Cantor Mark Saltzman's notes from OPERATICA JUDAICA, performed live at Congregation Kol Ami on Sunday, June 13, 2004

Operatic Judaism! Is there such a thing? In the strictest sense of the word, probably not. But considering the high drama bordering on melodrama that anyone who was raised in a Jewish home has experienced, the two words seem to fit together. After all, in Judaism, we are commanded in the Psalms and prayers to sing a new song and to make a joyful noise, which is very much in concert with the execution of an Opera. They are different in that singing in Judaism rarely involves grabbing a spear and honking out a high C for 8 bars in service of the divine spirit. Nonetheless, the influence that Judaism has had within the Opera world, particularly over the last two centuries is remarkable. Today we will explore the Judeo-operatic relationship, and will also have the great pleasure of listening to some of the most beautiful repertoire of the Operatic Canon sung by five of the most talented young singers in the country.

You are probably asking yourself, what is so Jewish about Mozart? The answer is not the music, but the text. The first half of this program is devoted to the part of Opera that we rarely think about unless you’re a singer, and that is the words or what we call the libretto. One thing that makes Opera so different from other art forms is how the music is shaped around the libretto. Cosi Fan Tutte, from which Gretchen’s aria was excerpted, was composed by Mozart to a libretto by Lorenzo DaPonte. DaPonte? It doesn’t sound Jewish, nu? No, but DaPonte was originally born Emanuele Conegliano, the son of a Jewish Tanner in a ghetto north of Venice. He was Bar Mitzvah at 13, but his mother had died in his early childhood, and his father remarried to a Catholic woman when he was 14. The whole family converted taking advantage of the elevation of their lifestyle once they were no longer Jewish. As a special sign of favor, the local Bishop bestowed his own name upon Emanuele when the conversion was complete, and so emerged Lorenzo DaPonte. A stint in the Catholic seminary rounded out his education, which is where he started writing verse, but he then decided his political, philosophical and amorous lifestyle was not in keeping with the requirements of the clergy. His verses eventually became libretti that reflected his life including the gigantic emotional upheavals illustrated in Dorabella’s aria “Smanie implacabili” that we just heard, but his poetry was also tempered with the philosophical sense of repose that you will hear in our second selection, the trio,”O Soave il vento” from Cosi. It reads like a poem from Songs of Songs telling the breezes to blow quietly and for the elements to sweetly answer our desires, and it sounds like the music of angels.

DaPonte wrote three of the most important libretti of Mozart’s operas, Cosi fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni. In Don Giovanni, he traces the life of a Don Juan who was modeled after DaPonte’s good friend Casanova, along with a fair amount of autobiographical detail as well. The character of Donna Anna paints an interesting portrait of a certain kind of Jewish female archetype. She is self tormented, anguishing over whether she is worthy of a man, wanting love, but afraid of her femininity, has high ideals, and when need be, a remarkable ability to take care of herself. She is a kind of Sarah , Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah all rolled into one. In this next aria, “Non mi dir”, Donna Anna rebuffs and then pleads with her fiancé to let her off the marriage hook until she can resolve her need to avenge herself against Don Giovanni. It ends with her own version of Avinu Malkeinu, a final invocation to heaven to have pity on her.

Leporello is perhaps the most fascinating and convoluted character in Don Giovanni. He works for a master that he admires, despises, fears and emulates all at the same time. He is a perfect combination of Jewish pride and guilt combined. His “Catalogue” aria is a wonderful tongue twister very much like the counting songs and acrostic prayers that are peppered throughout Jewish repertory such as the Passover songs Chad Gadya and Echad Mi Odea. In this piece, Leporello explains to Donna Elvira, the Jewish female archetypical shrew, how he has kept a catalogue of all the women his master has seduced and then proceeds to list them by country, (i.e. 640 in Italy, one hundred in France, and over a thousand in Spain) He also lists them by their looks, class, sizes, shape, and various attributes, but he stresses in the end that Giovanni’s only real prerequisite for seducing a woman, is that they wear a skirt!

