Reviewed by Gabriel Solis

Volume eight of the annual review The Jewish Role in American Life, published by the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life at the University of Southern California, is a welcome addition to the general literature on music and Jewish identity. It presents seven short articles collected by guest editor Josh Kun, all relating broadly to the topic of “Jews and American popular music.” The song is not the same, as the title of the volume says. Most readers who will turn to this little collection will approach it already feeling they have some handle on the topic of Jews and popular music, whether that means the cadre of Jewish songwriters from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim who wrote nearly the entire “Great American Songbook,” singer-songwriters like Carole King and Paul Simon who more or less made music in the 1960s what it was, or the Jewish hipsters from Mezz Mezrow to Lieber and Stoller to the Beastie Boys who made more than incidental contributions to black musical genres from early jazz to hip hop. Though these sorts of high points and familiar names provide points of reference throughout the essays, most readers will likely come away seeing things differently than they had. The great strength of the volume is in Kun’s editorial vision, having solicited a set of articles on topics that move beyond received expectations for the area of the Jewish contribution to American music. If there is a weakness, it may also be seen in Kun’s approach to editing the volume: there is a level of unevenness common to edited collections, and this one is no exception.

The articles in this collection are primarily historical in method, though one is ethnomusicological in orientation and one enacts a kind of autoethnography. Gayle Wald opens with a reading of what Michael Jackson meant to a Jewish girl “work[ing] out our incipient desires” in early 1970s suburban Philadelphia (3). As she says, “there is an immensely complicated story to be told here—about Jewish-American assimilationist desires, Jewish-American articulations of racial discourse in the United States, gendered narratives of Jewish-American success, and racialized expressions of gendered desire” (5). The significant focus on gendered and racialized elements of Jewish-American desire as mediated in music, whether in bedrooms or backrooms, ties a number of articles in the volume together, and thus makes Wald’s article a good starting point. Kun picks up both the theme of racially and sexually transgressive women’s performance in an article on singer-comedians Belle Barth and Pearl Williams, both of whom “worked blue” in after-hours rooms of the Jewish-American archipelago of New York, L.A. and South Florida in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This is crucial material, though it has been “left as a barely-acknowledged footnote” in histories of music and comedy. As Kun says, “The choice…for Jewish girls with Jewish noses, for Jewish women who are forty or fifty, not thirty or twenty, who speak with accents and use Yiddish…the choice was not between being a housewife or a Broadway star, between expressing Jewishness and repressing Jewishness, between expressing sexuality and repressing sexuality.  There was a third way…” (108).

The theme of racial crossing—or, put more plainly, the symbolic trifecta of blackness, whiteness and Jewishness—is part of Jody Rosen’s piece on “Jewface” sheet music illustration, Peter La Chapelle’s discussion of anti-black and antisemitic elements of Henry Ford’s support of old-time music and dance, Jonathan Pollack’s investigation of Yiddish in jazz songs, and David Kaufman’s essay on the “anxiety of Jewish influence” in Bob Dylan’s music. Rosen reminds us that while the imagery that typifies such song sheets as “Get a Girl with Lots of Money, Abie,” or “It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone” was so broadly stereotyped that it could very nearly have been picked up by Nazi propagandists a scant couple of decades later, “as genuine depictions of Jews—no joking!” they were a special case in the history of racial stereotype in American popular music: “the popular song trade was dominated by Jews, and Jewface music was, accordingly, largely a Jewish enterprise: songs by, of, and for Jews” (12-13). La Chapelle, by contrast, looks at one of the most straight-forward, and most regrettable, cases of anti-Semitism in the history of American popular music. Henry Ford’s support of old-time music and dance—the fiddle tunes, string bands, and contradancing that represented, to him and many others at the turn of the twentieth century, the pure Anglo-Saxon heritage of “real” Americans—was a way to stem the tide of black-cum-Jewish (or perhaps Jewish-cum-black) degeneration of America spreading, virus-like, through jazz. Pollack tells a more positive story in his essay “‘Ouvoutie Slanguage is Absolutely Kosher’: Yiddish in Scat-Singing, Jazz Jargon, and Black Music” which flips the script on a normative narrative of black-Jewish interactions in jazz. Rather than looking at Jewish adoptions and adaptations of black musical styles, he focuses on the numerous examples of African American performers’ uses of Yiddish in jazz songs. Sholom Secunda’s 1932 “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” figures prominently here, but Pollack goes beyond it to find multiple examples of Yiddish as part of hip slang, “employed as a secret code, for those ‘in the know’ to deploy in the presence of unknowing ‘squares’” (72). While the article’s title is not strictly accurate (nowhere does Pollack actually show an example of a jazz musician incorporating Yiddish into scat-singing), it is an engaging look at the double-edged quality of the language as a way for black musicians to signify “both parody and tribute to the multiple expressions of Jewish-black relations in the interwar and World War II years” (73).

The collection’s high points are truly excellent. La Chapelle’s article is immensely well-researched, and is a valuable intervention into an ongoing conversation about the nature of pre-World War II antisemitism in America, as much as into the limited question of whether Henry Ford was driven by antisemitism in particular arts patronage decisions (he was). The key question, and one that resonates over a range of American cultural consumption, is whether Ford’s and his close associates’ antisemitism matters in understanding the folk revival. La Chapelle’s answer, drawing on letters to Ford from fans of the music and on the larger history of the outcome of the revival, is complex and thought-provoking. Jeff Janeczko’s article on musical hybridity in the Avant-Klez music of the Lower East Side Radical Jewish Culture series is likewise a beautifully layered, thought-provoking work. Working with musical analysis and interviews with a number of the participants of this musical scene, Janeczko is able to tease out the radical implications, but also the status quo embodied in self-consciously hybrid musical projects that sometimes mediate the filters of race and genre, and sometimes highlight and reinforce them (162).

None of the articles in the volume really reaches the kind of level that Kun hits in his own contribution, however. Kun is a true virtuoso, and it shows, here as elsewhere, in both the breadth of his research, depth of his conceptualization of the topic, and sophistication of his writing. When he says that Barth and Williams were “working-class architects of the piano bar grotesque and yet also the unacknowledged queens of the cabaret carnivalesque, who translated the classic comic grotesque realism of ‘the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and reproductive organs’ into the domestic lexicons and relationship dramas of post-World War II Jewish life,” it is hard not to be impressed (94).

Unfortunately, this unevenness also throws into relief the moments when articles in the volume do not hit their marks. This is perhaps most clear in David Kaufman’s article on Dylan, precisely because Kun himself has published on Dylan’s “Talkin’ Havah Nagilah Blues.” The problem of Dylan’s Jewishness, which Kaufman quite rightly traces largely as a problem with his critics’ hamfisted attempts to read Jewishness as though it weren’t a complex thing for a popular musician in America, is, as Kun suggests, summed up brilliantly by Dylan in the “foreign song [he] learned in Utah.” “‘Talkin’ Havah Nagilah Blues’ [is] a song about not singing ‘Havah Nagilah,’ a performance about the refusal to perform” (Kun 2007, 66, quoted in this volume, 128).  Kaufman adds a useful summary of the critical response to questions of Dylan’s Jewishness, but on the central question of Dylan’s performances he goes no further than Kun’s previous analysis.

Rosen and Wald’s articles do not go as far as one would hope they might. Rosen has trod similar ground elsewhere, and while it is great to have reproductions of the song sheets he writes about collected in one place, ultimately I, at least, would have liked a stronger analysis. He claims, “if…the depictions on these song-sheets may seem at best politically incorrect and at worse [sic] a self-inflicted wound by Jews on Jews, it is useful to recall that a century or so ago it tweren’t [sic] necessarily so”; but while that must be true, it would be very helpful to know in more nuanced detail what they were to Jews a century or so ago (13). Likewise, Wald offers a framework, and the beginnings of what seems like a profoundly significant history of intimate listening, but her article is very short, and as she says, she “only gestures toward” the complexity the topic requires (5).

Ultimately this collection is bound to be quite useful to scholars from across a number of disciplines. Its greatest strength is certainly in the questions it raises, and in the breadth of interests it addresses. Clearly the essays speak to core questions in Jewish-American music scholarship; but beyond this, any scholar interested in American music should find much to learn here. Likewise, any scholar interested in music and gender will find a great deal to think about. The song is not the same. We may think we knew this history well, but we know it better for this volume.

Reference Cited

Kun, Josh.  2007.  “Abie the Fishman: On Masks, Birthmarks, and Hunchbacks.”  Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, ed. Eric Weisbard.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 50-68.

Gabriel Solis, Associate Professor of Music, African American Studies and Anthropology, University of Illinois

Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers. Stewart F. Lane. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7864-5917-9

Reviewed by Alisa Solomon

Like those Broadway musicals that are driven by deep emotion and a social conscience, intellectual books about Broadway musicals face a dilemma: how to be serious and popular. Indeed, books may have a harder time. From Showboat to Rent, musicals have managed to challenge audiences with questions about such issues as racism and AIDS even as they have filled the coffers of investors. But to whom is a book on Broadway addressed—to academic specialists or to die-hard show fans? Not that these categories are mutually exclusive (the best scholarship is typically driven by passion, after all), but they can represent vastly different cultures and interests. As publishers increasingly look for “crossover” projects—and as the academic study of musical theater expands—the clashing expectations of these disparate audiences can put some authors in a bind.

