800 Words: A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks: Felix Mendelssohn

Click Here for Part 1 of this series.

Click Here for Part 2.



It's impossible to listen to the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture or the Octet for Strings and realize that he wrote them when he was sixteen and seventeen. How could anyone that young write this music and not eventually be a composer to dwarf even Mozart and Beethoven? Yes, Mendelssohn was in some senses a spoiled kid whose parents bought him his own orchestra to conduct his own compositions. If he needed feedback, he could simply ask the family friends who happened to be the leading German intellectuals of the age; like Ignaz Moscheles, the Humboldt Brothers, or even Goethe (who was himself a fine musician and revered Mendelssohn’s talent even over Mozart’s). Some people have all the advantages life can bestow, but only a genius can take advantage of them in the way Mendelssohn did.


(A Wagnerian orchestra, made with only 8 string instruments by a 16-year-old kid.)

Mendelssohn was the kid you are simply desperate to beat up. He was the son of a rich banker and the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the most influential and significant philosopher of the German Enlightenment. His parents created the perfect environment for him, and he not only displayed astonishing skill in composition but also displayed astounding gifts for the piano, organ, violin, drawing, painting, languages (ancient and modern), literature, philosophy, poetry, prose, mathematics, gymnastics, and fencing, all with near-equal precocity. There was not a German intellectual of his childhood’s epoch who did not pass through the Mendelssohn’s drawing room. He was the son of a family with enough means to educate him in whatever his mind desired. If it is only Nature herself which designates true aristocracy, then fate finally bequeathed one of nature’s aristocrats with a proper upbringing.


(Mendelssohn’s incredibly exciting First Piano Concerto, surprisingly seldom heard in concert halls, but played by virtually every advanced piano student of the last 150 years as their first romantic piano concerto.)

But rich and entitled does not imply undisciplined. Every day of his childhood, Mendelssohn was ordered to arise at 5 in the morning so that he would work at all his cultural pursuits throughout the day – and throughout his life, he maintained this truly Protestant work ethic. In retrospect, his music is precisely what one should expect from a rich genius afforded every opportunity; exquisitely crafted music which shields its listener from most of the darkness to which life subjects its less fortunate subjects. There is barely any sense in Mendelssohn of boundaries being broken, or even of a desire to break them. The closer Mendelssohn gets to middle age, the less striving there seems to be toward anything transcendent. The harmonic language may be Beethoven’s, but the proportions are as classic (if not more) than Mozart, and his part writing is pure Bach. As he matured, his music increasingly seemed to go through the motions of impeccable technique – a virtuoso display of pure musical mathematics but with less urgency summoned from one piece to the next.


(The Hebrides overture. He was just 20…)

On the one hand, the music of Mendelssohn is of an intelligence and cosmopolitanism to which we should all aspire. It is also music that is narcissistic as only privileged people can be. To take one obvious example, listen to Mendelssohn’s famous Hebrides overture – said by some people to be the first ever ‘Symphonic Poem’; it’s a pictorial depiction of Mendelssohn’s impressions of Fingal’s Cave, a natural wonder in Staffa, an island off the West Coast of Scotland. Like all gentlemen of means, he went on a long ‘grand tour’ of Europe as ‘finishing’ to his education. When he reached the cave, he was inspired to sketch both a drawing of what he saw and the first twenty bars of the overture, which he immediately mailed to his parents. There are so many exciting musical moments in this piece, of stupefying craft, of a genuine sense of maritime atmosphere, and of natural awe, that it is clearly a work conceived at the highest level of genius. But on the other hand, are we listening to anything more profound than the travel diary of an entitled rich kid? If so, then we get it, the cave’s a nice place. But is there any human sentiment in this music or is all this Romantic nature-worship simply a substitute for experiencing human emotions? The kid may be a genius, but he’s still just a snot-nosed rich teenager who thinks the world is interested in his every thought (note), no matter how trivial.


(Pure erotic energy. The last movement of the Italian Symphony, said to be Mendelssohn’s impressions of a girl in Rome dancing the Salterello with a Tambourine.)

On the other hand, Mendelssohn’s music speaks a language that transcends the typical boundaries of Romantic artists. In an era when musicians, artists, peoples, were balkanizing into competing Nationalisms, Mendelssohn sounded a note of interests in other cultures and for international understanding. Perhaps one had to be rich to feel cosmopolitan in the 19th century, but there is something truly inspiring about Mendelssohn’s ability to find value in sources far afield. Whereas Wagner makes claims for Germans to strive for greatness alone to the exclusion of all other peoples, Mendelssohn’s work makes what amounts to a plea for internationalization. Nobody should mistaken Mendelssohn for anything but a conservative, but Mendelssohn’s conservatism is a liberal conservatism that at least allows for the possibility of greatness from any place, any era, any epoch. For all its problems, Mendelssohn’s stodgy over-reverence is far more appealing than Wagner’s fanatical authoritarianism, which has so often, and dangerously, been misconstrued as progressive.


