots in Western atonal technique, which he merges in diverse ways with Jewish musical elements. Such is his orchestral Meditations on a Drama (1966), which is dominated by a powerful declamatory motive, and his moving Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man, 1998) for soprano and orchestra set to painful texts by the poet Primo Levi.

Later immigration waves

In the early 1970s the Soviet Union briefly allowed Jewish immigration to Israel. A central figure in this group of Russian Jewish émigrés was Mark Kopytman (1929–2011), who soon advanced to the position of Professor at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem and became a composer of high international standing. Kopytman commenced his cultural assimilation by composing musical adaptations of modern Hebrew poetry, especially the works of the great poet Yehudah Amichai (1924–2000), whose “October Sun” Kopytman set to music in 1974. Kopytman then turned to the exploration of the East as a deeply ingrained musical concept, by creating a heterophonic technique of his own.¹⁸ His study of the East reached its apex in his large-scale orchestral Memory (1981). When the heterophonic score was nearly completed, he happened to attend a performance of the Yemenite folk singer Gila Bashari. Fascinated by her voice, he interpolated her live performance of a Yemenite traditional song at the beginning and end of the composition, and she participated in many performances of the work all over the world.

A huge immigration wave of altogether more than one million Jews from the former Soviet Union arrived in Israel beginning in 1991, over the course of about ten years. It included hundreds of well-trained musicians who effected a major change in orchestras, teaching faculties, and composition. Of special importance were composers from the Asian republics, such as two composers from Georgia, Joseph Bardanashvili (b. 1948) and Hana Ajiashvili (b. 1972). Bardanashvili has continued the Soviet tradition of composing large-scale symphonic works and retained the ethnic Georgian melos, which he merged into contemporary techniques. By contrast, the younger Ajiashvili took her advanced studies in Moscow and later trained under Pierre Boulez and Krzysztof Penderecki. Her chamber works are characterized by gentle crystalline sonorities in the high register. The Tajik composer Benyamin Yosupov (b. 1962), who studied in Moscow, has created his individual synthesis of contemporary Western compositional technique with the sonorities and melos of Muslim-Asian traditions, for example in his powerful Cello Concerto (2006) and in the rich sonorities of the Images of the Soul (concerto for two clarinets and orchestra, 2010).

Electro-acoustic music

Joseph Tal and Zvi Avni were the pioneers of electro-acoustic music in Israel. Tal directed a laboratory at the Hebrew University that operated from the days of the Moog synthesizer through the development of digital sound production. He also conducted extensive research into computer notation for sound generation. Avni founded a laboratory at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem. Interestingly, most of Tal's electronic works, and all of Avni's, combined live performers with electro-acoustic sounds. Examples include Tal's opera Mezada (1972), for live singers and electronic tape, and Avni's Vocalise (1964), which combines recordings of his wife, the singer Penina Avni, with electronic sounds.

The Israeli Opera

Since the collapse of Golinkin's opera in 1927, opera suffered the image and position of unloved stepchild in Israeli musical life, by contrast to symphony orchestras and chamber ensembles. The provincial Israeli Opera, founded in 1948, struggled for some three decades under financial and political difficulties until its collapse in the late 1970s. It managed to produce only a single Israeli opera, Menachem Avidom's Alexandra the Hashmona'ite (1956). In 1985 the New Israeli Opera (nowadays The Israeli Opera) opened, and after its first decade this company reached a high international level in its newly built opera house in Tel Aviv. The Israeli Opera created the conditions for the production of several new Israeli operas. As expected in a young state, these works turned to Israeli and Jewish historical and contemporary issues. Joseph Tal's Joseph (libretto by Israel Eliraz, 1995) related symbolically to the Holocaust through the personal tragedy of a German Jew at the time of World War I. Composed in dense atonal harmony and expressionistic vocal lines, it carried the traits of grand opera, for example the instruction for a full-scale ship to appear on stage in Act II.