Some of the greatest Jewish librettists and composers found their voice in Operetta as did many great Jewish singers. Operetta was a bit more like the musical theatre of our day in that there was usually dialogue between set numbers and both the subjects and music were often less weighty than Opera. The next two selections are two of the biggest blockbuster hits of Operetta.

The music and libretto of the Land of Smiles is composed by Franz Lehar who wrote the most well known Operetta in the world, the Merry Widow, collaborating with two of the reigning Jewish librettists in Germany, Fritz Lohner , and Ludwig Herzer,. It was written especially for the leading tenor Richard Tauber,who was kind of the Jewish Pavarotti of Germany in the first part of the century. They were all highly successful until the rise of the Nazi regime, when all but Lehar perished in the concentration camps. Even Lehar nearly met his untimely demise because he had collaborated so frequently with Jews, but Hitler so loved the Merry Widow that the Nazi’s spared his life. “Dein ist mein ganzes herz”, You are my heart alone, is sung by the tenor hero when he refuses to follow the Chinese custom of taking four wives, and will only dedicate his heart to one love. Jewish ethics to the core!

Jacques Offenbach, the composer of the Tales of Hoffman, was the son of a well known Cantor in Cologne. He was educated at the Paris conservatory, and frequently collaborated with two other famous Jewish librettists Halevy and Meilhac (of Carmen fame). Though he wrote hundreds of Operettas, The Tales of Hoffman is considered his best and most serious work though he was still reworking it up until the time of his death. As a result of his constant rewrites, the “Bacarolle” you are about to hear, was the kind of wandering Jew of the Opera. Conceived for the characters Giulietta the courtesan and Stella, Hoffman’s mystery love, it was originally designed for the last act of the Opera, but was moved to the second act where it was sung by Antonia and Nicklaus when the last act was deleted from the premiere. The final act was reinstated in later performances, and the duet was moved back to the third act and sung by Nicklaus and Giulietta as a languid duet, finding a home at last on the Grand Canal (so much for eretz yisrael!). Point of information, Nicklaus is a boy, played by girl as is common in opera, which inspired me towards a great idea for the sequel to this program, “The influence of the GLBT (gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, and transgendered)in Opera? Just an idea! In any event, first we hear “Dein is mein ganzes herz”, and then the “Bacarolle” from Hoffman.
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Ok, now its time for the Kol Ami Opera quiz! I’ve been talking about the influence that Judaism has had in Opera, but what about the reverse. What has been the influence of Opera in Judaism? Certainly many of the choral works of the late nineteenth century could easily be found in Operas, like the Lewandowsky Hallelujah, but even more directly, what about the solo music? Are you ready for the question? Ok, here it goes, what aria from what Opera and by what composer is this setting of the High Holiday liturgy, Ki Vayom Hazeh?

Its an arrangement of “Una Furtiva Lagrima” from L’elisir d’amore by Donizetti as arranged by one of the big German music director/organists Schlessinger, who moved to the Southern United States from Germany at the turn of the century He brought with him his love and knowledge of the current Opera repertory of that time; and so it (and many other beautiful melodies) were “lifted” for liturgical use! Your prize is that you get to listen to the next set (no Hebrew this time) from what is known as the most popular Opera in the world, Carmen.