(The Fair Melusine Overture. Without the example of this piece’s opening, Wagner could never have composed the beginning of The Ring Cycle.)

Indeed, few people in history wanted to beat up a rich genius a more badly than Wagner wanted to beat up Mendelssohn. Wagner viewed Mendelssohn a bit like Abel to his Cain (or Fasolt to his Fafner) – blessed by God with a flock of sheep while Wagner had to toil the ground and grow his full creative fruits only after Mendelssohn had passed away. No doubt, Wagner’s animus toward Mendelssohn was as much class-related as racial. Wagner was the stepson (and probable son) of an itinerate actor who may or may not himself have been Jewish. Throughout his life, Wagner had to hustle and bully his way into the cultural eminence Mendelssohn was assured from birth. But the first thing that strikes one about Wagner’s anti-semitism is not how vituperative it was, it’s how stupid.


(Would Wagner have ever exhibited such masterly use of the Horn section without Mendelssohn’s example from the Nocturne of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?)

In his article, ‘Judaism in Music’ (which, class act he was, he only allowed to be published anonymously for the first twenty years of its circulation) Wagner declared himself a firm believer that Jews were constitutionally incapable of creating any great art of value or originality. Wagner saw Jews as rootless cosmopolitans, who are therefore incapable of speaking languages as native-rooted artists do, and thus cannot create literature or songs properly (whatever that means). As supporting evidence, he cites Mendelssohn’s lack of depth and Meyerbeer’s pompous vulgarities. Well, even if the accusations against both composers are true (and to a certain extent, they are), it is not their Jewish origins which inhibited them, it was anti-semitism itself. A light-hearted success like Mendelssohn or a popular success like Meyerbeer’s were the only avenues for musical greatness open to Jews of their time – who even in this relatively enlightened era had to be careful not to challenge accepted boundaries. A great, challenging composer of the Beethoven or Bach (or Mahler) variety would still have been squashed by anti-semites for his effrontery long before he was allowed to flourish in full plumage.


(Hark the Herald Angels Sing…yes, Mendelssohn wrote it)

Furthermore, there was one small problem with Wagner’s blaming Mendelssohn…Mendelssohn was not Jewish; not by religion at least, only by origin (not that that would have mattered to Hitler…). His father, Abraham Mendelssohn, was one of the richest men in Germany, yet even he had to flee French-occupied Hamburg in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with his young children in tow. Abraham feared a coming vendetta from the Napoleonic government for his role in financing a breech of the Napoleonic blockade against the British. And as a man of Jewish origin, he had that much more reason to fear the extremity of French animus. When he settled in Berlin, he opened what became the final version of Mendelssohn and Co., a bank that would become the largest in Germany until Hitler ‘Aryanized’ it in 1939 by forcing it to sell all its assets to Deutsche Bank, all this in spite of the fact that there was hardly a single Jewish Mendelssohn in over a century.


(The opening chorus from Mendelssohn’s EXTREMELY Christian oratorio about St. Paul, Paulus)

Abraham Mendelssohn was nearly as militant in his pro-secularism as his father, the great Moses Mendelssohn, was determined to balance secularism with Judiasm. To his mother-in-law’s distress, he refused to circumcise his sons and added a second last name, ‘Bartholdy’, to his given surname (presumably after the Apostle Bartholomew, who spent the rest of his life preaching Christ to heathens). In a letter, he famously stated that ‘there could no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there could be a Christian Confucius.’ In 1816, Abraham had his children baptized in the Lutheran faith, and did so in secret in the distant city of Frankfurt so that he could avoid the suspicions of Jewish family members. Six years later, he was baptized as a Lutheran himself. Abraham Mendelssohn was determined that his family be accepted as fully German, an acceptance which would prove impossible after more than a century’s worth of attempts by the Mendelssohn family. The more achievements their family won for Germany, the more resented they were by the people for whom they strove.


(The finale of the Reformation Symphony, in which Mendelssohn incorporates Luther’s most famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, as the principle theme.)

This desire for acceptance is all the more tragic when one realizes that Mendelssohn’s cautious conservatism, his veneration for everything establishmentarian, his evangelism for Music as a Public Virtue, made him an ideal fit for the rigid moralities of Victorian England – a country to which he journeyed nine times over the course of his short life. He was a close personal friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and even wrote four-hand piano music specifically meant for the Queen to play with him. Mendelssohn’s temperament, with its twin horrors of empty showmanship and original daring, would have found a natural home in the England of Disraeli. In his veneration for older models, he was in some ways a musical equivalent of Keats. In his reluctance to challenge middle class sensibilities, he was much like Dickens.


(Mendelssohn’s band. The still extant Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra which Mendelssohn lead for twelve years and built into the best in Europe.)