Bardanashvili composed A Journey to the End of Millennium (2004) based on A. B. Yehoshua's novel about a family tragedy resulting from a religious schism in Judaism just before the year 1000, between the liberal-minded Sephardic Jews from Morocco and the conservative Ashkenazic Jews in Germany. Composed in atonal harmony, the opera presents multiple quotations of Sephardic songs and prayer tunes. Gil Shohat (b. 1973) composed The Child Dreams (2010) to Hanoch Levin's symbolic play about the Holocaust, using fully tonal harmony and brilliant orchestration. The most moving Israeli opera is Dear Son of Mine (1999) by Haim Permont (b. 1950), to a libretto by Talma Alyagon-Rose. This chamber opera tells a traumatic story of its four characters against the background of the most painful topics of Israeli society, that is, bereavement, Jewish-Arab relations, and the absorption of immigration. It is written with a veristic approach, in chromatic harmony close to that of Alban Berg, and with Italianate vocal technique, tuneful arias, and two songs in an Arabic style.

Creative work since the 1970s

Despite the significant growth in the number of composers in Israel since the 1960s, the quadripartite model mentioned above remains effective, yet with shifting stresses and with expansions in all directions. Most young composers have engaged in advanced studies and master classes in Europe and the United States. Since the outburst of folk-like works in the early 1950s, the Popular-National attitude has declined, yet it was still maintained, especially by composer Simon Cohen (b. 1937), for example in his use of the Arabic debka dance form that dominates his optimistic and energetic Saxophone Concerto. The Collective-National attitude has branched off from its naïve beginnings in several directions. One of them is the historical epic, characterized by large-scale works commemorating great events in Jewish history. For example, the oratorio Sephardic Passion (1992) by Noam Sherrif (b. 1935) relates the momentous event of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) through a rich palette of quotations of traditional Ladino songs and from Bach's St. Matthew Passion and readings of Spanish historical documents. A contrasting and highly significant direction has been political protest. Such were most of the works by Arik Shapira (b. 1943), who has stated: “In my view revolution must be total. One must negate all historical values of the nineteenth century, to offer a replacement and to invent new values.”¹⁹ In 1982 Shapira composed Aqeda (The Sacrifice of Isaac). In the first movement the chorus, accompanied by brass ensemble, recites the biblical chapters about the expulsion of Hagar and Isma'el and the sacrifice of Isaac, in a single repeated austere chord that “clearly explain[s] our attitude towards the Palestinians.”²⁰

The ideologically committed Michael Wolpe (b. 1960) settled in Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev desert, which for many years represented the pioneer ideal. Wolpe founded and directs the annual Sounds of the Desert music festival, which features concerts of Israeli art and popular music side by side. He has turned to Arabic music in some of his works, such as his concerto for recorder and orchestra. In Songs of Memory to poems by Elisha Porat, the poet and composer joined in a powerful political statement against the war in Lebanon, as exemplified by their song about a dead soldier who returns to his home and finds he can no longer recognize it. The vocal part was intended for the fine singer Maureen Nehdar, who was born in Iran and led an ensemble of Persian music while at the same time receiving Western vocal training at the Academy of Music in Jerusalem. The Western ensemble consists of guitar, string trio, and drums that emulate Arabic music. In his orchestral The Jackals Have Returned, Wolpe includes a digitally treated recording of the howling of a jackal in the Jerusalem mountains. Wolpe has dedicated himself to a thorough study of early Israeli music. In several of his works he adopts Lavry's concept of blurring the dividing line between popular and art music; the Piano Trio no. 3 (1998), for example, paraphrases songs by four of Israel's most venerable composers of popular songs (Y. Admon, D. Zehavi, A. Argov, and M. Wilensky). Recently Wolpe enriched his compositional method through an exploration of sonic techniques in rock music.

The Sephardic heritage has dominated many works by Betty Olivero (b. 1954). Her parents were born in Greece, and communicated at home only in Ladino. While Betty herself did not speak fluent Ladino, her Sephardic-Mediterranean childhood culture was the most powerful element in the crystallization of her personality. Yet her musical training was completely Western: she studied piano and composition at the Music Academy in Tel Aviv and then at Yale University, followed by a prolonged stay in Italy under the guidance of Luciano Berio. Her diverse style ranges from quotations of Yemenite and Arabic songs in Makamat (1988), for the unique vocal quality of the singer Esti Ofri-Keinan with the accompaniment of nine instruments, to the imaginative succession of the sonorities of ten instruments in A volo d'uccello (1996), which belongs entirely to the Western avant-garde. The originally imaginative conjuring of the East has also changed in the 1990s into a more genuine first-hand involvement in Arabic art and popular music, especially with the establishment of a Department for Arabic Music at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and at Bar Ilan University, directed by the oud player and violinist Taiseer Elias. The effect of globalization provided a powerful incentive to adopt a more cosmopolitan attitude in Israel. Composer Menachem Zur (b. 1942) based his compositional approach on theoretical reasoning totally removed from any national consideration. He has written:

