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FEATURE ARTICLE
Rarest of the Rare:
Jewish High Baroque
Growing
up Jewish, Tempesta di Mare Artistic Co-Director Richard Stone
felt a little left out.
“I
always envied the Catholics and Protestants who had wonderful
composers like Vivaldi and Haydn writing music for their ceremonies,”
he says. But then he and Co-Director Gwyn Roberts learned
about very rare examples of Jewish High Baroque music, “We
were thrilled,” Stone says, “not only because
there was music from the period that we love that’s
in Hebrew, but because it’s of really high quality.”
Hoshanna!
Hebrew Music of the High Baroque presents concert works
on the grand scale for solo singers, chorus and full orchestra
in the styles of Vivaldi and Haydn. If you’ve never
heard of Jewish High Baroque, don’t feel bad. Hardly
anybody has. History conspired against this music being created
in the first place. Then most of it was destroyed. The few
examples that remain—and they’re so rare that
Hoshanna! presents a good proportion of them—are
important artifacts in the long, complex history of European
Jewry.
18th-century
Jewish concert music came about when barriers dropped between
religious groups. Holland and Italy had traditions of tolerance;
there are 17th-century madrigals on Hebrew texts by Salamone
Rossi, for instance. Tolerance and acceptance increased in
the 18th century under the influence of greater commerce,
(somewhat) more open-minded autocrats and Enlightenment thought
about universal equality and fraternity. Governments allowed
Jews more freedoms; Jews in turn began leaving the ghettos
and taking part in wider culture.
By
the 1720’s, congregations in Piedmont’s Casale
Monferrato—home of a thriving Ashkenazic Jewish population
and site of one of the most beautiful baroque synagogues in
Europe—included concert music in their celebrations.
They marked the evening preceding Hoshanna Rabbah during the
High Holy Days in 1733 with an oratorio in up-to-date Vivaldian
style: God, Defender, and Accuser.
God,
Defender, and Accuser (Elyon, Melits, u-Mastin)
is a Day of Atonement fable in which humankind is brought
to trial before God by a Defender and an Accuser. “It
has a lot of the feel of a 17th-century opera prologue, one
of those allegorical pieces with witty banter going on among
characters about whose sphere of power will influence the
outcome of the story,” says Stone. “In a way,
it’s a prologue to the drama of who among the Jews—which
would have been everyone at the 1733 performance—will
be inscribed in the Book of Life.”
But
it wasn’t easy to get God to sing Italian oratorio in
Hebrew.
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FEATURE ARTICLE
(continued)
First, the libretto was written in Hebrew. Then
it was then translated into Italian so that the composer, whose
name is no longer known, could set the translation to music. With
the music completed, the Italian texts were removed and replaced
with Hebrew. Since Hebrew is read right-to-left and music left-to-right,
the Hebrew texts had to be transliterated into the Roman alphabet
so they could be read in the same direction as the music.
Translation may not have raised issues for the
music in other half of Tempesta’s Hoshanna! program,
music from the Sephardic Jewish community of 1770’s Amsterdam.
Abraham Caseres was a Jew. Cristiano Guiseppe Lidarti, a Jesuit-trained,
Viennese-born Italian who seems to have been a favorite with the
community, surely knew Hebrew. His writing glows with inspiration
from the Hebrew texts. They provided him with a terrific pretext
for bel canto vocalese.
“Let every thing that hath breath”
(“Kol haneshama,” Psalm 150) becomes a showpiece
for coloratura soprano, with florid, swooping runs over “hallelu-yah.”
Lidarti’s Rococo-era vocal fireworks isn’t synagogal
chant by a long shot. But by all reports, synagogal chant itself
in this era was becoming increasingly inventive, improvisatory and
“westernized.” Perhaps the two were reaching a spiritual
concordance.
Still, this isn’t Disney. This isn’t
a story of unblemished 18th-century peace and cooperation. The government
of Casale Monferrato clamped down shortly after the oratorio God,
Defender, and Accuser was performed in 1733, driving Jews back into
the ghetto. In most areas of Europe, acceptance would have to wait
until the 19th century, if then. And of course, the few, fragile
examples of Jewish Baroque that the 18th-century managed to produce
were scattered or destroyed in the world wars and the Holocaust.
What remains would still be lost without intrepid
researchers such as Moshe Gorali, who discovered the Casale Monferrato
manuscripts in Moscow’s Lenin State Library in 1964, and Israel
Adler, founder of the Jewish Music Research Center at Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, who has edited editions of the Hoshanna!
works and devoted a lifetime to studying and preserving treasures
of Jewish musical heritage.
Except…a living trace of the 18th-century
musical efflorescence may remain. Manuscripts vanish, but tunes
linger, particularly in traditions like that of synagogal chant.
Many of the tunes that have passed down through Amsterdam Sephardic
community are anonymous.
But in a few cases, scholars speculate, “anonymous”
was a Jesuit named Cristiano Guiseppe Lidarti.
Photo above: interior of the synagogue at Casale
Monferrato. For spectacular virtual-reality views of the synagogue's
interior, visit Casale
Ebraica online.
Anne
Schuster Hunter, Contributing Editor, is a writer and art
historian living in Philadelphia.
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Hoshanna!
Hebrew Music of the High Baroque
Program:
Ouverture
to Esther
orchestra
Nora Elohim
chorus and orchestra
Boi Beshalom
soprano and orchestra
Kol Haneshama
solo voice and continuo
Befi Yesharim
chorus and orchestra
Kol Haneshama
soprano and orchestra
Chishki chizki
chorus and orchestra
Overtura (Sinfonia)
orchestra
Elyon, Melits u-Mastin
soloists, chorus and orchestra
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Cristiano Giovanni Lidarti
(1730-1793)
Lidarti
Lidarti
Anon, ca. 1740-1750
Lidarti
Lidarti
Abraham Casseres
(fl. early-mid 18th century)
Antonio Brioschi
(fl. ca. 1725-1750)
Anonymous
(composed 1733)
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Click here to order tickets
online, or call 215-755-8776.
Venues:
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Sunday, Apr 1.
4:00
Roberts
Hall
Haverford College
Haverford |
Tempesta
di Mare - Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
Gwyn Roberts & Richard Stone, Artistic Directors
Emlyn Ngai, Concertmaster
with
Sheryl Heather Cohen & Nell Snaidas, sopranos • David
Newman, baritone
Chamber Singers of Haverford & Bryn Mawr Colleges, Thomas Lloyd,
Director
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