Mendelssohn was perhaps the first true musical classicist (in the University sense), who had no patience for his own day’s vulgarities, and sought to bring better, nobler, higher-minded music to the public than the tastes which fashion dictated. From his conducting originated the idea that the orchestra’s primary goal was to act as a preserver of music’s greatest literature – education rather than entertainment. As a conductor, he programmed not only his finest contemporaries, not only the ‘classics’ like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (and a great deal more besides), but also the ‘ancients’ like Palestrina and Lassus (Hector Berlioz, Mendelssohn’s musical antipode in so many ways, loved Mendelssohn personally but said that he was ‘a little too fond of the dead.’). In Mendelssohn’s chamber music, he strove to create chamber music for middle class homes that could act as a kind of self-betterment – never vulgar, never garish, limpid, beautiful, pastoral music for idyllic settings. It can be argued that the Golden Age of ‘classical music’ itself ended in 1829, when the great young hope of classical music introduced the great elder statesman in his grandest work: the St Matthew Passion of Bach. The next year, Berlioz first presented his Symphonie Fantastique, and from those two moments onward, the dichotomy was set in classical music, forever pitched in a battle between the preservation of the past and innovation for the future; a battle that still shows no signs of resolving…


(The Second Cello Sonata. Mendelssohn in typically exuberant mood.)

If Mendelssohn had lived to see the 1848 revolutions, he’d have been adrift. He was blind to the seismic undercurrents beneath him and ill-equipped to understand the era that followed him. Then as now, many viewed the rigidities of middle class sensibilities as a prison, and revolutionaries viewed Mendelssohn as the musical jailer. But had he lived longer, this very ill-adeptedness might have turned Mendelssohn into the great musical conservative of his age – the perfect rival which Wagner lacked. Mendelssohn’s temperament may have seemed untroubled, but it was not naturally so. As a conductor, Mendelssohn came again and again against those who would block his vision of making the greatest possible music, and as so many conductors have throughout history, his temper would raise the roof in response to his authority being questioned. Few composers ever worked harder than Mendelssohn, and no composer made as great an effort to travel further so that he could carry out his responsibilities. Merely as a conductor, Mendelssohn had official capacities all over Germany and England, and was a much sought after guest in Italy and France besides. In the 20th century, such travel is expected of top musicians, in the 19th century it was nearly impossible. This reckless travel schedule had to be honored in addition to his full schedule as a composer, his need to stay in shape as a pianist and organist, and his duties as a father. In those last few years, his music became more and more fraught with anexiety, stress, and emotional weight. Mendelssohn was finally composing like an adult. But it was too late for him to write a more sizable amount in this newly sober vein of his. The stress and strain of his workload no doubt contributed to the series of strokes which killed him in 1847.


(Minor-key Mendelssohn, his final string quartet. A completely different composer emerging?)

Furthermore, there is a new rumor that Mendelssohn, seemingly the happiest, most well adjusted of all composers, might have killed himself in response to the end of an extra-marital affair. An affidavit has apparently surfaced from the cuckolded husband, in which there is sworn testimony that Mendelssohn begged the revered Swedish Soprano, Jenny Lind, to elope with him to America, and threatened suicide if she didn’t. Like Mendelssohn, Lind was a deep artist above reproach, prized as much for her morality and the spiritual quality of her music making as for her general musicianship. Mendelssohn died barely a year or two after the letter was written, but it still feels like a conspiracy theory, an apocryphal theory like the kangaroo court which told Tchaikovsky to kill himself. But it does change our view of this composer – who is now revealed to be a suffering artist, and given to all the same hypocrisies as every other Victorian gentleman.


(Hear, Israel. A soprano aria from Elijah, written for Jenny Lind. The hypocrisy is a little thick…but a powerful aria anyway. Proto-Brunnhilde?)

Mendelssohn did not commit suicide, he had a series of strokes. He suffered from a family condition called “Mendelssohn Brain” first documented in his grandfather, in which the hyper-brilliance of their minds made them especially prone to aneurisms. No doubt, the stress of his affair might have contributed to the strokes, but so might have the death of his beloved sister Fanny from a similar stroke. Fanny might have become a still greater musician/mind than Felix had either her brother or her father approved of her developing her talents as anything more than an amateur pursuit. But as a female Mendelssohn, it would have caused a scandal had she become a professional musician, and while she suffered an additional indignity of not being allowed to pursue her gifts after the manner of Felix, she shared Felix’s hyperactive mental acuity, and suffered from its same imbalance.


(The most beautiful – and darkest – thing Mendelssohn ever wrote? The slow movement from the second string quintet.)

The music of Mendelssohn’s final years show a different composer emerging, using his natural genius to reflect emotions deeper than the typical light-hearted classicism Mendelssohn generally pervaded. A potentially new Mendelssohn, middle aged and bitter, is highly noticeable in his final works. After some failed early attempts, Mendelssohn had retreated all his life from attempting the Grand Metaphysical Statements of Beethoven. He simply lacked the nerve for daring vision. Even his Lobegesang Symphony (with its 40-minute long choral finale) and Paulus play by tasteful rules established long in the past, often seeming more like imitations than original compositions. Yet in his late oratorio, Elijah, a new Mendelssohn emerges. Like his other large-scale choral works, Elijah is a conservative work in every sense – a turgid monsterpiece filled with uninspired padding and lighter, sweeter moments than should probably occur in a dramatic oratorio. Yet there are passages in this oratorio of such heart-stopping drama that they seem far more like the greatest music of Wagner than like Mendelssohn.