Zur displayed his aesthetics in his three orchestral “letters” to Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky and in his large-scale, harmonically rich Violin Concerto. Zur has also been active in electro-acoustic compositions, most of them involving live performers. This global pluralism reached its peak in the 1980s. Amos Elkana (b. 1967) developed his own premeditated serial technique through which he composed his tightly cohesive works, such as his song cycle Arabic Lessons (1998), with poems in Hebrew, Arabic, and German. Hilat Ben-Knaz (b. 1970) has based her works on deep roots in history; witness the tight structure of her Prelude for cello solo and the dense atonal counterpoint in Night Visions (2012).

Two important events in the late 1990s enhanced the position of Israeli music in the country. First, the annual Israeli Music Festival was founded on the fiftieth anniversary of Israel (1998). It soon developed, especially under Musical Director Michael Wolpe, who was followed in this role by composer Boaz Ben-Moshe, into a five-day festival with orchestral, choral, and chamber music concerts taking place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beer Sheba.²² In 2011 the Festival branched into a new program, Composer of the Year, dedicating each season to performing most of the orchestral works of one of the founders of Israeli music (Ben-Haim in 2011, Seter in 2012, Partos in 2013, Boscovich in 2014, and Tal in 2015). Second, three highly competent ensembles dedicated to new music were founded, Musica Nova, the 21st-Century Ensemble, and Ensemble Meitar (the String). These groups perform mostly Israeli music in small auditoriums, in concerts that attract young, dedicated audiences.

Introduction: cavernous possibilities

As others in this volume have already noted, the deceptively simple question – What is “Jewish music?” – poses crucial questions about the nature of Jewish identities, musical experiences, and investigatory methods. The problem of “Jewish music” becomes more complicated, however, when combined with other terms that also resist easy postwar classification. From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, what qualifies as “art music”? Does the term refer only to highbrow extensions of serialism, or does it also embrace popular idioms? What does one mean when speaking of music “after 1945” or, more specifically, “Jewish music after 1945”?

Central to these questions is the concept of artistic postmodernism, which Jonathan Kramer refers to as a “maddeningly imprecise musical concept.”¹ The term implies some kind of relationship to modernism, the specific nature of which remains elusive. As Judy Lochhead notes, postmodern music can be characterized as either “discontinuous or continuous with the modern trajectory” and as potentially “negative or positive” in its outlook, a point nuanced by Kramer, who avers that the term can signify “a repudiation of modernism or its continuation” because it “has aspects of both a break and an extension.”² Moreover, postmodernism resists delineation into neat categories of genre and style. As Kenneth Gloag explains:

Kramer identifies several possible characteristics of musical postmodernists, including composers who “react against modernist styles and values”; who “seek originality in…disunifying fragmentation, in pluralism, and in multiplicity”; and who consider music “as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts.”⁴ While not intending to provide a definitive list – indeed, postmodernists would scoff at the notion – Kramer makes inroads into addressing the concept's complexity.

More generally, postmodernism surfaces as an attitude rooted in intellectual and social developments of the twentieth century. One key aspect of postmodernism is its rejection of modernist metanarratives (the “grand narratives”) and embrace of the micronarrative (the “little narrative”), which becomes the “primary form of imaginative invention.”⁵ As Gloag emphasizes:

The pluralistic and anti-temporal nature of postmodern music problematizes traditional modes of narrative and history, which can make the assimilation of postmodernism into a cogent narrative of music history difficult. As a result, scholars working with postmodern music often adopt a case-studies approach to the repertory, allowing for micronarratives to be explored for their individual significance.

