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Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity. Adi Nester. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005.
Reviewed by Madison Schindele and Samuel Teeple
In her 2024 monograph Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, Adi Nester offers a textually grounded analysis of the German-Jewish relationship as it emerged in music drama in the first half of the twentieth century. Nester focuses on musical settings of biblically-themed texts: Rudolf Borchardt’s poem Das Buch Joram and its oratorio realization by Paul Ben-Haim; Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron; Joseph Roth’s novel Hiob and Eric Zeisl’s opera of the same name. Throughout her discussions of these works, Nester pushes back against “the stagnant major-minor relation that has long served scholars in their definition of the German Jewish condition,” arguing that, even in the face of hardening racial logics, Jewish difference (what Nester calls the difference between German and Jew) actively unsettles any effort to categorize or contain it. [1] While this critical reorientation is not necessarily novel—since the 1990s, German Jewish Studies has increasingly recognized the fluid, entangled relationship between the categories of German and Jew—Unsettling Difference presents a convincing interpretation of this dynamic as expressed in musical texts, locating moments of role reversal, confusion, and ambiguation as aesthetic disruptions. [2]
Read the rest of this entry »The Milken Archive of Jewish Music: The American Experience
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? Read the rest of this entry »Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage. Caryl Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-5214-5547-3
Reviewed by Jeanne Swack
Caryl Clark’s recent monograph on the subject of possible Jewish characterizations in Haydn’s music focuses on his opera Lo Speziale (The Apothecary), composed in 1768 to a libretto by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni and first performed at the Esterhazy court for Haydn’s employer, the music-loving Prince Nikolaus I. The book’s principal contention is that the title character of this work, who is never identified as Jewish, nevertheless is an encoded representation of the typical “stage Jew” of the time, and would have been recognized as such by contemporary audiences. The argument for this reading is preceded by discussions of the Jewish communities in Haydn’s immediate environments in Vienna, Eisenstadt, and the Eszterháza estate, a discussion of stage Jews and previous characterizations of explicit Jewish characters in opera (citing my own work on Reinhard Keiser’s operas for the Hamburg stage in the early 18th century), a previous Singspiel in which Haydn seems to have portrayed a Jewish stereotype (but with no surviving music), and a discussion of a Haydn mass putatively aimed at Jews undergoing conversion to Catholicism.
Musica Judaica Online Reviews 