(Click here for the Magnificence of Elijah in Full Cry)

Here is Mendelssohn, fully mature, finally ready to take on the metaphysic mantle of Beethoven. But whereas Beethoven’s message is essentially liberal, to embrace the masses and storm the Bastille; Mendelssohn’s message is fundamentally conservative, that those embraced millions have grown sinful and indolent, and therefore must repent. Beethoven found choral inspiration in Schiller’s poetry and the Catholic Mass, Mendelssohn found his inspiration in the Old Testament Prophets. Mendelssohn may not have been Jewish, but he had a Talmudic cast of mind and a Rabbinic sense of mission. It might be said that at the end of his life, in the midst of crises from which privilege previously shielded him, he finally composed with true purpose; a purpose found within the texts which his grandfather so valued.


(Psalm 2: Why Do The Heathen Rage?)

Mendelssohn may not have been Jewish himself, but the values he inherited were Jewish to the marrow: a fearsome if imperfect commitment to ethics, knowledge, community, family, and rule of law. And whether rightly or wrongly, Mendelssohn saw his values as being rejected by his era's revolutionaries. The full promise of Mendelssohn’s genius was not to be contained in his actual achievements, but Elijah and a few other works from his final years give us a glimpse into the man which his earlier work never allowed. In choosing to write an oratorio about Elijah, Mendelssohn seemed to compose a declaration of intent – no longer would he be the passive, benevolent builder of public virtue. From the premiere of Elijah onward, he seemed to announce an intent to be the militant defender of righteousness’s cause – composing not with pen, but with a sword every bit as steely as Wagner’s, used to defend the glories of his Jewish and German heritage, both of which had given him so much. Given ten more years, Mendelssohn might have become a very different composer than the one we know; perhaps he'd have become an heroic spiritual leader after the manner of Beethoven, ready to do battle with Wagner's revolution so that he might preserve Beethoven's. Or perhaps he'd have calcified into every bit the fanatical purveyor of nationalist bombast (unlikely as much of his music makes that sound) which Wagner was. In theory, Mendelssohn was the fanatical defender of an Old Germany which allowed Mendelssohn’s ancestors to flourish while Wagner was the fanatical promulgator of a New Germany which would allow his descendents to flourish just as greatly. But Mendelssohn died, and Wagner, with his completely different (inverse?) goals, assumed the mantle of Germany’s Greatest Living Composer. He assumed this mantle in reaction to a Germany shaped by the first generations of emancipated Jews as a way of curbing their influence to restore Germany to a more glorious, united, and pure past. Yet the Germany of Wagner was not so different than Mendelssohn’s Germany. In their different ways, they exhibited precisely the same uncomplicated love of a national ideal which only a true outsider can possess. Wagner believed that the German past would only be saved by supporting the 1848 revolutionaries, Mendelssohn (would have) believed that that same past would be saved only by opposing them. But they shared a goal of a united Germany, with a truly German music to inspire her. Even Wagner’s greatest achievement, the Ring Cycle, began as an idea Mendelssohn had for his first adult opera. Perhaps Wagner merits a chapter of his own in A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks. I don't doubt he'd love to have one.

800 Words: A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks: The Good Stuff from Rossi to Mendelssohn - Oh God This Is Getting Longer

(Al Naharot Bavel - By The Waters of Babylon. By Salamone Rossi)

And so out we came from the Ghetto at no more than a trickle. We see signs of a Jewish musical culture to rival any Goyishe claim as early as the 16th century. Out of the hundreds of musical masters to come out of the musical Rennaisance, the Jews produced
exactly one. The Italian-Jewish composer Salamone Rossi wrote absolutely gorgeous polyphonic motets with Hebrew texts from the Old Testament. If one were a music lover who couldn’t tell the difference between Hebrew or Italian, one might assume Al Naharot Bavel a Gesualdo madrigal. Rossi was a court musician in Mantua, but his family almost certainly originated from Venice’s once-thiriving Jewish community. Indeed, he and his sister were both friends with Venice’s greatest contributor to musical history: Claudio Monteverdi. That a court musician like Rossi could be openly Jewish and write devotional music for the glory of his religious minority is a development not to be repeated for three-hundred years.


(An Adon Olam of which Palestrina would be proud)

However long it took for Italian Jews to be accepted by the rest of Italy, it took far longer in Eastern Europe. Italy had a large and consistent Jewish presence since the Flavian Dynasty. To this day, the Italian Jewish community exists as a genealogy utterly apart from the rest of Judaism - neither Sephardi or Ashkenazi. But if Italian Jewry stretches back to the Roman Empire, Eastern European Jewry can only trace its roots to the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne admired the industry of Jews and therefore invited the gumptious Hebrews to settle in towns upon the banks of the Rhine. As a result, the emancipation of German Jews was correspondingly later.