Additional historical consequences arise for postwar “Jewish art music,” in that the prepositional phrase “after 1945” evokes the most catastrophic moment in modern Jewish history – the Holocaust. So devastating was that event for Jewish life and culture – arguably for humanity worldwide – that scholars throughout the disciplines have interpreted it as the “end of modern history.” This post-histoire viewpoint has become “a topos of Holocaust research,” one whose wide-reaching implications Jacques Derrida characterized as omnipresent in postwar discourse:⁷

German sociologist Arnold Gehlen first referred to the post-historical in 1952 and described an “epoch characterized by a state of stability and rigidity, devoid of utopian ideas, change, or development.”⁹ And yet, as Anton Kaes notes, there is something strikingly utopian about longing for the “end of history” – an opportunity to “create a pure moment of origin that is not contaminated by history.”¹⁰ In this regard, he sees a connection between postmodern aesthetics and the tradition of post-histoire utopianism: “the ease with which a postmodern artist…uses the past as ‘material’ that can be quoted at will is based on the belief that history and progress have reached their limit and have come to a standstill; the present is itself no more than an assemblage of quotations from the past.”¹¹ From this standpoint, stylistic recycling has replaced modernism's emphasis on originality and innovation and the narrative of progress has been supplanted by one of free deconstructionism.

Obviously, no survey could ever capture the breadth and depth of “Jewish art music after 1945.” Therefore, I present three case studies that explore the questions raised by postwar responses to the Holocaust in musical composition. The Holocaust provides one such locus for postwar musical discourse in that it has been engaged by composers with diverse relationships to their Jewishness, including religious, secular, ambivalent, and non-identifying figures. For the sake of some cohesion, this chapter focuses on the aesthetic and cultural questions raised by three composers of Jewish birth working in America whose compositional style was directly impacted by their engagement with the events of World War II. Works by Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), George Rochberg (1918–2005), and Steve Reich (b. 1936) serve to illustrate some of the cavernous possibilities of postwar musical expression while also raising the question of whether musical representation of the Holocaust remains a cavernous impossibility.

Arnold Schoenberg: modernism's transcendent failure

Despite the previous emphasis on postmodernism, it is important to note that modernism did not suffer a definitive closure in the latter half of the century. As David Patterson writes, all modernist composers “did not retire en masse after the war in deference to those involved in creating a new era.”¹² In the specific case of Arnold Schoenberg, widely acknowledged as one of the progenitors of musical modernism, the composer felt compelled to respond to the Holocaust in the modernistic terms he knew best. His cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) sets the composer's fictionalized account of a Holocaust survivor who recalls a transcendent moment of Jewish resistance – the singing of the prayer Shema Yisroel (Hear O Israel) in the Warsaw Ghetto – through the lens of traumatic witness. “I cannot remember everything,” the narrator intones, before he attempts to reconstruct the events from the recesses of his fragmented memory. Schoenberg harkens back to his expressionist roots in the piece, which also utilizes the twelve-tone technique to structure its melodic and harmonic material.¹³ Motives associated with the text – atonal trumpet fanfares; weeping gestures; shrill dissonant cries – arise from the texture, only to be submerged as the recollection passes. At the conclusion of the work, the survivor assumes a more prescient role in his recollection; his narration becomes increasingly synched to the musical soundtrack, which ultimately erupts in a dodecaphonic (or twelve-tone serialist) choral setting of the Shema Yisroel.

As musicologist Klára Móricz notes, Schoenberg's return to abstract musical expressionism recalled a language of anxiety from his prewar compositions:

Schoenberg not only exploited these stylistic associations to characterize his narrator, but also provided corresponding textual references that helped the audiences comprehend his musical imagery. As musicologist Sabine Feisst recognizes, this was a period in which Schoenberg began to aim at the “widest possible dissemination of his music and audience appreciation, [including catering to] features of mass culture.”¹⁵ Expressionistic gestures such as those in Survivor would have been familiar to contemporary audiences due to their incorporation in film scores of the time, a fact that Schoenberg acknowledged with some annoyance in a letter to the critic Kurt List.¹⁶ Moreover, Survivor's twelve-tone structure and recurring motives display affinities with a more conservative, tonal presentation, suggesting that Schoenberg may have been exploring an engagement with “functional and politically engaged music, which were very topical among American composers in the 1930s and 1940s.”¹⁷

