Sara Itzig Levy—subject of Tempesta di Mare’s upcoming concert, Madame Levy’s Salon—was a salonnière, one of the wealthy eighteenth-century ladies who opened their homes for gatherings of thinkers and doers. It was salon society, with all the glitz, dashing noblemen and broken hearts that you’d expect. But Sara Levy was a salonnière with a difference. She was a professional-level harpsichordist. And strangely enough for autocratic, class and estate-bound Prussia, she was Jewish and stayed that way.

In one of those odd quirks of history, more than half of Berlin’s dozen-or-so late eighteenth-century salons were held by Jewish women. When the salon impulse, which began in France, spread through Europe, it took on different flavors. Conditions in Berlin produced a situation in which commoners and nobles, Christian and Jews, all wanted to mingle, socialize and variously schmooze in the beautiful homes of the city’s Jewish ladies. Careers, couplings and cross-cultural discourse of all kinds took place in the Berlin Jewish salons decades before civil rights were granted to German Jews.

Personalities contributed to the situation. Moses Mendelssohn, the philosophe dubbed “the Jewish Socrates,” exerted a dynamic presence in late eighteenth-century Berlin. His influence was strong in the Jewish community both in reputation and person. For instance, Sara Levy’s father, the banker Daniel Itzig—one of the wealthiest men in Berlin—was Moses Mendelssohn’s friend. Moses’s son, Abraham Mendelssohn, married Lea Salomon, daughter of Levy’s sister, Babette. Lea Salomon, who was thus Sara Levy’s niece and Itzig’s granddaughter, became mother to Felix Mendelssohn, making Levy the great aunt of the famous nineteenth-century composer. (And you thought Philadelphia was a small world.)

Sara herself was a personality to be reckoned with. She leaves us a portrait in the music she loved that is as vivid as any oil painting. Adam Pearl, Tempesta harpsichordist, talks about the C.P.E. Bach Quartet for flute, viola and keyboard that Tempesta will be playing and that Bach wrote for Sara Levy. “It’s bright and sparkling but parts of it—particularly in the middle movement—are more complex, with unexpected harmonic moves. And the harpsichord part—that’s Sara Levy’s part—it’s technically demanding.”

Stubborn and idiosyncratic, Levy favored the serious music of the late eighteenth century even while she lived well into the nineteenth. Contemporaries moved on to Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, but Levy continued to love the music which was, above all, the work of Bach and his family. She studied keyboard with one Bach son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, corresponded with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s music publicly herself in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

(FEATURE continues below)

TICKETS

Madame Levy’s Salon
a musical time capsule from Berlin
March 21 and 22

Tempesta di Mare | Chamber Players

---

Click the ticket roll image above to order your seats today.

FEATURE (continued)

Levy’s rich, deep collection—now coming to public use once again as part of the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection, repatriated to Berlin after years missing as Soviet war booty—includes a large number of works by the Bach family. Many of the works that we have by J.S. Bach survived, in fact, thanks to the foresight of the greater Itzig/Levy/Mendelssohn family. As well as Sara Levy’s own collection, Sara’s nephew, Abraham Mendelssohn, purchased the Bach family estate when it came to auction in 1804 and gave it to the Sing-Akademie, where its treasures were preserved for posterity.

The Jewish salons flourished from 1780 to 1806. But after the French occupation of Berlin in that year, religious intolerance became more overt, Prussian nationalism rebounded, painters and romantics looked elsewhere for exotic, dark-haired Orientals, the economy soured, and the Jewish salons faded.

Mme Levy kept hers going, but a famous incident in 1811 indicates how the environment had changed. The poet Achim von Arnim arrived at Mme Levy’s one afternoon unannounced, inappropriately dressed and apparently bristling with attitude. One thing led to another until Levy’s nephew, Moritz Itzig, challenged the nobleman to a duel for disrespecting his hostess. Adding disrespect to disrespect, the noble Arnim refused to duel Itzig, as he was a Jew. The situation, which eventually led to brawling and the courts, truly marked the end of an epoch.

Mme Levy weathered the storms, steadfastly refusing to convert to Christianity despite peer pressure and remaining a catalyst for Berlin music making until her death at the age of 93 in 1854.

And now for the hero.

Felix Mendelssohn famously directed a performance of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Sing-Akademie in 1829. This event is legendary as the act that catapulted the long-forgotten Bach back into the consciousness of Western culture. It’s the origination myth of the Baroque music revival.

It really doesn’t steal any of Mendelssohn’s visionary thunder to realize that he directed the famous performance from a score given to him by Sara Levy’s sister, his grandmother Babette.

Mendelssohn was a genius and a hero, yes. But his genius was a family affair.

---

NEWS from our friends at Piffaro

Piffaro Young Recorder Players Competition and Winners Concert

high school virtuosi en-route!

by Joan Kimball, special contributor

---

Recorder Competition Results

Piffaro’s second Young Recorder Players Competition—for ages 12 to 18—was held on Saturday, January 10, 2009, at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. Five finalists performed before an enthusiastic audience. Though snow and ice kept some people away who otherwise would have attended, the finalists had no trouble reaching Philadelphia from such distant snow capitals of Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago.

Unique in this country, the Young Recorder Players Competition was established in 2007 to pique the interest of young recorder players and to encourage them to investigate the repertoire of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries on recorders and other early wind instruments. While these young players tend to focus on eighteenth-century and contemporary music, Piffaro hopes to convey the importance of playing earlier repertoire too.

Joe Lewnard, an eighteen-year-old high school senior from the Chicago area, was chosen as the winner by judges Nina Stern from New York and Elissa Berardi from Philadelphia. Joe has played recorder for a number of years, studying with Aldo Abreu, among others, and has attended the virtuoso program at the Amherst Early Music Festival. His selections for the competition were the unaccompanied Ricercata Prima by Giovanni Bassano, and two movements from a suite by Pierre Philidor.

The other four finalists also played with poise and distinction in varied repertoire that showed their abilities to proffer distinct styles from Renaissance to contemporary. They were: Ariel Branz from Boulder (16, student of Linda Lunbeck), Bryan Duerfeldt from Minneapolis (15, student of Mary Halverson Waldo), Amy Pikler from Chicago (16, student of Patrick O’Malley), and Olivia Sohlen from Minneapolis (16, student of Clea Galhano).

With two of these competitions successfully completed, Piffaro plans to hold another in two years, with hopes that young recorder players will start thinking ahead to prepare for this event. We’d love to see more young virtuosi coming our way!

Recital for Competition Winners, March 7

On Saturday, March 7th, Joe Lewnard, this year’s competition winner, and Alexa Raine-Wright, 2007 winner, will appear together in a recital here in Philadelphia. They will perform seventeenth and eighteenth-century repertoire, spiced with a set of pieces on Renaissance recorders, assisted by harpsichordist Marcia Kravis, and Piffaro members Bob Wiemken, Priscilla Smith and Joan Kimball. Performing both solo and duo works, Joe and Alexa will play music by de Selma, Castello, Merula, Handel and Telemann.

For more information, visit the Piffaro website, piffaro.org, and click on the “Concerts, Special Events” link once you get there.

go to Contents 
go to Top of Page