This predicament was brought to mind by the recent publication of two books that come from— and perhaps aim at—opposite ends of the spectrum. The author of Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers is the Broadway producer Stewart F. Lane, who (among other significant credits) was behind the 2004 revival of Fiddler on the Roof that starred Alfred Molina (later replaced by Harvey Fierstein). His compendium betrays no scholarly ambition: it makes no argument and does not unearth new information. But at a time when—as the funny opening number of this year’s Tony Awards put it—Broadway “is not just for gays and the Jews” any more, the book’s jaunty inventory of Jewish theater artists from the early days of the Yiddish stage to now may appeal to Broadway buffs who still enjoy some tribal flag-planting. In contrast, Philip Lambert brings to bear his expertise as a music theorist in his meticulous study of the song-writing team of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick in To Broadway, To Life!, the first full account of this music-and-lyric duo whose seven Broadway collaborations included Fiddler (1964). Lambert’s close analyses of Bock’s compositions may be lost on readers with little more than a rudimentary knowledge of music theory, and those looking for insight into the lives of Bock and Harnick outside the studio or the rehearsal hall will be disappointed. But those who appreciate why it’s the scores, not the men themselves, that are the main characters here will be richly rewarded.

Lambert identifies “the stylistic fingerprints of essentially all their subsequent works” as early as the mid-1950s, when Bock and Harnick first met. By then, both had written for various revues in New York, at out-of-town summer resorts, and for television, and Bock had written the score for the Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful (lyrics by Larry Holofcener). Lambert neatly summarizes the “traits and trends that would become their calling cards”:

Harnick emerged as a master lyric craftsman with an eye for detail, an ear for musical speech, a taste for unusual rhymes, and a nose for offbeat humor, often delivered with a touch of social consciousness. Bock had proven to be a prolific inventor with a seemingly endless supply of original, fertile musical ideas, a mastery of the complexities of style, and a focus on challenging conventional creative boundaries. (45)

Lambert uses a key word there, for as he devotes a chapter to each of the pair’s seven Broadway musicals over their fourteen-year partnership—among them, Fiorello!, She Loves Me, The Apple Tree, and The Rothschilds—the duo comes across, indeed, as consummate craftsmen. Artists, yes, but also showbiz pros who could make and shape a song to suit the dramatic purpose (a concern that deepened for both as their careers evolved) without getting precious about tunes that had to be left behind if they didn’t work within the context of the show. (Lambert quotes Harnick at one point comparing lyric writing to carpentry.) Bock and Harnick worked so specifically for each project—trying something new with each show they engaged—that they were never able to pull from their stash of “trunk songs” and retool them for another musical. For Fiddler, for example, they wrote more than 40 songs; 12 made it into the final version of the show. Their craftsmanship is also what enabled them to dash off dazzling new songs during on-the-road tryouts. To cite just two astonishing examples, “Do You Love Me?” and “Miracle of Miracles” from Fiddler were the products of deadline labors in a Detroit hotel room.

With their first show together, the short-lived The Body Beautiful (1958), the story of an aspiring prizefighter, Bock and Harnick settled on a working method they sustained through their partnership. Beginning independently, Bock would sketch some tunes—“musical guesses,” he called them—and send them to Harnick on a cassette. Meanwhile, Harnick would read as deeply as he could in the subject area related to the show and begin to hatch some notions for lyrics. He’d work with the tapes from Bock; soon he’d begin sending Bock lyrics that didn’t seem to fit any of his tunes, and Bock would compose in response. Back and forth they would go, each stimulated by the other. As their skills developed, and as they landed ever-larger projects, they began to work more holistically, writing lyrics and music that not only made appealing numbers, but that also built the dramatic action.

Lambert notes that Harnick says he didn’t really become fully attentive to a show’s book until She Loves Me (1963; book by Joe Masteroff), the team’s small, bright chamber musical based on Ernst Lubitch’s 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner. But, Lambert persuasively demonstrates, Bock and Harnick were already headed firmly in that direction with Fiorello! (1959; book by Jerome Weidman), their dizzyingly successful early effort that traces the rise of the beloved New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. (It shared that season’s best-musical Tony with Sound of Music and then won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.) Lambert explains how, for example, the opening number “On the Side of the Angels” works musically and verbally to establish character and set off the plot: Some of the mayor’s staff members sing, “Penniless and helpless / Ignorant and scared / He collects ’em all” and then new voices and melodies are added as some of those poor and downtrodden people seek assistance. The two groups sing together and, writes Lambert, “[t]he contrapuntal writing allows fleeting dissonance and momentary rhythmic entanglements” that “help bring out the contrast between the two parts, the clients and the staff.” In the song’s chorus, he continues, in the first two phrases,

prominent chromatic tones occur on the downbeats of the first and third full measures . . . and then return with heightened frequency and drama in bars 5-7 . . .  each resolving upward by half step to a chord tone. As these figures continue to appear throughout the song’s choruses, they repeatedly offer little moments of tension and release, little anxieties that are quickly whisked away, like a legal advocate protecting the rights of a client. (70)

And thus he continues, through the entire song. Lambert scrutinizes, too, the first-act show-stopper “Politics and Poker,” arguing that “similar chromatic accents” connect lyrics about the card game with those about  local power-brokering.

In addition to similar, thorough musical analyses of the shows that followed, Lambert also describes the duo’s non-Broadway gigs—among them, a television version of The Canterville Ghost (based on an Oscar Wilde novella), songs for a World’s Fair extravaganza, an eight-year run of numbers for Mayor John Lindsay to sing at an annual dinner for New York’s political reporters, and even tunes for Ford tractor and Ballantine beer commercials. Lambert briefly chronicles, too, their separate projects in the four decades after their partnership dissolved.

Fiddler on the Roof, as Lambert quite rightly states, stands as “the defining work of the Bock and Harnick partnership” and it properly receives his most detailed treatment. He shows, for example, how “counter-clockwise fifths progressions” in Tevye’s monologues “give an impression of searching for a home key, as a depiction of Tevye’s rambling questions and exclamations.” And he provides a thorough assessment of the show’s “musical roots,” demonstrating influences on Bock of Theodore Bikel’s recordings of Yiddish songs and of the Moiseyev albums of Russian folk music.

Lambert is less interested in how Bock and Harnick’s songs actually play in performance—how different actors interpret them, what emotion they evoke in audiences, and in general, as theater folks say, how they “work” on stage. (Neglecting the theatrical life of the songs sometimes leads him to miss how lyrics can be contradicted by action.) Still, in reading the scores so carefully and explaining how each Bock-and-Harnick show was built, he not only provides a vivid portrait of one of Broadway’s most important and beloved teams, he also brings to life the process of constructing a score for the integrated book musicals of mid-century. To Broadway, To Life! is one more way the vital new Oxford University Press series, Broadway Legacies, is enlarging the field of musical theater studies.

Less academically inclined readers might be more drawn to Lane’s book, an exuberant gush of appreciation for—by his count—Broadway’s 69 percent of composers, 70 percent of lyricists and 56 percent of librettists who are Jewish (at least as statistics available since 1947 have permitted him to calculate), but they would get more depth from Lambert, even if they skipped over the technical sections of musical analysis.

True to its subtitle, Jews on Broadway is a galloping survey, racing from Jacob Adler to Adam Guettel in less than 200 pages. Organized chronologically, it reads, essentially, as an annotated list of dozens of creative personalities, each described in a page or two (and sometimes less). Sections on many artists are shorter—and thinner—than a Wikipedia entry. For the most part, Lane does not consider in what way these artists related to their Jewish background or identity—or, indeed, what such an identity comprises. In the absence of any sustained or sophisticated discussion of the significance of being Jewish for Broadway artists or, indeed, for the art of Broadway, the book amounts to a theatrically-focused prose version of Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song”—a simple, prideful assertion of ubiquitous Jewish talent—but without the irony.

Jews on Broadway might function as a handy reference book, except that it is riddled with errors (and, sad to say, McFarland & Co. Publishers seems to have laid off all its copy editors). To cite just a few of myriad examples: Bock’s partner is called Sidney Harnick and subsequently referred to—twice—as Harnish. The opening date of Funny Girl is given, inaccurately, as 1965. Lane calls the Shylock play that Zero Mostel was working on when he died a musical; it was not. He describes Jerome Robbins as the original director of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but Robbins came in to help fix the show when it was in out-of-town tryouts. Egregiously, Lane claims that in Robbins’ appearance as a friendly witness before HUAC, he named Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford as Communists. Not true (though Gilford’s wife, Madeline Lee, was one of the people Robbins named). And so on. Broadway devotees thrive, I can personally attest, on inside stories, back-stage gossip, and even downright rumor. But that’s no excuse for getting the facts wrong. They matter—does it need to be said?—even in a book that does not purport to be scholarship.

Alisa Solomon, Columbia University

Vol. XVI: Heroes and Heroines: Jewish Opera

http://www.milkenarchive.org/volumes/view/16

Reviewed by Jeffrey Shandler

Editor’s Note: This essay represents the first in a series of reviews exploring the recently launched Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience, an online resource that incorporates and expands upon the Archive’s earlier CD series (published on the Naxos label from 2003-2006).

In the annals of Jewish music, is any genre as fraught as opera? In nineteenth-century Europe, this most elaborate of western art forms seduced and dazzled Jewish admirers from Theodor Herzl (whose visions of Zionism were inspired by Tannhäuser) to Emma Goldman (transfixed by a performance of Il Trovatore in Königsberg). The lure of opera for cantors became the stuff of legends (the story of Yoel-Dovid Strashunsky’s fall from grace when he abandoned the synagogue in Vilna for the opera house in Warsaw inspired works of fiction, theater, and film). Jewish opera composers became celebrities (Meyerbeer, Offenbach), and their musicianship the target of anti-Semitic attack (most famously, Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik). Opera production has long been a familiar home for Jews who converted (Mahler), intermarried (Otto Goldschmidt, the husband of Jenny Lind), or obscured their Jewishness (Rudolph Bing). Is it any wonder that the most renowned opera whose central figures are European Jews, Halévy’s La Juive (1835), is named for a character who, it turns out as the final curtain is about to ring down, isn’t, in fact, a Jewess?

