Conference Agenda

The philosophical ideas of Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza do not easily lend themselves to musical representation. Spinoza’s life, however, is another story. Given that Spinoza was famously excommunicated from his Amsterdam Sephardic Jewish community in 1656 for what were dubbed heretical claims, his biography offers poignant material that could suit a libretto. Jewish investment in this narrative has been especially notable: Jewish thinkers, novelists, and dramatists have repeatedly returned to Spinoza’s life, and especially this episode, to cast Spinoza as a founding figure of modern forms of Jewish identity and thought.

This paper looks at one case in which a composer responded to this tradition: the unpublished opera Spinoza, A Life in Three Acts (1979), one of the very few operas written on Spinoza’s life. Through original archival research and interviews on the opera and its contexts, I examine how general trends in Jewish Spinoza reception take on intensified meaning when they are personalized and localized, and ask what musical composition may bring to picture. Looking first at the opera’s composer Julius Drossin (1918-2007)—Cleveland Orchestra cellist, Cleveland State University music department chair, and a respected composer during his lifetime—I argue that the project was a way for Drossin to bring together his own identities as a practicing and philosophically-minded Reform Jew and an academically-situated classical musician. In light of the overlapping local Cleveland and larger American Reform Jewish and classical music contexts in which he operated, Drossin approached the project with an American tonalist modernist musical language that allowed significant space for musical gestures meant to faintly echo some aspects of cantorial practice, an idiom that he had also used to compose sacred music for his local temple. Though Drossin’s opera does not currently enjoy a place in the repertoire—likely in part because his own personal investment in its content led him to be reluctant to revise it after initial performances for increased stage success—it stands out as an example of how individual and local community beliefs, concerns, and lives interact with and concretize larger historical trends in religion, philosophy, and identity.

During a visit to Berlin in 1797, the Romantic writer Jean Paul remarked upon the unexpected presence of Jewish singers in the Passions of Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759), court composer to Frederick II. By performing a genre that often casts Jews as antagonists in the death of Christ, Jean Paul quipped that the Jews of Berlin “sing against themselves.” This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon was in fact a point of pride for some within the community: activist Wolf Davidson regarded the Jewish singers of Der Tod Jesu (1755), Graun’s most famous Passion, as evidence of Jewish cultural achievement and thus their right to citizenship.

Though much has been written on the Jewish embrace of German music, most approaches prioritize how Jewish lives were impacted by German culture. This paper, however, asks how Jewish musicians and audiences shaped the emergent national discourse of German music. To this end, I investigate the role of Jewish singers and listeners within the Berlin Sing-Akademie’s performances of two representative works: Der Tod Jesu and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. While the 1829 revival of the latter is credited with cementing the position of music within German national culture (Applegate 2005), others have pushed back on the revival’s novelty by tracing its origins within eighteenth-century musical and intellectual trends (Exner 2022). In conjunction with Enlightenment ideals of sympathy and tolerance, Berlin’s active environment of amateur music-making enabled the public cultivation of sacred music among Jewish Berliners.

Drawing on Sing-Akademie membership rolls, music criticism, letters, and other contemporary sources, I document the significance of Jewish singers within rehearsal and performance of these works, in addition to their reception among Jewish listeners. Bernd Sponheuer’s analysis of “the ‘German’ in music” as opposing discursive tropes—the universal and the exclusive—offers a new approach to theorize the Jewish contribution to the construct of German music. I suggest that by publicly singing and listening to these Passions, German Jews performed the otherwise abstract universality of German music in a way that German Christians could not, embodying a distinctly German set of musical values that were eventually adopted as international signifiers of greatness.

The employment of “ethnographic ingredients,” of folk materials or stylistic elements, for the concoction of Jewish art music, has been a contested matter. As I attempt to show, controversies surrounding this issue, from their start at the turn of the twentieth century, were grounded in political differences. Generally speaking, two orientations in the making of Jewish music may be discerned, representing Right and Left respectively. The first is characterized by the search for “ancient sources” as a means of mobilizing and reinventing national myth; the second seeking contemporary or recent folk music as representing a living reality. Early on, the conflict became apparent in the negotiation between Hebrew-language “music of the synagogue,” on the one hand, and Yiddish song and Hassidic music on the other. In subsequent decades, the choice of musical sources continued to hold added significance, revealing the chasms between different approaches and political orientations.

The two outlooks will be examined through the prism of both polemical writings and musical works. The earliest debate, involving composer Lazare Saminsky and musicologist-composer Joel Engel, acquires a musical manifestation in their corresponding compositions, Engel’s music for the play Hadybbuk (1922) and Saminsky’s opera-ballet The Vision of Ariel (1916). Further on, the opposition became more acute in the contrast between two other musicologists and ethnographers, Moshe Beregovsky and A. Z. Idelsohn, particularly, as expressed in the former’s critical essay of 1934. Both controversies, I argue, were politically rooted, and the opposition they reveal delineates the contrasting paths Jewish Music was to take.