Schoenberg's historicized return to expressionism and his conflation of abstract modernist techniques with fictional realism have caused the work to encounter both praise and condemnation. Early reviews in America and Europe praised the work's humanitarian message and cited it as evidence that modernism was relevant in the postwar landscape. Others have asserted that Survivor enacts the transcendent release of a specifically Jewish modernism from a “history that was in the process of terminating the [Jewish] moment” itself, what David Liebermann characterizes as a reclamation of modernism from the Germans.¹⁸ But for many, Survivor's overt text-music mimesis muddies Schoenberg's abstract modernist pedigree; its artistic literalism met direct challenge from the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who countered that Schoenberg's transcendent version of the Holocaust re-victimized the dead and trivialized their suffering.¹⁹ More recently, Móricz has reiterated this discomfort with the work. “It is hard,” she writes, “to dismiss the feeling that the Shema stands for an illusory triumph – for the attempt to re-create the spirit of those whose bodies perished in the Holocaust. The artistic cliché of transcendence used here has little to do with the brutal reality.”²⁰ Ultimately, Schoenberg would defend his representational decision along ethical rather than aesthetic lines: “We should never forget [the Holocaust], even if such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the Survivor. This does not matter. The main thing is, that I saw it in my imagination.”²¹

The popular success and potential failure of A Survivor from Warsaw sets the stage for postmodern musical responses to the Holocaust. By casting the choral Shema Yisroel as an act of resistance – and by setting it to a twelve-tone row – Schoenberg seemed to suggest a possible utopian transcendence for Jewish life, faith, and modernism after the war. But when tired allusions to previous style periods supplant modernist expectations for innovation, aesthetic consequences arise. Here, Schoenberg's modernism becomes regressive and reified rather than progressive and novel. Thus, by appropriating his own musical vocabulary to articulate personal ideas about Jewish faith and suffering in a post-Holocaust world, Schoenberg ultimately posed a central question for Holocaust representation: can the historicized language of modernism adequately respond to the genocide, or is a new direction necessary?

George Rochberg: postmodernism's response

For George Rochberg, there was “something profoundly moving about Schoenberg's search for faith, his struggle to regain his roots in Judaism, his deep need to raise a protective barrier against the godlessness and loss of values of his generation.”²² Rochberg had also struggled to define his own relationship to Judaism – a spiritual process he described as frustrating to Canadian-Jewish composer István Anhalt:

Throughout his life, Rochberg struggled with his identity, wondering whether “buried under layers [and] layers of secularized living” the non-religious Jew carried with him “a kind of ‘genetic’ suffering that comes with being born a Jew.”²⁴ As he admitted to Anhalt, “I start[ed] reacting badly to the whole [Jewish] question, [rejected] it, because it insists on…partness and my deepest inclinations [and] thoughts…are toward…wholeness, the oneness of man, of the universe, of what others call ‘God’ but I think of as ‘world-consciousness.’”²⁵

These comments derive from Rochberg's mature postmodern period, generally accepted as beginning with the Third String Quartet (1972). But in the previous decade – the compositional period in which Rochberg initiated his “postmodern turn” – the composer more openly incorporated Jewish ideas into his musical compositions and critical essays. As he admitted to Anhalt in 1969, “the urge [to reaffirm my Jewishness] is tied up with music…[M]usic is being corrupted today, is being lost in the vagaries of ‘false idols.’ It has become unclean.”²⁶ In his admonitions, Rochberg draws parallels between postwar modernism and the dangers associated with idolatry in the Second Commandment.²⁷ Serialism had become the Golden Calf of the musical world, assuming “the condition of a quasi-religious status among its followers and practitioners. In the process [it] becomes externalized, is abstracted away from the realities of human existence, and gives birth to an inviolate dogma or doctrine in its own right.”²⁸ The end-result was an “uncritical and unqualified ‘pursuit of truth’ – without regard to the consequences for the values of human existence.”²⁹

During the 1960s, the aesthetical and the ethical remained closely tied for Rochberg; he polemically described science and technology in terms that recalled the apocalyptic events of World War II, suggesting a corollary between fascist ideologies and the artistic “exclusionary tactics pronounced by false prophets such as Boulez.”³⁰ He bluntly decried modernism as a form of “aesthetic cleansing” that fosters “aesthetic ideological repression” and leads to “the narrowing of thought and gesture…the destruction of the possibility of multiplicity…in favor of single ideas, images, and means.”³¹ Against such a current, Rochberg cultivated the polystylistic technique ars combinatoria, a compositional method that utilizes “styles from all historical periods in the making of new music…[in order to craft] a critical commentary on the accepted teleological approach to history and its implications in the study of music.”³² Rochberg's musical pluralism was not simply an “array of different things” but a way of “seeing new possibilities of relationships; of discovering and uncovering hidden connections and working with them structurally; of joining antipodes without boiling out their tensions.”³³