(Giacomo Meyerbeer - Psalm 91: Qui in manu Dei requiescit)

There is always something about musical achievement that always seems to occur later in history than other branches of the humanities. By 1870, Impressionist painters were scandalizing Parisian galleries while salons were still stuck on Saint-Saens’s gold-plated neo-classicism - Debussy was still a small child. Goethe and Jean Paul lit the way toward Romantic literature while Haydn and Mozart were still sounding the notes of high classicism. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that while the intellecual emancipation of German Jewry begins in the mid-18th century with Moses Mendelssohn, the musical emancipation of German Jews does not occur until the mid-19th century with Felix Mendelssohn, Moses’s grandson - more on him in two minutes.


(Wagner in embryo. The Coronation March from Meyerbeer’s Le Prophete - the first piece I ever played in an orchestra.)

But before the 19th-century emancipation of the Jewry which Germany found so crucial in its development into a world power, we must stop for a brief but welcome sojourn in Paris. As the French always have been in matters of principle, 19th-century Parisians were at the very vanguard of progress as far as Jews were concerned, and as always they were nowhere near the progressives they thought themselves to be. In the early 19th century, there were not one but two eminent Jewish composers of Grand Opera. One of them was the much-feted Giacomo Meyerbeer, who practically invented the term ‘Grand Opera’ and was a Peter Jackson for his day - a composer of the grandest stage entertainments Paris had ever seen. His operas are gluttonous displays of orchestral muscle, virtuoso singing and grand choral fanfares which call for the tackiest, most exotic possible stage sets - all with nary a three-dimensional character to be found. His operas are synthetic as motor oil, as dated to our ears as C.B. DeMille is to our eyes.


(Il Crociato in Egitto - some typically grand Meyerbeer)

One of the very first people to notice how artificial was his music was one Richard Wagner. In the early 1840’s, Wagner was a talented but penniless musician living in Paris who spoke not a word of French. By 1840, the German-born Meyerbeer was an extremely wealthy man and quite generous to other musicians whom he felt displayed promise. Meyerbeer so highly esteemed Wagner’s potential that he personally recommended Wagner’s opera Rienzi for the Dresden Opera - a premiere that would the first (and financially the greatest) success of his career. Wagner repaid that debt by anonymously publishing an tract called ‘Judaism in Music’ in which Wagner took Meyerbeer to task for ‘Judaizing’ opera with hours of empty bombast, artificial plots, superficial characters and facile spectacle. In the forty years after Meyerbeer’s friendship proved so key to Wagner’s success, Wagner paid Meyerbeer a much more fitting tribute by writing operas of empty bombast, artificial plots, superficial characters and facile spectacle. Incidentally, Wagner also reserved some time in his infamous pamphlet for the only musician he hated more than Meyerbeer, the "detestable" Felix Mendelssohn; but more on him in one minute.


(Mime and Siegfried. The German ideal alongside the Wagner’s archetypal Jew.)

As befits a stranger in a strange land, Meyerbeer’s operas all seem to focus their plots on the theme of tolerance. The typical Meyerbeer plot will include (among many other things) an oppressed minority group at the mercy of the majority. Whether intentional or not, Meyerbeer’s Jewishness may have made him particularly sympathetic to the plight of the ‘other,’ a plight which the other eminent Jewish composer of his era addressed far more frankly. Whereas he pecunious Meyerbeer was the son of great wealth long before he made money himself, Fromental Halevy was the mere son of a cantor. Halevy was not only born to modest means, but he died in near-penury - forced his life long to support himself as a professor and musical administrator. He did, however, achieve two great successes in his career. The first was an opera called La Juive (The Jewess) - an opera praised as one of the very greatest not only by Mahler but by Wagner himself. It’s medieval plot, like all opera plots, is a bit far fetched; but the plot deals with the impossibility of love between Christians and Jews, and the horrific persecution which Jews endured in the Middle Ages. At its center is the character of Eleazar, the Jewish goldsmith who watched his sons executed as heretics. In order to save his daughter’s life, he must confess that his beloved daughter is not his biological daughter but is in fact the daughter of the very man who sent his sons to their deaths. In his despair, he sings one of the greatest opera arias ever written:


(Rachel, quand du Seigneur...Rachel, as God gave me to you...)

The ability to create something as wrenchingly sad as this seven minutes of music takes not only talent but immense training, luck and knowledge of life’s suffering. It’s a combination inherently difficult to gain, and Halevy never managed it again. Whereas Meyerbeer possessed an infinite supply of money and ease to put his talent in the service of grand entertainment for fifty years, Halevy only once gathered the means to develop his still greater talent into the creation of a great work of art. Never again did he manage to set the world afire. But part of his legacy was to bequeath the world a pupil who very much did.