Against this turbulent background, the emergence of operas composed by Jews on Jewish subjects in post-World War II America makes for a remarkable chapter in the history of opera as well as of American and Jewish culture. A sampling of these works can be heard in Volume XVI of the online Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience, titled “Heroes and Heroines: Jewish Opera.” This volume consists of four sets of selections, which offer excerpts from ten works by as many composers: David Tamkin’s The Dybbuk (1951), Robert Strassburg’s Chelm (1956), David Amram’s The Final Ingredient (1965), Abraham Ellstein’s The Golem (1965), David Samuel Adler’s The Wrestler (1972), David Schiff’s Gimpel the Fool (1975), Bruce Adolphe’s Mikhoels the Wise (1982), Elie Siegmeister’s Lady of the Lake (1985), Hugo Weisgall’s Esther (1993), and Paul Schoenfield’s The Merchant and the Pauper (1999). The attendant website provides brief musical samples gratis and full downloads for purchase, capsule biographies of the composers and performers, as well as photos and videos, mostly of the recorded performances, which are by musicians from the University of Michigan School of Music, the Seattle Opera, and the Eastman School of Music. The website’s more substantial auxiliary offerings include a lengthy introductory essay by Neil W. Levin, Artistic Director of the Milken Archive, and a half-hour oral history recorded with Amram.

What enabled this spate of operatic production? Levin notes that it is due, in part, to the advent of cultural institutions dedicated to producing new American operas on a small scale, notably the Opera Theatre of Westchester, New York, and the 92nd Street YM/YWHA in Manhattan, as well as the commitment of some major American opera houses to the commissioning of new works. These efforts figured in the robust expansion of opera as a fixture of public “high” culture in the United States during the postwar era, a remarkable development in the longer trajectory of Americans’ complex relationship with an art form long associated with European elitism.

The operas sampled in this collection also reflect signal shifts in Jews’ engagement with this art form.  If, in the nineteenth century, opera figured as a culture frontier for European Jews seeking entry into the modern Western world, the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the advent of opera as a proving ground for creating works of modern Jewish culture. Jewish composers began writing operas in Yiddish (Yaakov Ter’s Di yidishe melukhe, 1899) and Hebrew (Mikhail Gnesin’s Abraham’s Youth, 1921-1923). Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (left incomplete in 1932) epitomizes prewar German Jewish composers at their most avant-garde. And on the threshold of genocide, Jews composed and performed operas under—and in defiance of—Nazi persecution, most famously, the production of Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister’s children’s opera Brundibár in Terezín in 1942.

In American Jewish operas of the postwar era several impulses converge: a new American commitment to the virtues of public culture, expanded academic support for the training of opera performers and composers in the United States, and a shared interest among American Jewish artists in exploring Jewish texts and lore in dramatic form—and doing so with a general American audience in mind, as part of the nation’s mainstream high culture. This last impulse was not confined to opera.  At the same time that the earliest of these operas were composed, Jewish religious institutions began to produce original radio and television dramas for ecumenical series broadcast on national networks. In fact, Amram’s The Final Ingredient is based on one of these dramas, an original script by Reginald Rose about Jewish inmates in a Nazi concentration camp.[1]

This opera deals explicitly with the Holocaust, but its impact can be felt in the creation of these operas more generally. They exemplify a new awareness among American Jews of their postwar role as the world’s largest, most stable diaspora Jewish community, a status earned by tragic default. As part of an array of efforts to demonstrate new possibilities for Jewish culture in the wake of the Holocaust, these operas turn for inspiration to diverse Jewish source texts, from the Bible to events of recent history (not only the Holocaust but also the Stalinist suppression of Soviet Yiddish culture, in Adolphe’s Mikhoels the Wise), and are especially indebted to works of modern Yiddish literature: H. Leivik’s The Golem, Sh. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The scores of these operas likewise demonstrate a range of musical strategies, with some composers deliberately drawing on folk melodies or liturgy, others seeking a sound that is modernist and universal.

If these works have not become fixtures of contemporary opera repertoires or of American Jewish culture, they have garnered attention in the academy. This development can be key to inspiring new interest in these works not only for their artistic value but also as revealing artifacts of American and specifically American Jewish culture of the second half of the twentieth century. They are telling examples of the postwar search for America’s role in the realm of opera and of American Jews’ exploration of the possibilities of creating a Jewish “high” culture in the American context.

Uniting these works is a seriousness of purpose, as they address subjects of weighty moral significance and strive to make music drama that is respectable artistically. As a result, Weisgal’s atonal Esther has a cerebral earnestness that is far from the carnivalesque nature of traditional Ashkenazic Purim plays or the droll modern take on the Book of Esther in the Megile-lider (1967) by Yiddish poet Itzik Manger and composer Dov Seltzer. And the efforts at comedy in Strassburg’s Chelm feel somewhat ponderous—especially when compared to American Jewish composers’ and lyricists’ concomitant success in creating musical comedies for Broadway.

Placing these recordings online with auxiliary materials is a noteworthy development in the history of these operas its own right. To some extent, the online version of these recordings are comparable to boxed sets of recorded operas, which accompany the discs with booklets providing background on the opera’s creators, performers, and the work itself, including libretto, synopsis, and illustrations from productions. The first two sets of selections (from the operas by Ellstein, Strassburg, Tamkin, Schiff, Siegmeister, and Weisgall) are available as downloadable files or on compact discs; the latter come with booklets providing informative background by Levin on the composers and operas, including plot summaries. The online versions of these operas (and the works in the third and fourth sets, which are only available online—the operas by Schoenfeld, Amram, Adler, and Adolphe) offer this information as well, but it is difficult to find; it entails a fair amount of clicking on different categories, rather than making it all readily available in one place. The flexibility that may be gained by atomizing this information and presenting it though a network of hyperlinks is, to my mind, offset by the loss of offering all material relevant to each opera as a unit.

Given that opera is a musical genre realized on the stage, I found the visual materials limited.  For the most part, the photos and videos on the website do more to vaunt the Milken recordings than to provide substantive background on the inception of these works, their performance history, or scholarly analysis. More documentation of how these operas have been staged (e.g., photographs or drawings of sets and costumes or interviews with directors, designers, and performers who realized these operas in the theater) would be especially welcome.

Levin’s introductory essay seeks to situate these ten individual operas within a larger context, and demonstrates the potential that the online presentation of this material has as an advantage over individual boxed recordings.  While the essay spends rather too much time on the impossible question, “What’s a Jewish opera?” which revisits shopworn debates on what’s Jewish and what’s opera, the background that Levin provides on the works at hand and the context of their creation is much more helpful. Given how little scholarship has been done on these operas, individually or as a group, this essay is an important start that, at the same time, begs for more information and analysis.

Placing these recordings online can make these operas more readily accessible not only to the dedicated scholar or enthusiast but also to the curious browser, who might come across them in the course of pursuing an interest in the composers, performers, source works, history of American music, or modern Jewish culture, among other possibilities. Posting these recordings together with auxiliary materials can further enrich these interests. Moreover, by providing these supporting images, videos, and texts on a website, there is the potential to expand these offerings, especially artistic responses and scholarly analyses, over time. These recordings provide a compelling point of entry into a largely unfamiliar chapter of American Jewish music. The works sampled in this volume are among the most elaborately conceived performance works in which American Jewish artists have sought to position Jewish culture—literature from the Hebrew Bible to the work of modern American writers, sacred and folk music, people, events, and ideas of the Jewish past—forthrightly as a source of creative inspiration for a general public. The recordings in Heroes and Heroines should inspire more interest in these compositions and more reflection on their place in history.

Note

[1] See Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches:  Televising the Holocaust (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 64-69.

Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University

Eatala: a Life in Klezmer (Barry Dornfeld & Debora Kodish, 2011). Philadelphia Folklore Project. 37 min.

Reviewed by Mikel J. Koven

Music documentaries are difficult creatures to discuss. How does one approach them? Should the evaluation of any documentary be based on its cinematic principles, that is, as a film? Or should discussion be limited to an evaluation only of the documentary’s content? Music documentaries complicate the discourse further: is this a biography film, charting the history of a band’s development? A film documenting a particular event, like a tour or particular concert? Or is the film exploring a particular ethnomusicological idea, a filmed essay on a music topic? All of these questions are up in the air when discussing any music documentary film, and one hopes that particular films will focus on one of these potential discourses. But, alas, that almost never happens.

Erik Greenburg Anjou’s The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. On Holy Ground covers tremendous ground trying to be, simultaneously, a history of the New York-based klezmer revivalist band The Klezmatics; a documentary of The Klezmatics’ 2007 tour of Poland; an exploration of the significance of Yiddishkeyt and its revival over the past twenty years; and a document of the band’s 2006 project of recording its first all-English album, Wonder Wheel, an album of unrecorded songs written by Woody Guthrie (who had a Jewish grandmother, Aliza Greenblatt). Because Anjou tries to cover so much content, each of the topics or themes he touches is never satisfactorily developed.

While the film is professionally made and “looks good,” what is missing from it is any organizing principle for its content. As a bio-doc, On Holy Ground is probably at its most successful. To simply tell the story of The Klezmatics, from the group’s founding in the Yiddish revival movement of the late 1980s in New York City through their 2007 Grammy award for Best Contemporary World Music Album for Wonder Wheel, followed by the collapse of the group’s label (Jewish Music Group [JMG]), and the possibility of the band’s breakup with founding member Frank London taking a teaching job, the movie is at its safest and most prosaic.

The rise of The Klezmatics is properly contextualized in the Yiddishkeyt revival of the 1990s, with ethnic Jews (predominantly in North America) rediscovering their Jewish identity and recasting traditional Jewish values (specifically Jewish social consciousness) into cultural products. We are given solid ethnographic data on the importance of “klezmer” music (via The Klezmatics) as a conduit of those cultural values. Even non-Jewish members of the band, like the Quaker-raised Paul Morrissett, notes they were drawn to Jewish (Ashkenazi) traditional music because of the cultural values that music conveyed. The Klezmatics’ blend of traditional Ashkenazi music with contemporary jazz and rock-infusions has been keeping the band current for more than 20 years.