While most scholars contextualize ars combinatoria as an aesthetic retort to serialism, two works from the 1960s suggest that it was first developed as a means to respond to Jewish suffering in the twentieth century. The unpublished Passions According to the Twentieth Century (1964–7) predates Rochberg's early attempts at collage and assemblage and uses textual and musical juxtaposition to dramatize a historical narrative of Jewish suffering. With the Passions, Rochberg attempted to “deal with the enormity of the human tragedy that had overtaken the twentieth century, without falling into obvious clichés and pathetic sentimentalism.”³⁴ The ambitious choral work merged two periods of Jewish persecution – Herod's slaughter and Hitler's Holocaust – in a dramatic structure that utilized musical texts ranging from the medieval period to the twentieth century.³⁵ Therein, Beethoven's “millions” from the Ninth Symphony encounter laments sung by the millions exterminated in the death camps; abstract jazz motifs are overcome by the banal insistence of the “Horst Wessel Lied.” In his program notes, Rochberg emphasizes not the aesthetic aims of ars combinatoria, but its usefulness as a cultural tool of confrontation: “Since we who live in the twentieth century have inherited all of history…[it] seem[s] right and plausible [to] use…musical quotation…In this cultural ‘folding over’…we cannot escape any longer the peculiar and powerful sense that all things and all times, however worthy or unworthy, belong to us. At least, we have not been able to escape their consequences, humanly and artistically.”³⁶

Ultimately, the Passions was never performed, but its dramatic concept was incorporated into Rochberg's Third Symphony (1969), which was intended to convey “the sufferings of millions upon millions of human beings at the hands of an anthropomorphized ‘Twentieth Century.’”³⁷ Instead of vernacular citations of Jewish laments and Nazi songs, Rochberg's Third Symphony engages the Western art music tradition. A recurrent refrain from Heinrich Schütz's “Saul, was verfolgst du mich?” (Saul, Why Do You Persecute Me?, 1650) evokes the theme of Jewish persecution throughout history – from the biblical figure of David to Holocaust victims.³⁸ Other musical quotations suggest a spiritual meditation on mortality and human suffering, including quotations from “Durch Adams Fall” (J. S. Bach, c. 1713–14), the Missa Solemnis and funeral march from the Third Symphony (Beethoven, 1819–23 and 1803–4), and The Unanswered Question (Charles Ives, 1908, revised 1930–5).

Rochberg's assemblage explores specific sonic and structural resonances, but the intent is not purely musical. As Rochberg explains, the Third Symphony is “an offshoot of [the Passions]…The texts – each of which has its associated ‘music’ drawn from a specific work of another composer – bear their load of awesome religious-theological meaning and unify themselves around my idea of twentieth-century man's…struggle with his own nature.”³⁹ Rochberg's decision to embed the Passions’ program more abstractly into the Third Symphony suggests that the composer may have realized the limitations of his initial Holocaust project. Such concerns were already at the forefront of his mind; in his notes for the Passions, he explicitly demanded that no historical footage of the Holocaust be used to dramatize the production. Those images “are too raw,” he explained, “too factual, too literal.”⁴⁰ Ultimately, the Passions would prove too direct an employment of ars combinatoria, especially when Rochberg himself was searching for an “indirect” way to address history and, ultimately, his Jewish sense of self. As he would recognize later, “the means of human expression are insufficient and inadequate to ‘name’ the horrors that constitute the depths of…[evil] human actions…like holocaust, ethnic cleansing…and concentration camp.”⁴¹ A more universalist tone, such as that of the Third Symphony, extended the consequences of modernism to all of humanity while constituting a “more open, pluralistic view that allows for bringing together all manner of disparate gestures and languages.” Only this “veritable inconsistency of styles, ideas, and languages,” Rochberg contended, could adequately wage war against narrow-minded zealotry, whether musical, religious, or political.⁴² And yet, questions remain: are indirect methods of commentary effective, or does their lack of specificity dilute and compromise their political intent? If a diversity of voices is allowed to speak concurrently, will the audience hear the message above the din?