(The most famous duet in all opera...from an opera people still don’t know)

Over the years, Halevy taught various musical subjects to most of French music’s greatest lights of the mid-19 century. But no light among them was so great as Halevy’s prize pupil, to whom he grew closer than any other student. The student was Georges Bizet, the greatest musical talent of his generation from any country. And Bizet grew so close to Halevy and his family that he married Halevy’s daughter Genevieve. After Halevy’s death Bizet completed his final opera, Noe. Six years after Halevy’s death, Bizet’s followed. In the intervening six years, he bequeathed the world (along with a number of still neglected works) Jeux d’enfants, L’Arlessienne, and Carmen. Meyerbeer's legacy to our day is Wagner, Halevy's is Bizet. I know who I prefer...


(Is it completely insane to wonder if Bizet based the Chanson Boheme on memories of watching the Halevy family dance the Hora?)

...and I didn't even get to Mendelssohn...

800 Words: A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks (Part 1 of 2...I mean it)

(Cartman tells it like it is.)

They have Handel’s Messiah, we have “I Have a Little Dreydel.” So it goes. Great music by Jews is very different than ‘Jewish Music.’ We were shuckling in the Ghetto while Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin, Isaac, Gombert, Willaert, Lassus, Victoria, Palestrina, Striggio, Taverner, Tallis, Byrd and Monteverdi (among so many others) wrote the great Christian masterpieces of the Renaissance. Even Bach and Handel predated the Jewish emancipation. The presence of Jews as musicians with any more prestige and education than Klezmerschpielern depended upon a world no longer ruled by religion. Every time Jews were let into the mainstream of cultural life, they were too late to the party to write Jewish music of equal value to the great music of Christianity. When Christian art and music dominated cultural life, it was the apex of civilization for its time. Both the authoritarian Christianity of the Middle Ages and the more humanist Christianity of the Renaissance represented the triumph of monotheism and order over the chaos of a Pagan world. A world with one god was a world in which every person the world over shared something in common and had at least one more reason to live in peace with his neighbor.


(The Christian Rock of 800 years ago. The first ever full setting of the Catholic Mass by Guillaume de Machaut. This is truly great Christian music, but how would we know it’s Christian if we didn’t know the text? Does it sound Medieval? Gregorian? French? Andalusian? Spanish? Arabic? Sephardic Jewish?)

When the historical emancipations of European Jewry began, Jewish artists were at an impasse which even now very few have solved. How can a progressive, educated, liberal minded artist create truly great art that openly declares an allegiance to parochialism, medievalism, and segregation? It’s hard enough for great talent to flourish in any religious community. What if a person’s talent leads him in a direction that contradicts the dogma of the religion? But how much more difficult would that be in a dogmatic community that has also been an embattled minority for two millenia? Even the relatively liberal Jews of 17th-century Amsterdam gave Baruch Spinoza a Cherem.


(Even a work as moving as Bach’s St. John Passion has strong anti-semitic overtones.)

For any artist for whom Judaism is anything more than an accident of birth, there is an uncomfortable truth that should trouble them far more than it seems to. All too few modern artists who create ‘Jewish Music,’ ‘Jewish Art,’ or ‘Jewish poetry’ seem to create anything worth remembering. Little of it sounds or looks particularly Jewish. It’s just like bad goyisher art, only it’s made for Jews. Go to any Reform Temple (once) and take in the unabashed awfulness of music by Debbie Friedman, Schlomo Carlebach or Safam. The only thing that separates it in quality from Christian Rock is that most people can’t understand the banality of the lyrics. Just as Christian Rock (or ‘Worship Music’) has done for Christianity, this music should strike us as bad news indeed. Whatever remains of Judaism’s greatest artistic traditions are being replaced by a bland, accessible music of which nobody with a brain would ever want to go within a hundred feet. What’s frightening about bringing the guitar into the mainstream of religious life is how successful it’s been at bringing people back to religion. Instead of people viewing religion as a fascinating and illuminating artifact of previous civilizations, people are convinced to believe in religion with all the devotion and literalness with which their ancestors believed 500 years ago. So it goes.


(Debbie Friedman. It’s sad that she’s dead. But her music makes me nauseous.)

When Martin Luther wrote the first Protestant hymns, his aim was more than simply musical. He needed a simple style of music that spoke directly to the layman to express a simpler vision of religion. There should be little doubt that Luther’s hymns still speak to us today. But there should be little more doubt that Luther’s hymns struck most Catholics of his day (if they heard Lutheran hymns at all) as absurdly trivial. These hymns call centuries of unconscious associations into our minds. From Luther we can hear the kernels of Bach, of the Anglican Hymnal, of Black spirituals, of Gospel music. We don’t simply hear Luther, we hear everything that came from him. As unlikely (and awful) as it might seem to us, people may one day hear Hillsong and hear the kernel of much much greater music that comes later.


(....Though I doubt it. Forever Reign by Hillsong.)