Ethnomusicologist and music critic Bob Cohen notes at one point that The Klezmatics “are a power band. They’re not heavy metal, they’re heavy Yiddish.” The problem is that this particular story is about 15 years too late: when I was doing my doctoral research in the mid-1990s, the Yiddishkeyt revival was in full swing. If this story was told then, it would have been exciting and relevant. In 2010, it’s just yesterday’s kugel.

In 2005, The Klezmatics released Brother Moses Smote the Water, a live album recorded with Joshua Nelson. Nelson’s presence, the film claims, symbolically connects The Klezmatics’ Ashkenazi roots music with the musical traditions descended from  Ethiopian Jews; on a practical level, it adds African-American gospel music with Jewish themes to the group’s repertoire. The inclusion of Nelson’s music within the Klezmatics’ own style of contemporary klezmer demonstrates how this band is able to explore and push new musical boundaries. A fresher approach to the documentary would have been to explore, in more detail, these ethnomusicological fusions that The Klezmatics are known for.

On Holy Ground also discusses the band’s 2006 project of recording some of Woody Guthrie’s Jewish influenced songs. Guthrie himself had Jewish blood through his maternal grandmother, Aliza Greenblatt, and he explored, but never recorded some of that musical legacy. The resulting album, Wonder Wheel, won the band its only Grammy award. Despite the award, the album’s distributor, Jewish Music Group (JMG), went bankrupt and the Los Angeles-based press at the time seemed completely uninterested in promoting the album. Again, there is a bigger story here that doesn’t get sufficiently developed.

Between making Wonder Wheel and its win at the 2007 Grammy awards, The Klezmatics did an extensive tour of Poland, their first outside of Warsaw. The footage included in the film expresses the prejudices of the band in their first proper encounter with modern Poland; prejudices typical of North American Jewry’s first encounter with the landscape of the Holocaust. The Klezmatics play the White Stork synagogue in Wrocław and on the streets of Krakow. What they discover in playing Poland is that their Ashkenazi music isn’t received as the lost music of the Shoah/Holocaust, which is what they anticipated, but that modern Poles feel partially robbed of their own culture by the absence of a living Jewish presence in the country. But this story isn’t sufficiently developed within the film either.

The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, while interesting enough as a passive music documentary, touches on a number of significant topics; but because these aren’t developed, the film feels somewhat pointless. What was director Anjou’s purpose in making the film? Well, considering after watching it, I went onto iTunes and bought copies of Wonder Wheel and Brother Moses, the film works as a feature-length advertisement for selling the band’s albums. But not much more.

Eatala: A Life in Klezmer is a very different kind of documentary, and one more in keeping with the idea of a“filmed ethnomusicological essay.” A “folklore film,” as Sharon Sherman defined it, is a film made by folklorists or about explicitly folklore topics.[1]  Eatala’s filmmakers, Barry Dornfeld and Debora Kodish, are folklorists making films for (primarily) folklorists. Whereas Anjou, a professionally trained filmmaker, has made a fairly bland, ticks-all-the-right-boxes kind of documentary, Dornfeld and Kodish are more interested in their film’s focus on family folklore.

Eatala has at its centre the remarkable Elaine Hoffman Watts, a sixty-something klezmer percussionist who was trained by her grandfather Joey Hoffman and her father Jacob, and who broke new ground as the first female drummer in the Philadelphia klezmer scene. Just as her father trained her, Elaine has continued to train her own children, and now also trains her grandchildren, in keeping the klezmer tradition alive in Philadelphia. She still regularly performs with her daughter and others from the Philadelphia klezmer scene.

While Eatala is a bio-doc, like aspects of On Holy Ground, the film is more than simply Elaine’s story despite its 37-minute running time. Ashkenazi traditional music is the focus of the Hoffman family, but the film is equally about how that family folklore is passed down through the generations; that is, while the film’s music is at the center, we are given insight into family histories, family traditions, family immigration stories, and so forth.

In addition, the klezmer tradition in the Hoffman family is demonstrated as not entirely stable and conservative—each new generation adapts the music to the contemporary cultural context. At one point, Hoffman-Watts’ daughter Susan notes that their repertoire consists of two versions of the songs, one “trad” and, it is implied, the other more “modern.” We never discover what the other form of the song is—what the family members call it—but the implication is that it is a more contemporary variant on the “trad” number. In many of the sequences in the Hoffman home, the jamming musicians are cross-generational, as older members teach this musical tradition to the younger ones. Eatala is a lovely demonstration of that process of musical transmission.

Eatala is a bio-doc, but as a folklore film it offers a much more nuanced and textured representation of cultural context than On Holy Ground. And as such, it is the more interesting film.

Note

[1] Sharon Sherman, Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video and Culture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), p. 63.

Mikel J. Koven, University of Worcester (United Kingdom)

Reviewed by Karen Painter

Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna expands upon K. N. Knittel’s pathbreaking work on the reception of Mahler’s conducting, published in 19^th Century Music in 1995 and 2006. The book’s trajectory has a clear rhetorical strategy, moving from explicit and offensive accounts of the Jew’s body to, in my view, speculation on how musical discourse served the cause of antisemitism, while concluding with ruminations on anti-Jewish prejudice in the United States today. Ironically, the resistance Mahler faced as a Jew (or merely perceived that he faced, Daniel Jütte has recently argued in a paper on Jews at court) in aspiring to become director of the Court Opera, is all but ignored. Rather, Knittel moves into the important but murky subject of criticizing music because it sounds Jewish.

The introduction (chapter 1) positions Knittel’s work in the crossfire of musicological debates over antisemitism and studies of Nazism, with an ambitious thesis: “For those critics writing while Mahler still lived in Vienna, Jewishness was the fact that determined how Mahler would behave, look, speak, walk, and conduct, and how he would write music” (49). Conceding that “a number of Mahler’s Viennese critics were Jewish,” Knittel suggests that the Jewish critics “desperately wanted to show their understanding of the dominant discourse” (8), and therefore participated in antisemitic rhetoric. In fact, the majority of critics she consulted (based on her listing on pp. 169-172) were Jewish. Chapter 2 unfolds in captivating detail, yet its case studies do not speak to one another—from antisemitic portrayals of the Jew’s body, but not Mahler’s (section 1), to the essay accompanying the 1922 edition of Mahler photographs, penned by the composer’s friend and collaborator Alfred Roller, which Knittel dismisses as defensive in portraying Mahler as Aryan (section 2), to the vitriol of Alma Schindler, antisemitic even in her attraction to Mahler and other Jews (section 3).

Chapter 3 examines Richard Wagner’s article “Das Judentum in der Musik,” published anonymously in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850 and in a revised form, under his name, as a brochure in 1869. Knittel believes that the Wagner text became “a handbook or guide for describing the music of Jewish composers” at the fin de siècle (50). Unfortunately, she does not engage with the extensive German-language literature on the reception of Wagner’s essay. How might critics have encountered a text that was, according to Jens Malte Fischer, reprinted only once before the Third Reich—and that was in Weimar in 1914, four years after Mahler’s death? Consulting the original article in a journal from a half century earlier, or tracking down the essay in the fifth volume of Wagner’s collected writings (did newspaper staff or critics themselves purchase the complete writings?), implies a more specialized readership. Moreover, given its negative reception in 1869, what led critics to turn to Wagner’s vocabulary and claims? The only commentary I know did not appear until 1920, and from a rightwing nationalist press (penned by from Karl Grunsky, of similar political and aesthetic inclinations).[1]

Knittel’s two longest chapters contribute important archival material to fin-de-siècle Vienna reception studies. Chapter 4 examines the reactions to Mahler’s symphonies—interestingly, not his Lieder. It was the successful premiere of the Kindertotenlieder, for example, that led some reviewers to consider Mahler a composer, not a conductor who composed. His expressive and masterful control of the German language, along with the vivid yet restrained orchestration, showed Mahler’s “German” side, as proponents later put it, stressing the balance between Mahler as Jew and as German. Knittel, moreover, limits herself to the first performances, whereas subsequent performances—which implied that Mahler’s symphonies might become established in the repertoire—incited the harshest reviews by critics such as Robert Hirschfeld. Her bold move was to include a chapter on Richard Strauss, whose music faced similar charges as Mahler’s, despite the fact that he was not Jewish: chapter 5 documents in rich detail the Viennese reception of Strauss’s tone poems and the comparisons critics made between Mahler and Strauss during the weeks in November and December 1904, when Viennese audiences heard six performances of their music.

The brief conclusion urges a re-examination of more recent commentators, especially Theodor Adorno, as perpetuating the same antisemitic tradition, even as they embraced Mahler’s music. Knittel launches into the chapter via a long anecdote about a recent plane trip she found “excruciating” due to the reactions of fellow passengers towards a group of orthodox Jews that included a family with two babies and a toddler, whose car seats forced an inconvenient row change. The details Knittel recounted suggest to me less that “the Jew is still . . . subject to the same ridicule that they have endured for centuries” (160) but rather underline the subjectivity and therefore immensely complicated nature of discerning antisemitism, in both contemporary life and in fin-de-siècle music criticism.

*  *  *

Knittel’s modus operandi is to appose statements from concert reviews with passages from “Das Judentum in der Musik,” yet in ways that can be contrived. Hans Liebstöckl observed about Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, “The right mood is missing, and so too the tenderness, happy inwardness, and the calm of creation” (my translation). The raw intensity of the symphony, perhaps with the exception of the Andante, might reasonably provoke such a description. To me, pace Knittel (84-85), Liebstöckl does not “echo” Wagner’s attack on the “prickling unrest” in Jewish music. Further on, Knittel argues that Liebstöckl’s straightforward criticism that music quotes from other works can “be seen as illustrating Wagner’s assertion that Jews hurl together diverse forms and styles from every age and every master” (92). The one-to-one correspondence seems impoverished, missing for example the resonance with the more general nineteenth century tradition of criticizing musical allusions (as Christopher Reynolds calls them).