Now, what you might ask is Jewish about Carmen? To start with, the librettists. Halevy and Meilhac were very successful operetta librettists, primarily with Offenbach as mentioned before. Ludovic Halevy was the nephew of Jacques Frommenthal Halevy, one of the most popular Jewish opera composers of the mid nineteenth century of whom we shall learn about later. Frommenthal Halevy’s daughter (Ludovic Halevy’s cousin) had married one of the elder Halevy’s students, Georges Bizet, and so Ludovic and Bizet knew one another. Sounds like a typical convoluted bible story, doesn’t it? She was my mother’s second cousin by marriage, but three times removed, and then even more closely related by the great grandfather who…..etc. Anyway, Bizet, Halevy, and Meilhac got together to create a new Opera Comique, kind of an Operetta on the way to becoming an Opera with Dialogue, but more serious in nature. What resulted was the masterpiece Carmen from which we will hear three selections today. I can’t help but think that Bizet was influenced by the Jewish music that must have been around his wife’s family, because Carmen has definite Jewish modalities throughout the score. In particular, the “fate” theme; now tell me that isn’t a Cantor draying in there! Even the Seguidilla has the signature accidentals of synagogue davening, and in this first duet we find Carmen davening with Don Jose to convince him to set her free. If he does so, he will gain her affections she promises. A kind of Delilah as a Gypsy! The second duet is between Don Jose and Micaela, who by the way was not in the original novel on which the Opera was based, but was added in as a comic relief? Must be Jewish humor! The two of them whine their way in and out of love, notwithstanding Jose’s highly suspicious infatuation with his mother. You draw your own conclusions! The last ensemble is the famous quintet with Carmen and her four gypsy sidekicks. The quintet gives us their wonderful sense of friendship and community as they try to convince Carmen to forgo her newest infatuation with the Toreador Escamillo, and help them further their plots and plans together.

Intermission

Welcome back! In the first half of the program, we heard Operas that had been influenced primarily by Jewish wordsmiths. In this half, we will explore some of the Jewish composers and the use of Jewish or at least old testament subject matter. We start out with a whopper, the grand daddy of them all, La Juive, The Jewess. The composer, Jacque Frommenthal Halevy, was descended from the great family of Spanish Halevy’s including Yehuda Halevy, the great Jewish poet and philosopher. His family had experienced the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the 15th century, and ended up in France where he was considered on of the great teachers and composers of the 19th century. The story of La Juive is filled with violence, intrigue and passion, with the main character, Eleazar the Jewish Jeweler (what else?) set on wreaking vengeance on the persecutors of the Jews in Switzerland. The plot is complex with many twists and turns, and is not unlike the story of Moses discovering he is Jewish and then turning against Pharoah. The aria is the penultimate scene where Eleazar decides whether he should sacrifice himself and his adopted daughter (“the Jewess”, though she turns out not to his real daughter, nor really Jewish after all) The opera ends with caldrons of boiling oil, etc. and Eleazar finally has his vengeance on the Christian community.

So now for a touch of levity, we move on to Nabucco! Another, pot boiler (so to speak), but this time biblically based. The Opera is based on the story of Nebucanezar, known as Nabucco in Italian. Again, the Jews are doomed, the temple is looted and burned, but for our purposes, we will skip to the aria that takes place in Babylon. Though Verdi was not Jewish (at all), the fire and depth of feeling matches anything in the Jewish canon, as Abigaille our nasty tempered Soprano discovers that she is not the daughter of Nabucco and swears vengeance on her supposed father for deceiving her. Lots of confused heritage and vengeance in this biblical epic Opera.

Enough Melodrama yet? Actually, during the 19th century, Operas were the soaps, mtv, and sitcoms of the era. People couldn’t wait to see their next installment of Gounod, or Meyerbeer, or Verdi. Audiences loved the pageantry and music so much, they could care less if the plots were nonsensical and the singers acted like awful actors in a dreadful“B” movie! Oy veh, What a movie!

One thing Jews have learned over the years is to maintain a sense of humor! Leonard Bernstein, the composer and librettist of Trouble in Tahiti of which you’ve just heard an excerpt, was not only talented as a writer, composer, pianist, conductor, and general genius, but he was also immensely interested in the human condition as he viewed it in the modern world. One of the big differences between the Operas of the 19th and 20th centuries, at least as far as Judaism is concerned, is that the more recent composers tended to concentrate on more contemporary themes and events rather than historical or literary epics. Bernstein often chose subjects that explored the relationships of the ordinary man in the here and now, like Sam and Dinah in Trouble in Tahiti. The next piece “Lonely House” from Street Scene is a Kurt Weill/Langston Hughes collaboration of the same ilk. Weil wrote many interesting adaptations of Jewish texts including a Kaddish. The atmosphere and tone of this aria based on a novel of Edgar Rice describes the feeling that Jews have written about for thousands of years, and one that we have all known at one time or another in our lives. That feeling of loneliness when you can’t connect to the world you live in.