But the problem for Jews is compounded. Simplifying Jewish culture will never work for one reason: There is nothing simple about being Jewish. If you want a simpler religion, you have hundreds of Christian sects to choose from. Judaism is a religion built around 613 laws so complex and obfuscating that there are two-thousand years of commentary around the interpretation of every one of them - with heated debates between between many rabbis of each generation. No Jew could ever hope to master all the laws and commentary in a single lifetime. If anybody wants the secret of Judaism’s long-term survival, it’s all too simple: Jewish laws are so strange, and discovering a proper interpretation of the laws so time-consuming that a strictly Orthodox Jew would never have a chance in the hell he doesn’t believe in of fitting in with the rest of society.


(Whose directions would you trust? Directions from somebody whose religion allows for a setting of ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ like this one by Bach?......)

Furthermore, the complexity that is Judaism’s natural state will only be accepted by a society that is comfortable with complexity. A society that is appreciative of complexity, education and individuality is a society that will find much common ground with the Jewish people. A society that views those concepts suspiciously is almost guaranteed to view Jews with suspicion. Unfortunately, Ultra-Orthodox Jews can seem strange to even the most liberal-minded people. But some people are quite comfortable with the strangeness of the ‘other.’ Some people are not. For nearly three millenia, Jews have lived at the mercy of other communities. Liberal communities warmed quite well to the differences of the Jewish people, illiberal ones did not (and let that be a lesson about getting into bed with the Religious Right). If all feelings of liberalism and tolerance were to desert the world tomorrow, there is not a single Jew in the world who would survive by this time next year.


(.....or directions from somebody whose religion allows for a setting of ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ like this one from Chris Rice?)

Thank God (no pun intended) we live in an extremely tolerant era, relatively speaking. In descending order, the countries with the 10 highest Jewish populations are Israel, the US, France, Canada, the UK, Russia, Argentina, Germany, Australia and Brazil. Each of these countries is a democracy, relatively speaking. There has never been a time where being a Jew among goyim has been so easy. And there has never been a time when there is less incentive to uphold Jewish traditions. No Jew need uphold a mitzvah in today's world if he or she doesn’t want to.

The fact that Judaism is a conscious choice for today’s Jews makes our generation of Judaism different than virtually every Jewish generation in History. Until the Holocaust, Judaism was a Scarlett Aleph. Whether or not Jews chose to assimilate, the Gentile world looked upon even the most assimilated Jews with suspicion. After the Inquisition forced Jews to convert or leave Spain, the Jews who remained were still stuck with epithets like ‘Marrano’ and ‘Tornadizo’, terms perhaps as offensive (if not more) to their society as ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ are in ours. In the Spain of the 1500’s, a Marrano was a Catholic convert of Jewish origin, a ‘Tornadizo’ a heretic who practices another religion in secret. Many Spanish Jews did practice their religion in secret. But many of those whom the Inquisition burned alive for practicing Judaism were neither secretly Jewish nor even Jewish by origin. In Spain, as everywhere else so far, we were stuck with the accident of our birth. Whether we viewed ourselves as Jews, the rest of the world refused to view us as anything else. We therefore were discriminated against, attacked and slaughtered for the simple crime of being something different.


(What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe)

Well into the 20th century, Judaism had this unfortunate reason for continuing, and so did its culture. But it’s a reason which it no longer seems to have. In ages when the survival of your community is in doubt, every good work - whether in science or politics or culture - becomes an affirmation of why the community lives on. But in a world where your survival is nearly guaranteed, what urgency is there to uphold the magnificence of a culture? The tides of history are such that thousands of years of great Jewish music-making have been lost simply to posterity, but apathy might lead us to forget all the vestiges of older Jewish culture which we still have.


(The Selikos Epitaph. The oldest surviving musical composition. Would the Greeks have recognized this?)

Even among the Greeks and the Romans, we have only a handful of musical remains. It would be far too much to ask of history that we find remains of music from the people they conquered. Sure, we have the instruments of biblical times, but we have no idea what they played with them. The oldest example of Jewish composition is ‘Cantillation.’ Every Jew knows what cantillation is, even if they don’t know what it means. Cantillation is what every Bar-Mitzvah instructor calls ‘Torah Trope.’ But even in this, we have no idea if, or which, notated cantillation is accurate to what Cantillation was in the days of the temple. The system which most American bar-mitzvah students learn is the cantillation of the Litvaker Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe. But Litvaker cantillation is only one of at least thirteen distinct varieties of cantillation that are still practiced throughout the world today. How many other styles of cantillation were born and died over the millenia?


(Profanation. The second movement of Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony. In this piece, Bernstein took the most boring thing in the world: the Eastern European Haftarah trope which every American Jew has to learn for his/her Bar/Bat Mitzvah and turned it into some of the most exciting music ever composed)

We have more specific examples of the Sephardic/Mizrachi music of Spain, Northern Africa and the Middle East. But even from these later periods in history, we still have very little idea how their music sounded. Mizrahi music has now become perhaps the most vital force in Israeli contemporary music, as though Sephardic musicians finally have an opportunity to create a permanent literature that speaks for their civilization.