Knittel devotes the first section of chapter 4 to the debate between program music and absolute music—which arose before and independent of Wagner’s antisemitism. This was an important issue for Mahler’s early reviewers but, so far as can be discerned from the excerpts Knittel provides, did not provoke any Jewish stereotyping. However, she draws a parallel between the criticism of hidden program music and the allusion to Jewish deceit in the original, unpublished ending of Thomas Mann’s “Blood of the Walsungs.” (In that story, Siegmund [who is Jewish] boasts of “robbing the non-Jew,” his future brother-in-law, by consummating his passion with his sister—a passage that the author duly changed after the editor objected.) The section concludes with a diversion from the book’s otherwise tight argument: Knittel references commentators finding “hidden” programs in the music of Berg—who was not Jewish—in the years following the 1976 discovery of a program to the Lyric Suite.

At various points, “Blood of the Walsungs” serves as context for interpreting Mahler’s critics. Knittel correctly identifies the story as from 1905. Yet while this date is relevant to Mann’s biographers, or historians for whom a work reflects a general “spirit” (or Geist) of its generation, the text itself did not influence views towards Jews at the fin de siècle. Mann withdrew the story shortly before its 1906 publication in Berlin. A bootleg copy, compiled by a bookkeeper’s apprentice in Munich after the Berlin publisher used the discarded page proofs as packing paper, had a very limited circulation. Even the first edition hardly warrants a place in cultural history: Mann authorized 530 copies, and for private sale only. The first public access to the story was in 1931, in French translation, and not until 1960 in German.[2]

At other points, too, one wishes for more care with sources. Although far-flung historical examples are informative to the musicologist, how relevant to a study of fin-de-siècle Vienna are post-World War I antisemitic comments by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hitler, which Knittel, in a move that most will find jarring, places side by side on p. 60? Certainly Wittgenstein, given his idiosyncratic schooling, extreme wealth, and Jewish heritage, and Hitler (whose anti-Semitism, according to recent research, only became virulent after World War I)[3] are hardly representative. Elsewhere, Knittel juxtaposes Wagner’s rant against Jewish creativity with a question posed by the French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (91, but missing from the index), which likewise asked whether Jewish achievements were merely derivative. In fact, Leroy-Beaulieu’s question is rhetorical; the same passage reveals a much more complex view of the relationship between Jewish identity and creativity: “Here we must beware of confounding the Jew with the Jewish race, the originality of a nation with the faculties of an individual. Because Israel as a people, as a race, seems no longer to give evidence of a national genius, it does not follow that the Jew, as an individual, as a modern Frenchman, Englishman, or German, is always completely lacking in originality and spontaneity.”[4]

Occasionally, a mistranslation contributes to what I see as a tendency to exaggerate or inject anti-Semitism into negative reactions to modern music. For example, the idiomatic expression “auf kaltem Wege” (“in a cold style”) refers to effort or strain. Thus, in asserting that “Mahlers Sinfonien sind auf kaltem Wege erzeugt,” Max Vancsa does not “state that Mahler’s symphonies are ‘cold.’” Vancsa—like virtually every early commentator—did not like the Sixth Symphony. Is Knittel justified in concluding that the “‘moral’ of Vanca’s review is  . . . ; Mahler will reveal himself eventually as a Jew—by writing banal or second-hand melodies, with orchestration—no matter how hard he may try to write a ‘normal’ symphony” (91)? While such explanations may not be entirely satisfactory, they nonetheless repeatedly provoke the important question: what constituted antisemitism for the generation of music critics active circa 1900?

*  *  *

Quite apart from its sometimes idiosyncratic take on antisemitism, the book will stimulate lively debates within the field of reception studies, specifically, the parameters for analyzing concert reviews, as opposed to other texts. Given the extended length of these reviews, are we justified in extrapolating a critic’s views beyond what s/he articulated? Julius Korngold, an assimilated Jew, supporter of Mahler, and writer for the authoritative Neue Freie Presse, is raised as an example of a critic who “reveals” that Mahler’s “work . . . failed as a totality” (85) on the basis of the following reservation: “The more precisely Mahler strives for an outwardly classical form, the more—we will not continue this statement.” Ambivalence, however, is a common reaction to new music. A related challenge is determining what role the particular musical work might have had in promulgating certain vocabulary or mindset: might a genuine response to music be confused with antisemitism? My own encounter with the Sixth Symphony is similar to Korngold’s. Korngold’s expressive language—hearing a mood of “realism” and “nerve-churning tensions,” and observing that the score lacks the “variety and vigor of invention”—seems authentic and appropriate, particularly at a first hearing of an immensely complicated score. It does not necessarily reflect antisemitism on the part of this assimilated Viennese Jew. Yet according to Knittel, Korngold here “gives the impression of not really knowing what he is trying to say, or what problems he really finds with the music” (86). Musical description is necessarily imprecise. The question remains:  when does expressive language fail to serve the task of the critic and instead become an arsenal of antisemitism?

Knittel is explicit about her approach to concert reviews. “I wish to emphasize my premise that early reviewers were reacting not to his music but rather to the figure of Mahler” (13). How can we show that critics shirked their professional responsibility in order to convey reactions to a composer’s identity, rather than to a new musical work? Critic Robert Hirschfeld’s perceptions of expressive rupture and radical contrast in Mahler’s music seem accurate—only I interpret these as virtues, not flaws. Negative reactions, cast in vivid journalistic prose, often evoke one stereotype or another. Thus the very same description demonstrates, in Knittel’s view, that Hirschfeld is claiming that Mahler’s music, “like the Jews themselves, can only ‘pose’” (136). But can’t one read Hirschfeld’s comparison of Mahler to George Bernard Shaw within this review as defusing any notion of troping Mahler as Jew? Likewise, Vansca’s attack on Mahler, quoted at length, compares the opening movement of the Third Symphony to a painting by his Belgian contemporary, the neo-Impressionist Théo van Rysselberghe. This maneuver, if anything, averts any antisemitism by comparing the modernist composer to a non-Jewish modernist painter.

Whereas Knittel deliberately contests the very notion of a reception history that seeks to disentangle political differences between critics and newspapers, her alternative may be extreme to others: she links ideas without tracing particular lines of influence. A more general problem with cultural studies that focus on artistic products is that the aesthetic dimension as such often disappears. How did critics actually hear this music, and how did its novelty affect their ability to comprehend and judge? Given the title of her book, it is surprising that Knittel does not address the phenomenon understood as viewing music, which was one way of criticizing Mahler’s vivid orchestration—the bold colors that allegedly distracted listeners from the more spiritual content of music. Although her interests veer towards a political reading, the very sources she quotes generously, with German original in the footnotes, will inspire further consideration of how this generation of highly trained critics captured powerfully the novel sounds of music that we still find gripping today. 

Knittel’s book, or any study of anti-Semitism in musical reception, prompts us to ask the basic question: is it possible to criticize music (by a Jew) without being accused of antisemitism?  Vancsa accuses Mahler of being a performer who has technical mastery but lacks genuine originality: I, too, have identified this dichotomy with antisemitic claims about Mahler. But then as now, listeners and critics should be free to reject music on aesthetic grounds. Yet whatever one’s methodological quibbles—and mine are numerous—the book stands as a major contribution to Mahler scholarship, an effective contextualization in artistic, literary, and political trends. Lucid and written with verve, the book is a pleasure to read and will spark an important debate.

[1] Karl Grunsky, Richard Wagner und die Juden, Deutschlands führende Männer und das Judentum, vol. 2 (Munich:  Deutscher Volksverlag, 1920); the book was praised as a harbinger of National Socialism by Hans Gansser, “Die musikalische Erneuerungsbewegung vor der deutschen Revolution,” Zeitschrift für Musik (Sept. 1935): 1020.

[2] John Whiton, “Thomas Mann’s Wälsungenblut: Implications of the Revised Ending,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 25, no. 1 (1989): 37-38.

[3] Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War (Oxford: Oxford and New York, 2010).

[4] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel among the Nations: a Study of the Jews and Anti-Semitism, trans. Frances Hellman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1895), pp. 240-250.

Karen Painter, University of Minnesota

Reviewed by Israel J. Katz

When I was invited to review this book, I was under the impression that it was written by an ethnomusicologist, given that it was advertised by its publisher under the categories Judaica, Ethnomusicology, and Spanish Traditions, and by a bookseller under Ethnomusicology, Sephardic songs, and Jewish music. To my surprise, I learned that its Mexican-born author obtained her university degrees in the fields of Latin-American Literature (Licenciatura from the Universidad Iberoamericana)[1] and Comparative Literature (earning both her masters degree and doctorate from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Even the title of her masters thesis, “Los símbolos de la naturaleza en los cantos judeo-españoles: una visión de la lírica popular hispánica [‘The symbols of nature in Judeo-Spanish song; a view of the Hispanic popular lyric’],” completed in 2003, and that of her doctoral dissertation, “Simbología poética y visión del mundo en los cantos judeo-españoles [‘Poetic symbolism and worldview in Judeo-Spanish song’],” submitted in 2006, clearly indicate that both deal solely with the lyrical/ poetic content of the songs she examined.[2] And, whereas both furnished the material for the monograph under review, one can only surmise that the confusion caused by referring to the book under review as an ethnomusicological work arose from commencing its title with Cantos Judeo-españoles.

