Conference Agenda

During the nineteenth century, Jewish scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement adopted cutting-edge scientific methods to study the history of Judaism and Jewish culture and assembled archives to support their research. Jewish music scholars also embraced the movement’s scientific ethos and started their own archive building projects, which led to the publication of several anthologies and historical studies of synagogue music during the nineteenth century. My paper explores a different, less-examined aspect of nineteenth-century “wissenschaftlich” Jewish music scholarship: Jewish scholars’ reception of Christian-authored histories of Hebrew music. These Christian-authored histories often have been overlooked in historiographies of Jewish music research because they are frequently laced with antisemitic bias and tend to focus exclusively on the musical culture of the Hebrew Bible. Nevertheless, many nineteenth-century German-Jewish music scholars critically engaged with these narratives in the name of scientific thoroughness.

In this paper, I argue that nineteenth-century encounters between Jewish and Christian traditions of scholarship on Hebrew music played a crucial yet overlooked role in shaping the historiographical foundations of the emerging field of Jewish music studies. I will focus specifically on Joseph Levin Saalschütz’s reception of Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s account of Hebrew music in the widely read Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788). In Geschichte und Würdigung der Musik bei den Hebräern (1825), Saalschütz sought to provide a more rigorous account of Hebrew music that refuted Forkel’s claims that it had not progressed beyond “mere cantillation” and had failed to attain the same level of development as had ancient Greek music. Although many nineteenth-century Jewish music scholars sought to move beyond discussions of only ancient Hebrew music, I argue that Saalschütz’s critical engagement with Forkel’s text demonstrates that these scholars nevertheless had sustained interest in this topic. Their sustained interest was motivated by a desire to challenge the dominance of Christian narratives and thereby reclaim the history of Hebrew music for their new histories of synagogue music.

The Palestine Opera was founded in 1923, shortly after the establishing of British Mandate Palestine. Its activities were mostly terminated (at least temporarily) in 1927. Founded by Mark Golinkin, the former conductor of the Odessa Opera and of the St. Petersburg People’s House Opera, the company struggled with inadequate physical conditions and a lack of funds, which ultimately led to its collapse. Over its four years of existence the Palestine Opera staged seventeen full operatic productions. While generally following standard repertoire sung in Hebrew translation, Golinkin’s performances of operas on biblical and Jewish themes stand out for their special significance. My presentation will focus on two biblical-themed operas, whose plots are set in the particular geographies of the holy land: Anton Rubinstein’s Die Maccabäer (1874) and Camil Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah (1877). Building on the notions of opera performance as a sociocultural event and of operatic works as adaptive to local sociopolitical conditions, my presentation examines the significance that the two operas assumed within the historical context of their reception. Originally, the works may have been intended as anything from the essentially Christian dramatization of biblical stories to a political allegory. In Mandatory Palestine, the works took on further (and at times, even contradictory) territorial and representational meanings as they became employed in service of Zionist agendas on the one hand and British colonialist interests on the other.

This paper examines the career of harpsichordist Gusta Goldschmidt (1913–2005), whose activities as a historical performer, resistance worker, Holocaust survivor, and teacher elucidate the role of women and Jewish musicians in the Dutch early music revival. Following studies with Wanda Landowska, Goldschmidt concertized in the Netherlands from 1939 as a harpsichord soloist and accompanist; among an Amsterdam circle of Jewish and leftist musicians, experiments with period instruments presented a creative alternative space outside inhospitable mainstream musical institutions. During the German occupation, Goldschmidt and her husband became involved in resistance work until their eventual arrest and internment in concentration camps. Drawing on archival materials and recent scholarship on post-Holocaust reintegration, I document Goldschmidt’s remarkable postwar career touring internationally and recording with the Baroque ensemble Alma Musica. I argue that Goldschmidt, Jewish and female, was doubly marginalized in a majority Protestant, patriarchal Dutch society (Kaplan; Holtmaat & Van den Berg), in which Jewish survivors—and Jewish musicians—faced a mixed reception (Gerstenfeld, Hondius, Wennekes). Goldschmidt was further sidelined by younger historical performers, for whom Landowska’s vitalist approach and Pleyel harpsichords became unfashionable: as the Netherlands emerged as a center of the 1960s historical performance movement (Haskell, Kelly, Sherman, Cohen & Snitzer), women became excluded from the dominant narrative that centered the “authenticity revolution” of Leonhardt, Bylsma, Brüggen, and Koopman (Haynes). Nevertheless, by adapting and retraining as a lutenist, and remaining active as performer and pedagogue, Goldschmidt maintained her relevance in a renewed historical performance scene.

During the twentieth century, at least three memorial compositions became influential: Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), and Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988). How did these, and other works, inform Israeli art music compositions written in the aftermath of October 7^th? Several leading Israeli composers have expressed the horrifying experiences of 2023 in their 2024 works, among them Josef Bardanashvili, Talia Amar-Krim, Aviya Kopelman, Haim Permont, and Michael Seltenreich.

Seltenreich’s work, The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2024) is the first to have reached a wide audience—and have achieved international acclaim. Commissioned by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and the 2024 Lucerne Festival (funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation), Seltenreich’s Dilemma was performed in Tel Aviv, Munich, and Lucerne, between July and September 2024. Robert Jungwirth, a music editor in Munich, tagged Seltenreich’s Dilemma “extremely inventive.”

This paper analyzes threads common in Seltenreich’s work—and in selected works of his predecessors and peers—and situates them in their Israeli, European, and American contexts. In so doing, I shall highlight the stylistic roots and originality of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and ultimately, both evaluate and challenge its promotion and reception. Notably, as this paper is informed by studies on memory and identity (Wlodarski 2007 and Calico 2009, respectively) and on trauma (Grimmer, 2023), I shall show how The Prisoner’s Dilemma, through its visceral compositional processes, brought a snapshot of the trauma of October 7^th and its aftermath to European audiences.