Steve Reich: musical documentary and secular midrash

For Steve Reich, the appeal of documentary sources grew out of a period during which the composer reengaged his Jewish heritage and incorporated myriad Jewish texts in his compositions. As Antonella Puca notes, “the rediscovery of his Jewish background in the mid-1970s oriented [Reich's compositional] approach…in a new direction, one that aims at preserving the integrity of speech in terms both of its acoustic quality and of its semantic meaning.”⁴³ The apex of this process was Different Trains (1987), a piece that featured an autobiographical program:

In Trains, Reich digitally sampled excerpts from taped interviews and used them to create “speech melodies,” Reich's term for a type of musical transcription that attempts to replicate the distinctive rhythm, intonation, and inflection of human speech.⁴⁵ The process was distinctly linked to notions of musical ethnography and Holocaust witness, two testimonial forms that Reich equated with the concept of “musical documentary,” and took its departure from Reich's admiration of Béla Bartók, who had collected folk songs in his native Hungary and incorporated their melodic and rhythmic characteristics into his art music.

Archival evidence for Different Trains illustrates the degree to which Reich struggled with identifying the primary subject of the work, which originally held the working title “Triple Quartet/True Story.”⁴⁶ Although he contacted several Holocaust-related archives early in the process, Reich resisted the idea of writing a piece exclusively about the Holocaust. On the first page of his sketchbook, he contemplates initial actors for the piece:

He then considers several possibilities: a four-movement work integrating autobiographical voices (Reich's own voice; Virginia, his governess; and Mr. Davis, a Pullman porter) with those of Holocaust survivors; a three-movement work exploring the different sonic possibilities of trains and air-raid sirens; and a two-movement work featuring only the voices of survivors. Initially, Reich seems wary of connecting his own personal experience to that of Holocaust survivors. In an online work journal, he remarks with some weariness that “after much thought and some depression, I have come to the conclusion that this piece will be about the HOLOCAUST. Only. World War II. All my words, those of Virginia and those of Mr. Davis seem quite trivial…The openings which [I have] worked out so far also sound trivial.”⁴⁸ Three days later, Reich reverted back to his original idea and began contemplating how to create a contrapuntal fabric from his human subjects (the speech melodies) and his newly composed material.

Different Trains helped to move minimalism further from its postmodern origins as “intentionless music” that did not attempt “a calculated effect [or] paint a picture,” what Philip Glass described as “non-narrative.”⁴⁹ Different Trains possesses a narrative structure, distinct imagery, and compelling characters – all of which collaborate to present a vision of the Holocaust (and its after-impact) imagined by Reich. Even though he decided against incorporating his own voice as a speech melody, Reich functions as a speaking subject within Different Trains; his sequencing of the testimonial excerpts becomes a form of secondary witness to the Holocaust – a representation of his understanding of the event, its symbols, and its importance.⁵⁰ Such artistic control raises important questions about narrative and Holocaust testimony, in this case, who is the authoritative voice in Different Trains? If this was to be a “true story,” as the original working title of the piece suggests, whose story is it and can it ever be “true”? Moreover, how does the telling of that story affect the integrity and primacy of the other voices that appear in Different Trains?

The question of authority is key with regard to Holocaust testimony, as survivors have emerged in the postwar period as a new secular authority within Jewish culture. The rise of a post-Holocaust crisis of faith – in which the presence of God as “the ultimate Author” is often rejected in light of extreme Jewish suffering – favors a more postmodern, multi-vocal approach to Judaism in which secular voices, especially those of survivors, bear significant weight in theodic and cultural debates about God, the nature of suffering, and Jewish history. Reich asserts as much in the musical documentary that followed Different Trains, the video-opera The Cave (1993/2003), in which biblical passages from Genesis are interpreted through musical midrash, the rabbinical practice of scriptural interpretation. Traditionally, such exegesis is the domain of Jewish religious leaders, who possess the authority to examine and reinterpret the incongruities and questions raised by the Torah in an act of “commentary [as an] authorized form of creative thought.”⁵¹ In the first act of The Cave, however, Reich presents midrashic texts in counterpoint with critical commentary drawn from interviews with contemporary Israelis. For example, in the scene “Who is Abraham?” the midrash rabbah (non-legalistic biblical exegesis) is immediately followed by an exegetical collage created by Reich from a secular cast of intellectuals – a professor of Jewish art, a social worker, an archeologist, and a political satirist. These secular voices dominate the work, and the weight that Reich gives their opinions suggests their increased interpretational authority in a post-Holocaust world.