Nonetheless, Cantos judeo-españoles, as expounded in her rather lengthy introduction, is primarily a study of the songs associated with the varied stages of the Jewish life cycle whose lyrics have nurtured the spiritual life of the Sephardic Jews throughout their history. Taken as a whole, as Dr. Hamui Sutton believes, these time-honored lyrics reveal, even in their diversity, the ritualistic practices, symbols, ethical/ideological values, and beliefs which reflect their worldview. To understand the Hebraic and secular beliefs embedded in their lyrics, she examined their origins from 1) the laws and narratives obtained from their sacred books; 2) from the poetic traditions they absorbed during their Iberian coexistence among Christian and Moslems, prior to their Expulsion from Spain in 1492 (and from Portugal in 1497); and 3) and from what they absorbed from the cultures among whom they settled (throughout the Ottoman Empire and Morocco) after the Expulsion.

The rituals of Sephardic communities, the author claims, demonstrated social hierarchies (positions of power, gender roles, and recognition), illustrated life transitions (with their attendant responsibilities), and illuminated Judaic values. The symbols expressed in their lyrics represented messages of logical and coherent discourse that constitute a source of religious identity and cultural cohesion. By interpreting these lyrics, one could construct a rather unified worldview. To broaden her discussion concerning rituals and symbols, Dr. Hamui Sutton relied on anthropological concepts proposed by Arnold van Gennep and Mary Douglas. For her interpretation of the Jewish religious symbols, she turned to the researches of Manuel Alvar, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Michael Molho, Joshua Trachtenberg, Vicki L. Weber, and Susana Weich-Shahak. And, for explaining the varied structures of the Hispanic lyric and its Iberian antecedents (from both Arabic and Christian lyrical and epic sources), Margit Frenk’s prolific researches proved most useful.

Hamui Sutton posed eight questions to guide her study (17), none of which addressed music. Why she did not clarify her use of the terms canto and canción, nor their interchangeability, is questionable, even though the former appellative has for long been considered traditional. Only later, under the subheading “Oral tradition and the Judeo-Spanish lyric” (21-40), does she discuss the origin of the canto (22), followed by an  explanation of the popular lyric genre from both the diachronic and synchronic perspective (20-21), as well as her distinction between the revered cancionero and Romancero, i.e., corpora of Hispanic songs and ballads, respectively (22). Her sparse allusions to music are unclear, yet she touches on the problem of contrafaction, the suiting of traditional lyrics to foreign tunes, to which exiled Sephardic communities were exposed (25-26).[4] Inasmuch as the linguistic components of the Castilian-based Judeo-Spanish lyrics exhibited pre- and post-Expulsion borrowings from Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages spoken in the Ottoman Empire, Judeo-Spanish remained remarkably hermetic and well preserved. Hebraisms were injected mainly in romances and liturgical songs with religious content. Yet, what I found instructive was her discussion of Judeo-Spanish and its alternate appellatives Ladino, judezmo, and haketia (in Morocco), whose usages she distinguished from linguistic, geographical, and historical perspectives (34-40). From here she proceeded to the heart of her study (presented, surprisingly, in two chapters).

Chapter I ([41]-93) deals with the intertextual relationships in the Judeo-Spanish lyric and the ideological influences that the Spanish [Sephardic] Jews assimilated. Divided in two sections, the first ([41]-68) concerns Judaism, the official religion, and its popular interpretations; the second (68-93), daily practices for counteracting evil spirits. From the popular lyrics, extracted from their daily practices, she explains the discrepancies she encountered between the official and domestic practice of religion, and examines popular interpretations of certain Halachic laws (prescribed in the Mishna) that indicate rules of behavior, ideas, and attitudes supported by a Supreme Being.

In the second chapter ([95]-274), Hamui Sutton delves into the customs, ceremonies, and rituals of the life cycle, interpreting their respective phases through the lyrics that best convey them. Thus, the chapter’s subsections are devoted to 1) La parida ([95]-126), songs relating to birth; 2) Circuncisión [Heb. Brit Milah] (126-65), the ritual performed on the male child on the eighth day after his birth, signifying man’s covenant with God; 3) Bar mitzvah (165-73), the religious ceremony representing the transition from childhood to adulthood, performed as closely as possible to the male child’s thirteenth birthday, according to the Hebrew calendar; 4) La boda (173-204), the ritual of the wedding, beginning with the engagement, and followed by the varied social and preparatory stages leading up to and including the nuptial ceremony; 5) Baño ritual (204-33), the ceremony of the ritual bath, in which the bride is immersed in water on the day or days prior the wedding (the water symbolizes the purification of the body and soul. Here the prime focus centers on the young bride’s transition to womanhood, expressed in an emphatically erotic manner); and 6) Cantos de muerte o endechas (233-74), being the lamentations or dirges addressed to the bereaved as expressions of sadness and condolence. The customs and rituals centering around death, the cleansing and preparation of the corpse for burial, the guarding of body to ward off unwanted spirits, and mourning practices are particularly interesting from the standpoint of Jewish law.

In her conclusion, Dr. Hamui Sutton summarizes her discourse, emphasizing what she considered to be the most relevant aspects of her presentation.

The cantos, then, which she failed to delineate in her study, constitute all the genres (canciones, coplas, endechas, romances, etc., including lyrical and liturgical songs), whose lyrics/verses served as illustrations for the topics under consideration. All who are familiar with this tradition know that each of these genres was sung, for the most part strophically (mainly as distichs and quatrains; some with refrains), to tunes that were transmitted orally for countless generations, but whose geographical provenience and temporal exactitude have proven difficult to ascertain. Had Dr. Hamui Sutton provided an index or concordance citing (in alphabetical order) the incipits (first lines) of the lyrics/ texts she included throughout her study, indicating as well their respective genres, such an addition would have served as an invaluable tool for seeking further tune variants and versions in other compilations and studies bearing notated Judeo-Spanish tunes and lyrics. It should also be mentioned that, depending on extravagance, additional musical entertainment (instrumental and dance) could have embellished any of ceremonies and rituals discussed.

The bibliography, comprising 118 works (mainly in Spanish, with only eighteen in English), indicates 2004 [i.e., Tractenberg’s reedition of his 1939 study] as the latest reference she examined, which suggests that nothing more was read between her thesis and dissertation (including the publication under review). Among the Hispanists whom she drew upon for material concerning traditional Hispanic poetry were Asensio, Díaz Roig, Piñero Ramírez, and especially Frenk. For Judeo-Spanish traditional poetry, she relied on Alvar and Bénichou for the Moroccan; Anahory Librowicz, Benmayor, and Molho, for the Eastern; and Armistead and Silverman, Díaz-Mas, and Weich-Shahak for both traditions.[3] It would be inappropriate to append a list of items she should have consulted; still, she would have profited greatly from reading chapters II and III entitled “Judaic women: their family ceremonies (22-41) and “Judaic women: their family ceremonies (42-72) in the second volume of Lucy M.J. Garnett’s classic study, The Women of Turkey and Their Folklore (London: David Nutt, 1891); the introduction in Moshe Attias’s Cancionero Judeo-Español: Canciones populares en Judeo-Español    (Jerusalem: Centro de Estudios sobre el judaismo de Salónica, Tel Aviv, 1972), and  Eli Shaul, Folklor de los judios de Turkiya (Istanbul: Isis, 1994).

Although much has been written on this subject, Dr. Hamui Sutton’s views and interpretations are worth pursuing.

[1] For her Licenciatura (1992-1997), she produced a thesis on “[Horacio] Quiroga, [Alejo] Carpentier, [Juan] Rulfo y [Jorge Luis] Borges. Un acercamiento a cuatro cuentos latinoamericanos.”

[2] Surely material from this study was included in “Cantos judeo-españoles en los rituales del nacimiento [‘Judeo-Spanish Songs in the rituals of birth’],” the paper she read before the 14th British Conference on Judeo-Spanish Studies (University of London, June 2006).

[3] See particularly Weich-Shahak’s “Las canciones sefardíes y el ciclo de la vida (Repertorio judeo-español de Oriente y Occidente),” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, XLIV (1989), 139-60.

[4] The most complete bibliography concerning the technique of contrafaction can be found in Edwin Seroussi’s Incipitario sefardí: El cancionero judeoespannol en fuentes hebreas (siglos XV-XIX) (Madrid: CSIC, 2009).

Israel J. Katz, University of California, Davis

Reviewed by John T. Pawlikowski

At the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II on May 1, 2011, a Brooklyn-born Jewish orchestra conductor had an honored seat in the audience. How this came to be for a traditional Jew with little prior contact with Catholic religious leaders is the basic narrative of this volume told from a first person perspective by Levine.

Levine’s grandparents emigrated to the United States from Poland. His mother-in-law is a survivor of Auschwitz.  He has been a distinguished conductor who has performed with leading orchestras in North America, Europe, and Israel. In 1987 Levine was invited to serve as a guest conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic for one week. This is where his story begins.

Poland was a complicated location for Levine given his family history and the fact of the Communist government then in power, which exercised a heavy hand in controlling arts and culture.  He felt he was being watched for the entirety of his stay.

As a result of this guest conductor’s role he was approached by Krzysztof Penderecki, a renowned composer as well as the dominant figure in the Polish official musical establishment of the time. Penderecki greeted Levine’s efforts in leading the Krakow orchestra with considerable enthusiasm. At a post-concert reception he suddenly startled Levine with the question, “Why don’t you consider becoming the lead conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic?”

Levine initially reacted to the supposed offer as though it was a joke. But Penderecki insisted he saw it as a realistic possibility. In terms of the political situation in Poland at the time Penderecki was in a position to pull off such an arrangement. For Levine, however, the political landscape also brought up major issues. Would he want to live in a Communist regime for several months a year? And what about his family in New York – would he have to be away from them for several months each year? And the low pay scale in Poland at the time was also a factor he had to consider.