Did you notice the Jewish modal jazz motives in” Lonely House”? And how about all the jazz rhythms and harmonies in Bernstein’s “What a movie”? The influence of Jazz with Jewish overtones was a mainstay of Jewish composers in the first half of the 20th century. George Gershwin, Judaism’s Jazz icon is looked upon as Tin Pan Alley’s greatest success story going from a song plugger’s cubicle to the lights of Broadway and the heights of Hollywood. He was raised and educated with an array of Jewish musicians in New York from Mrs. Goldfarb to Mr. Green. He studied Chopin and Debussy as much as he did jazz for his popular song writing and musicals, but he was also fascinated and focused on serious composition and started to explore the idioms and folk melodies of the blacks in the South. He moved to South Carolina as he was starting the score of his grand opera, Porgy and Bess to gain a deeper understanding of the sounds and flavors described in Dubose Heyward’s play on which the opera is based. Porgy and Bess solidified Gershwin’s reputation as a serious composer, and gave birth to one of the first and truly greatest American Operas.

There is nothing even vaguely Jewish about Les Heugenots, however, its composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer was the most famous and successful Jewish composer of the mid 19th century in all of Europe. He was born Jakob Liebermann Beer, but eventually changed his name to a more Italianate Giacomo Meyerbeer becoming Italian-German in the process. As beloved as he was during his lifetime, he was the victim of anti-Semitism after his death with the publishing of Wagner’s infamous essay against Jewish music “Jews and Music” in which Meyerbeer and his music was soundly denounced. Today, his operas are almost unheard of with the exception of a few excerpted arias and ensembles. “Noble seigneur” which we will hear next is another trouser role, like Nicklaus in Tales of Hoffman. In it the character makes his brilliant entrance into the noble lords of the court with this scintillating virtuoso introduction for himself.

No trouser role is this next lady. Samson and Delilah is a Jewish biblical parable that we are all familiar with from our earliest childhood. And, no composer has ever captured the dangerous, sultry, sensuality of Delilah as did Saint-Saens when he composed his setting of her seduction song, “Mon Coeur s’ouvre ta voix”, my heart at your voice. Gentleman, hold on to your hair!

Finally, we come back to one of my favorite composers, Leonard Bernstein. As I mentioned before, versatility was his trademark, and in 1957 when two other versatile Jews, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins agreed to collaborate on a modern day telling of the Romeo and Juliette tale, thus West Side Story was born. A Jewish artistic team yes, but Opera? Hmmm….perhaps not. Arguments have been made for decades that West Side Story is more than just a musical because the dance calls for classical ballet, and the vocal demands are operatic, yet because the drama is spoken, we call it a musical. Let’s just say that the entertainment may be called musical theater, but the scale is operatic. The text and musical idiom are what strike me as what is most Jewish in character. It speaks of the Jewish dilemma of thousands of years of feeling like outsiders, wandering, looking for a home, “Somewhere”. And the distortion harmonic scales call us back to haunting motives from the time of the second temple in Jerusalem. One can even hear the sound of the Tikiah shofar call in the opening leitmotiv of the Sharks and Jets. All these sounds remind take us back to the destruction of the 2nd Temple, when the wandering all began. Perhaps the one the thing “Somewhere” and the art of opera teaches us, is that one place the Jews can always call home, is in the songs and words of its people.

Notes compiled by Cantor Mark Saltzman, adapted from a live presentation on June 13, 2004

Posted by Lee at June 17, 2004 01:30 PM