In an interview with Jonathon Cott, Reich acknowledges that the counterpoint between the primary voices (the interviewees) and the secondary voice (the composer) constitutes a key procedural component of his secular midrash. “The speech melody of each person,” he argues, “is a kind of musical portrait of that person. It's their melody…From their answers we edited out the rest of our libretto…The reality is that Abraham and the others only live in the words and thoughts of the living. [In] The Cave, they live in the words of the people we interviewed.”⁵² But, what ethical dimensions are raised when the musical process of secular midrash engages a historical event like the Holocaust rather than a biblical text? Reich's intervention – his use of the survivors’ voices to perform an authoritative act of secondary witness – raises several crucial questions about Holocaust representation and artistic license in the late twentieth century. Should the voices of survivors be held as sacred voices, or can they be manipulated to tell stories that are not their own? Can anyone be an interpretive authority, and if so, what dangers arise in the free incorporation of victimized voices into art? Can an artist ever assume the voice of another without repercussions? In a postmodern era, are any historical events sacred, that is, beyond material use?

Conclusion: a cavernous impossibility

As this sampling suggests, artistic engagements of the Holocaust raise more aesthetic and ethical questions than solutions. As Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg contend, the debate over Holocaust representation has come to signify one of the central paradoxes of postmodern historical interpretation. They explain that postmodernism compels one to “question the traditional understanding of the relationship between ‘facts,’ ‘representation,’ and ‘reality’…[But] if truth is discourse-institutional and context-dependent, if there is no final truth, but rather truths in the plural, are we really left with…anything goes?”⁵³ This concern figures heavily in the postwar debate over Holocaust aesthetics, which historian Alan Mintz describes as consisting of two basic positions: exceptionalist and constructivist.⁵⁴

Exceptionalists view the Holocaust as a unique tragedy comprised of essential historical “facts” that become distorted and manipulated through the process of artistic representation. As Michael Wyschogrod bluntly declared in 1975, “any attempt to transform the Holocaust into art demeans the Holocaust and must result in poor art.”⁵⁵ More recently, Berel Lang has specifically targeted postmodern relativism and its potential to negate the historical “truth” of the Holocaust. He argues that when everything becomes a matter of interpretation, it is possible for audiences to confuse figuration for historical “fact” or, even worse, to “distrust the tale as well as the teller – with no place else to turn.”⁵⁶ Elsewhere he explains:

Saul Friedlander shares Lang's concerns, worrying that “the equivocation of postmodernism concerning ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ – that is, ultimately, its fundamental relativism – confronts any discourse about [the Holocaust] with considerable difficulties.”⁵⁸

As Hayden White outlines below, constructivists ask the same questions as exceptionalists:

Unlike the exceptionalists, however, constructivists maintain that the Holocaust possesses no inscribed meaning beyond its factual core; its cultural and historical significance derive, instead, from its placement into postwar narratives, which constructivists see as the product of a dialogical relationship between event, artists, and their audiences. For White, Holocaust art is both a cultural representation of the genocide and a portrait of the artist's mode of understanding. Indeed, for constructivists the goals of representation could never be historical objectivism or literalism, notions rejected as cultural constructs themselves. Instead, artistic representations reveal contemporary relationships to the Holocaust, and their descriptive figuration becomes an undeniable marker of the relativity of Holocaust meaning within culture.

As with most debates, the “truth” lies somewhere between the poles, with postwar Holocaust representation emerging as a cavernous impossibility – resounding in its potential narratives and yet unable to approach the actual scope and horror of the genocide. As Martin Jay warns, the Holocaust “can never be made absolutely safe from either oblivion or distortion,” and thus requires “an institutional framework, however imperfect,…for critically judging our reconstructions.”⁶⁰ In these three case studies, the questions posed draw attention to the aesthetic limitations and failures of each representation, illustrating that none of them solve the representational quandary. Indeed, no representational act could. But, as Berel Lang astutely notes, limits can only be defined through perceived transgressions, which themselves raise questions about aesthetic appropriateness. Recalling Adorno's infamous dictum – “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – Lang concedes that artistic barbarism is sometimes necessary:

In closing, he observes that the limits of representation are just as culturally constructed and authored as the representations themselves. This leads him to wonder whether the limits even refer directly to the artistic product anymore, or have they become about “something else,…a psychological or biological impulse for boundaries and taboos, perhaps…an intrinsic incompleteness in all systematic structures.”⁶² Another impossible cavern to explore…