But Levine’s Polish roots made this an offer he could not merely put aside despite the many obstacles that stood in the way. He decided to discuss the proposal with close friends and with officials at the United States Consulate in Krakow. Most of Levine’s friends treated the offer as a joke. The U. S. officials made it clear to him that they could not protect him against “harassment” by the Polish government.

Despite the many challenges the Polish music directorship presented for Levine he decided in the end to accept the offer. His first concert as music director took place in December 1987 in Krakow with Mahler’s Third Symphony as a central piece.

Shortly after taking up the role of music director word reached Levine that certain Vatican officials wished to meet with him. So Levine went off to Rome where he was introduced to Pope John Paul II’s top aides such as Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, now the Archbishop of Krakow. This initial meeting during which Monsignor Dziwisz conveyed the Pope’s serious interest in the work of Levine in the Pope’s almost native Krakow. Levine was also to meet with Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, as well as Cardinal William Keeler, the head of the U. S. Bishops’ Commission on Catholic-Jewish relations. Eventually these developing Catholic institutional contacts led to an invitation to meet with Pope John Paul II himself. That meeting took place in February 1988.

After this initial face-to-face meeting during which the Pope expressed admiration for Levine’s work and his joy that Levine had taken charge of the Krakow Philharmonic. A relationship ensued between the Pope and Levine which lasted some seventeen years. This relationship culminated with his designation as a papal knight in 1994.

The seventeen years of friendship between Levine and the Pope brought about a series of landmark classical music concerts at the Vatican and elsewhere. For Levine this collaboration proved transformative, including an enhancement of his own Jewish religious identity (he joined an Orthodox synagogue). While we have no direct expression of the papal reaction to this relationship it appears that Pope John Paul II saw this unique relationship as one central part of his promotion of improved Catholic-Jewish relations, which became a hallmark of his papacy.

The high point of Levine’s collaboration with the Pope was the extraordinary papal concert to commemorate the victims and survivors of the Shoah, which was held at the Vatican on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in 1994. I myself had the opportunity to speak with some Holocaust survivors who attended the concert.  To a person they spoke of how truly reconciling and healing it was for them. At the candle lighting ceremony that opened the concert one of the survivors who participated was in fact Levine’s mother-in-law, who lost some forty members of her family during the Holocaust. Clearly the Levine-papal cooperation had achieved a remarkable level of success.

Overall this volume tells a remarkable story of human transformation.  It is very well written and follows a chronological order.

The book also contains a DVD.  Certainly this brings another dimension to Levine’s story and musical skills.  It is a wonderful addition that clearly enriches the text of the volume.

The fundamental drawback of the volume is its overly enthusiastic evaluation of Pope John Paul II’s record on Catholic-Jewish relations. While no one would expect Levine to undertake such an evaluation, he could have emphasized in an Introduction that his is a highly personal account of a relationship that had an impact beyond the immediate context, but that he leaves to other scholars the task of a more comprehensive evaluation of John Paul II’s papacy, including his role in fostering Catholic-Jewish relations.  Levine also heaps praise on certain Catholic leaders of the time whose role in Catholic reform, including Catholic-Jewish relations, is questionable. In this he comes off as rather naïve. And his ecstatic description of the Vatican chambers sounds like a kid in a toy store, something that few Catholics today would emulate.

For what it does – a description of a profoundly transformative relationship – The Pope’s Maestro does well. Hence Levine’s book is definitely worth a read despite its uncritical assessment of John Paul II’s papacy.

John T. Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

Reviewed by Susana Weich-Shahak

Professor Samuel G. Armistead offers us one more book in his series of Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews, the third focusing specifically on Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition. Following the previous volumes, which were dedicated to Carolingian Ballads on the themes of Roncesvalles (1994) and Gaiferos (2006), the theme studied and analyzed in the present volume is that of Conde Claros, edited and studied by Samuel Armistead with musical transcriptions and musical studies by Israel J. Katz. As their former publications, this book includes two sections of ballad analyses, a rich and comprehensive bibliography, indices and a glossary. As the former volumes, the present one is based on materials collected in fieldwork conducted by Armistead, Silverman, and Katz in Tétouan, Morocco (1962, 1963), and one version collected by Katz in Israel (1971). To these materials, Armistead adds to his study versions from the rich corpus of Sephardic romances that he had catalogued at the Menéndez Pidal Archives in his three-volume work El romancero judeo-español en el Archivo Menéndez Pidal (Catálogo –índice de romances y canciones) (Madrid, C.S.M.P., 1977).

Armistead’s aim is, in his own words, “to study each ballad as an oral poem, a work of oral literature, elaborated over centuries of collective authorship by the uncountable individuals who make up the author legion” (by this term he means “all singers of a given ballad, in all its multiple variations, in whatever geographic subtraditions it may be sung”). He certainly fulfills this goal, presenting each of his collected ballads in direct comparison with a wide repertoire of romances in Hispanic written sources of the 16th century, with Sephardic versions collected in the 19th and 20th century, and with romances collected from the oral tradition in Spain.

According to Armistead, the hero of the ballads, Conde Claros de Montalbán, could have some connection to the French hero Renaud de Montauban, but, despite several allusions to France in the ballad’s text, Armistead recognizes that “it has no epic antecedents and must be characterized as Pseudo Carolingian.” In the Sephardic tradition the romance of Conde Claros, “a particularly complex example of the creative uses of contamination,” has survived combined with other themes: Conde Claros y el Emperador (Count Claros and the Emperor), Conde Claros insomne (Sleepless Count), La jactancia del conde Velez (The Vainglory of Count Velez), Conde Claros y la infanta (Count Claros and the Princess), Conde Claros fraile (Count Claros in Friar’s Garb), and El nacimiento de Bernardo del Carpio (The Birth of Bernardo del Carpio).

Armistead dedicates a first part (Theme 10, pp.1-124) to a literary study originating in two versions that combine the first two mentioned themes (Conde Claros y el Emperador + Conde Claros insomne): the first one, a version from an informant from Salonika collected in 1971 by Katz in Kiryat Matalon, Israel; and the second one a version from Tétouan, Morocco collected in situ by Armistead and Katz in 1962. These two versions show the presence of this theme in both the Eastern and the Moroccan Sephardi communities. Since both versions were not sung but recited, Katz provides only rhythmic transcriptions, in both cases in binary meter.

To these two versions Armistead adds eighteen versions for comparison, of which eleven belong to the Menéndez Pidal Archive and the others to other collections such as Attias’ and Crews’.[1] To show the permanence of the theme in the oral tradition, let me mention that the Salonikan version of this ballad that I collected in Tel Aviv in 1993, although fragmentary, coincides in its plot with the synthetic version that Armistead proposed for the Eastern tradition (14-15) and opens with the same incipit.[2]

In the second part (Theme 11, pp.125-461) Armistead studies the combination of the themes Conde Claros y la infanta, Conde Claros fraile, and El nacimiento de Bernardo del Carpio. The eight versions of the romance presented are all from Morocco, collected in 1962: the first five versions—from the same (almost mythological) informant (partly sung and mostly recited)—were collected in Tétouan by Armistead and Katz.  The other three versions are from various informants from Larache, Morocco: two collected by Armistead, Katz, and Silverman; and the last collected by Samuel Fereres, whose collection the authors acquired in 1962.

As in the first part, Armistead provides a synoptic version of this complex romance, followed by a comparative study of textual motifs with twenty-two other versions from the various Sephardic communities of Northern Morocco (eight from Tangier, nine from Tétouan, three from Larache and two from Alcazarquivir). Most of these versions (thirteen) are from the Menéndez Pidal Archive; the others come from known collections such as that of Larrea Palacín.[3]

In both parts Armistead analyzes the motifs as they appear in each presented version, and then compares the narrative segments of these versions with those in written sources of the 16th century. He also conducts a thorough comparative study of the ballads outside the Hispanic traditions, including Scottish, German and Hungarian ballads, and ballads from the oral tradition in the Spanish regions: Leon, Cantabria, Cataluña, Asturias and Galicia.

To Armistead’s thorough and always inspiring analysis of the texts, Katz adds his detailed study of the ballads’ tunes. Aware of the difficulty in tracing Hispanic musical sources of the romances’ tunes—in his words, “none of the tunes associated with these romances can be traced to early Iberian sources”—Katz comments on two old musical sources related to Conde Claros. One of these sources is the tune used by Juan de la Encina (1468-1521) in his vocal setting of “Pésame de vos el conde” for solo voice and instruments. Katz mentions the diferencias (variants) based on the romance Conde Claros by Luys de Narváez, in Los seys libros del Delfín de música, printed by Diego Hernández de Córdoba in 1538 as well as the use of Conde Claros by other vihuelistas: Alonso Mudarra (1546), Enríquez de Valderrábano (1547), Diego Pisador (1552), and Venegas de Henestrosa (1557).[4] The second source described by Katz is Francisco Salinas’ quotation of romance tunes as didactic examples in books VI and VII of his monumental work, De Musica Libri Septem (Salamanca 1577).[5] Salinas quotes short fragments of romances, songs and other genres that were popular at his time to illustrate various issues of rhythmic performance. Yet Katz expresses doubts about the reliability of Salinas’ notation (312), showing no less than twelve different ways to transcribe Salinas’ quotation of the first two hemistiches of Conde Claros—including attempts made by Pedrell (1900:392), Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal (1953:I, 387), Pope (1953:396) and Querol (1954:322).[6]

In his musicological commentary (293-379) Katz also presents comparative examples from the musical transcriptions of Sephardic romances made in 1915-1916 by Manrique de Lara (catalogued at the Menéndez Pidal Archives), as well as those by made by Arcadio de Larrea Palacín in 1952. From the ballad tunes in the Spanish oral tradition he presents additional examples from the collections transcribed by Manzano, Schindler, and others.[7] He even quotes musical transcriptions from more recent publications like that by José Manuel Fraile Gil on the oral tradition of Province of Madrid, with its musical transcriptions by Eliseo Parra García, and the collection of Jesus Suárez López (1987-1994) from Asturias, transcribed by Susana Asensio Llamas.[8]

To conclude: this is a highly recommended publication, a book that is both exemplary in its scholarship and useful to all those interested in themes of both the Sephardic and the Hispanic Romancero.