(Layers on layers of music. An original Sephardi melody with Ladino text. With a Mizrahi band reinterpreting it to sound like a contemporary vision of what the music of the Andalusian Period might have sounded like)

Even the final pre-modern wave of great Jewish musicmaking, what we once called ‘Chazzanus’ is a dying art. The Chazzan (or ‘Cantor’) is a singer - often a trained opera singer - who prays to God on behalf of the congregation. He (and sadly in the old days it was always a ‘he’) might lead the congregation in some communal prayers, but he is ultimately no less an intercessor to God than a Catholic Priest. Chazzanut has its roots in very old ideas that are not popular in our time: in the very Catholic idea that people need a spiritual figure to speak to God for them, and in the very ‘Old Europe’ idea that people the ultimate enjoyment is to be found while sitting in respectful silence so an expert singer can sing something far more beautifully than any amateur could.


(Leib Glantz. Would that today’s lyric tenors could sing like this...)


The Chazzan is no longer a wanted figure on both sides of Judaism. Most orthodox Jews view cantors as an unnecessary barrier to God. Most conservative and reformed Jews view cantors as an unnecessary barrier to direct participation in the service. Increasingly, we are seeing the replacement of the chazzan. Orthodox congregants know all the prayers by heart already and simply chant them themselves. Conservative and Reform synagogues would rather have simple melodies that everyone can sing and responsive readings in the language of the congregants. So if that’s what works better for some people, bully for them.


(Shir HaMaalos. Sung by Yossele Rosenblatt, traditionally thought the greatest of all Jewish cantors - even if it’s bereft of vocal fireworks, this is one of the very few recordings that does true justice to the beauty and power of Chazzanus to move audiences. A simply stunning document.)

But I can’t help thinking that it’s one of the most unfortunate developments in modern Jewish history. A great Chazzan is one of the few Jewish ways to obtain an authentic spiritual experience without all the baggage of religious dogma. No one who has heard a great Cantor can ever forget the experience. A nonagenarian relative of mine, musically quite knowledgeable, has sworn to me that most of his greatest musical experiences were in the synagogues of Brooklyn. I believe him.


(The famed cantor Gershon Sirota died in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a recording from 1903. The Unetanah Tokef, a Jewish High Holy Day Prayer. Recorded with Choir as Cantors always should be. If people could hear the recorded performances of Chazanim like this in better sound, it would likely take the entire world by storm.)

Chazzanut is music-making at its very rawest - with all the spontaneity and passion of great opera singing. Unfortunately, it is a greatness that cannot be well captured by recording. Orthodox Judaism strictly forbids recording a synagogue service. And so nearly all the great cantors had to record in a studio. And to make matters worse, the synagogue choir was usually replaced by a church organ (doubtlessly for financial reasons). Most of what we hear on recordings is a pale shadow of the greatness that must have transpired in every week in Shul.


(Somehow, somebody recorded Moshe Koussevitzky live during a service. Not very well...)

It’s yet another of Judaism’s cruel ironies that Jewish culture is moving away from building on a great cultural tradition at the very moment when the world would value it most. But like most things about Judaism, Chazzanut is a culture built to be appreciated by a precious few.

No, the chance for Jewish music to make its mark in an age of religion has passed. Once upon a time, religion was the world’s great force for progress. But progress has long since passed religion. No doubt, what we hear of Josquin and Ockeghem are pale shadows of what music lovers heard 500 years ago. How much more difficult would it be to recapture the musical greatness of a roving sect who only wrote down a small portion of the great music it made?

The vestiges of the old traditions are far too beautiful to not be preserved. New Chazzanim have to learn the secrets that made cantors like Rosenblatt and Leib Glantz so compelling and practice like mad so that other people can also experience what makes Chazzanus great. We have to have more Jewish musicians who learn Arabic instruments and research Sephardic music so that we can make a convincing recreation of what Andalusian Jewish music that sounds like something more than a skeletal outline.


(Pentecostal Music. Better than ever and a total contradiction to what I say in the paragraph below)

Personally, I’ve become more and more convinced that great religious art isn’t possible in an era when religion is a force that moves the world backward rather than forward. It isn’t unique to Jewish music, anybody who’s gone into a Church in the last ten years will know that the quality of Christian music is growing ever duller. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. And anybody who’s heard Pentecostal music knows that great religious music is not dead. Today’s Pentecostals play their old tunes with more musical skill and passion than you’ve long since ceased to find in your average jazz club.

The only chance for Judaism to make a mark on an inclusive world culture is to put the echoes of the old Jewish music into works of art that have a function that isn’t related to religion. It’s stil possible - maybe more possible than ever before - to create as much great Jewish art as it is to create as much great Christian art. But most artists don’t do it. Instead, they’ve liberated their work from the confines of religion. Perhaps they’re right to do so. But religion has produced too much good along with the bad to be banished from the present day.


(Perry Como’s Kol Nidre. Because I can’t help myself.)