[1]  Moshe Attias, Romancero sefaradí: Romanzas y cantes populares en judeo-español, 2nd.ed. (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Insitute, 1961); Cynthia M. Crews, “Textos judeo-españoles de Salónica y Sarajevo con comentarios lingüísticos y glosario,” ed. Iacob M.Hassan, Estudios sefardíes, 2, (1979), 91-258.

[2]  Susana Weich-Shahak, Romancero sefardí de Oriente. Antología de tradición oral (Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto, 1910), pp.68-69, No.3, recited by Renée Bivas-Sevy, from Salónika, recorded in Tel Aviv, 7.11.1993.

[3]  Arcadio de Larrea Palacín,  Romances de Tetuán, 2 vols. (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1952).

[4]  Cancionero Musical de Palacio, in Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, Tipografía de los Huérfanos, 1890; 2nd. Ed., Málaga: Gráficas Urania, 1987, no.329).

[5]  Francisco Salinas, Siete libros sobre la música, trans. Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta (Madrid: Alpuerto, 1983).

[6]  Felipe Pedrell, “Folk-lore musical castillan du XVIe siecle,” Sammelbande der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1900, 372-400); Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, “Ilustraciones musicales,” in Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Romancero hispánico (hispano-portugués, americano y sefardí), 2 vols. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953, vol I, pp. 367-402); Isabel Pope, “Notas sobre la melodía del Conde Claros,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 7, (1953), 395-402; Miguel Querol, “Importance historique et nationale du romance,” Colloques Internacionaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, V: Musique et poesie au XVIe siecle, ed. J. Jacqot (Paris: CNRS, 1954, pp. 299-327). For other instances comparing Sephardic ballads with old Spanish musical sources in which romance tunes were used by Spanish vihuelistas as a basis (tenor or cantus firmus) for their instrumental compositions, as well as by court composers for vocal settings or for voice and instruments, see Judith Etzion and Susana Weich-Shahak, “The Spanish and the Sephardic Romances: Musical Links,” Ethnomusicology, vol. 32, no.2, (Spring/Summer 1988), 1-38.

[7]  Miguel Manzano and Angel Barja, Cancionero Leonés, vol.II, tomo I: Cantos narrativos (León: Diputación Provincial, 1991);  Kurt Schindler, Música y poesía popular de España y Portugal, 2nd ed., ed. Israel J. Katz and Miguel Manzano Alonso, with the collaboration of Samuel G. Armistead (Salamanca: Diputación de Salamanca, 1991).

[8]  José Manuel Fraile Gil, Romancero tradicional de la Provincia de Madrid, musical transcriptions by Eliseo Parra García, (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1991); Jesús Suárez López, Nueva colección de romances (1987-1994), with Mariola Carvajal Alvarez, musical transcriptions by Susana Asensio Llamas (Oviedo-Madrid: Fundación Menéndez Pidal, 1997).

Susana Weich-Shahak, Hebrew University

Reviewed by Simon Morrison

This is a book about the struggle to preserve and promote the music of the Jewish enclaves in the Russian empire. St. Petersburg and Moscow dominate the framing chapters; the villages, or shtetls, of the Pale of Settlement the core. To tell the tale, James Loeffler draws on an enormous trove of documents gathered from libraries and archives in Russia, Israel, and the United States. Organizing the material must have been a challenge, but Loeffler prevailed to write an elegant, moving account of the effort to perform, in new arrangements, a repertoire threatened with extinction. Russian nationalism hampered the effort; revolution and war terminated it—with extreme prejudice.

In terms of writing, the best chapter is the first. It concerns the bittersweet career of Anton Rubinstein, and sets the context for the detailed description of the Jewish musical repertoires that follows. Loeffler offers a well-paced assessment of the chief events in Rubinstein’s complicated, multifaceted career: his founding of the Conservatory in St. Petersburg (his brother would do the same in Moscow); his Western European concert tours; his efforts to create non-nationalist “spiritual” operas (as riposte to Richard Wagner’s music dramas); and the political attacks that clouded the 1889 celebrations of his fifty years as a performer.

Loeffler reports that Rubinstein was born in the Pale of Settlement, but his grandfather insisted that he and his siblings be raised as Christians. Growing up in Moscow and Berlin, he spoke Russian, German, and Yiddish. He considered himself Russian, but his complicated background and endless border crossings as a touring virtuoso made him feel like an outsider, foreign to all ethnicities. Though the clashes with bureaucrats, tsarist officials, and conservative ideologues in St. Petersburg and Moscow only increased his anxieties, he was not deterred from his quest to contribute to Russian culture by establishing a professional school for the training of composers and performers. In his energetic middle years, he fended off anti-Semitic accusations that he had rigged the admissions decisions at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in favor of underprivileged Jewish students. The accusations were unfair—both Rubinstein and his attackers knew it. But the invective intensified in the twilight of his career, forcing him to expel those students who failed to meet his ever-stricter standards. Most of them, Loeffler notes, were women.

Entire books have been written about Rubinstein; this chapter is better than them all. Whereas others leave the impression of Rubinstein’s life and work as chaotic, Loeffler paints a picture of a rigid, tough individual, a cultural warrior who achieved greatness almost despite himself.

The undisputed hero of The Most Musical Nation is the ethnographer and composer Joel Engel, who had little direct exposure to Jewish music as a youth, but who made it his mission to preserve the living traditions of the shtetls. In 1912, he dragged a phonograph and a couple of colleagues from Moscow to the village of Ruzhin, outside Kiev. He returned with 44 recordings and a profound sense of estrangement. In Loeffler’s words, “the closer he came to the shtetl, the more Engel sensed his own distance—linguistic, cultural, even spiritual—from the folk itself” (91-92). The music he captured was of one world, he of another, and he sought to reconcile the two in his own compositions. He aspired to create, in art, the synthesis of Jewishness and Russianness that had been denied him in life.

Engel had his opponents within the Jewish intellectual elite, one of the most strident being Lazare Saminsky, who dominates a chapter of the book dedicated to the years 1915-17. Saminsky subscribed to the myth of original pureness, basing his definition of Jewish music on a single mode and a small group of time-tested melodic intonations. He sought to rid the oldest tunes he identified of the “impurities” accrued from later peoples in later times. Engel adopted a much more cosmopolitan approach, allowing for non-Jewish influences on the repertoire and disputing the reductive emphasis on discrete pitch sequences. The musical dispute finds a parallel—one Loeffler draws cautiously on p. 195—with the Hebrew-Yiddish language debates of the 1920s and 1930s. Hebrew was cherished for its ancient Biblical origins, whereas Yiddish was associated with diasporic assimilation. Like the musical repertoire embraced by Engel, Yiddish combines Hebrew, Aramaic, German, and other languages. What Loeffler does not highlight is that the ideological and methodological divide in Russia might also be likened to the one constructed by American critics reviewing the Jewish-American composers Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Copland’s concert hall pieces were often related to “Hebraic” seriousness, while Gershwin’s show tunes and jazz-inspired Rhapsody in Blue emblematized “Yiddish” commercialism. (In a chapter on “Hebrew American Composers” in his 1934 survey Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, Saminsky cruelly dismissed the music of both as abounding in “ghetto raffinement or regeneration.”) The point is germane because Saminsky emigrated to the United States in 1920, becoming a noted critic as well as a conductor and composer.

The emphasis shifts away from Engel in the second half of the book toward several lesser-known figures involved in the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Loeffler also provides hitherto unknown biographical details about several eminent musicians, including Serge Koussevitzky, best known as the conductor of the Boston Symphony from 1924 to 1949; the information about him here, as about Saminsky, should be of interest to scholars of American music. Loeffler also offers a crucial new perspective on the career of Mikhail Gnesin, whose early works showed the overbearing influence of Wagner, but who tackled the issue of musical anti-Semitism in a 1916 article. His career did not turn out the way he had imagined. In the early 1930s he came under harsh ideological attack from a proletarian music organization. Frightened, he converted to the proletarian cause. His final works are dull adaptations of “the folk music of other Soviet minorities: Azerbaijani, Armenian, Circassian, Chuvash, and others” (p. 205).

Loeffler takes a pass on these pieces, focusing instead on Gnesin’s 1943 piano trio, “In Memory of Our Murdered Children.” Elsewhere he discusses Mark Warshavsky’s tear-inducing song “The Alphabet” (also known as “Oyfn Pripitchek”), which has been recorded by countless vocalists. (Esther Ofarim’s version is my personal favorite.) Loeffler also notes the inclusion of an adaptation of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in a 1913 Songbook for the Jewish School and Family. Apparently the editors were striving for “universal” appeal (166), but the choice still seems bizarre.

The speculative conclusion of The Most Musical Nation, focusing on the friendship between the composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Moisei Weinberg, tries to find something positive in dreadful circumstances. Two of their works, Loeffler proposes, erase the distinction between ethnic categories. The first movement of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (1962) “symbolically invokes Jewishness to emphasize its own Russianness” (217); and Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony (1963) “celebrates Russian culture” as well as “quietly but unmistakably assert[ing] the Jewish presence within it” (218). Perhaps. But whatever the sentiments of the two scores, Shostakovich occupied a much more privileged position in Soviet society than Weinberg. So too did all of those musicians whose passports listed their nationality as Russian rather than Jewish. That injustice, which lies outside the historical framework of Loeffler’s fine book, awaits a reckoning.

Simon Morrison, Princeton University