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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: Jews

Neve Shalom Synagogue

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

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architect, Bach Before & After, Bernar Motola, Beyoğlu, Daily Sabah, Elyo Ventura, Galata, Gülşah Dark, Istanbul, Jews, Neve Shalom Synagogue, Rav Rafael Saban, refugee, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, synagogue, Turkish, violin

The dome of Neve Shalom Synagogue

The dome of Neve Shalom Synagogue

The construction of Neve Shalom Synagogue, the central and largest Sephardic synagogue in the Galata neighborhood of Istanbul, today encompassed by the Beyoğlu district, was completed in 1951 by architects Elyo Ventura and Bernar Motola. At its opening, Chief Rabbi Rav Rafael Saban expressed his wish that it would be “not only a place to pray, but a place where the rich and poor, the young and old, the ignorant and the learned could gather and meet in a spirit of brotherhood and sincere equality.” In 1992 a prayer of thanks was offered to the Turkish nation on the five hundredth anniversary of their acceptance of the Jewish refugees who had been driven from their original homes into these new lands.

On 26 February 2015, as part of the the music series “Bach Before & After,” Sigiswald Kuijken will present a program featuring Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6) at Neve Shalom Synagogue.

Gülşah Dark– Daily Sabah

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Bach via Mendelssohn

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Films, Other Artists

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antisemitism, baritone, bass, Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic, cello, Choral Arts Philadelphia, chorus, David Patrick Stearns, documentary, Duke University, Eric Owens, Girard College, Handel, harpsichord, Jews, Leipzig, Marietta Simpson, Masaaki Suzuki, Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, Mozart, Oxford, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia Inquirer, R. Larry Todd, recitative, soprano, St. Matthew Passion, string bass, Susanna Phillips, tenor, Yusuke Fujii

Upper volume of the Girard College Chapel

The upper volume of the Girard College Chapel

From the opening chorus of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b), audiences at the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia performance at Girard College on Sunday [8 February 2015] will be hearing something a bit alien.

Instead of a children’s chorus sailing over the top of the grand double-choir interchange, adult operatic voices among the vocal soloists will be in their place. During recitatives, the typical harpsichord won’t be heard.

Who is responsible for these hard-to-explain decisions?

The chorus’ namesake, Felix Mendelssohn, who rescued the St. Matthew Passion from roughly a century of obscurity in 1829 with a performance adjusted to his nineteenth century, as opposed to Bach’s eighteenth.

“It’s still a beautiful artistic gesture,” said longtime Mendelssohn Club music director Alan Harler, who is retiring at the end of this season. “If you can change your thinking . . . and listening, we’re replicating a version that was more about how people in the Romantic period heard this music.”

Though Mendelssohn was used to hearing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) played among his ultra-literate family for recreational purposes, the rest of the world had changed so much that, while planning his St. Matthew Passion performance, he was told the audience would never sit through anything so long – about three hours – and complicated.

So they weren’t asked to, because of changes so radical they signify a meeting of two musical minds separated by a century, something like Mozart’s orchestration of Handel’s Messiah.

“At some point, somebody would have rediscovered the St. Matthew Passion and performed it,” said Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd at Duke University. “But you had to have . . . somebody who could pull it off, musically speaking. And Mendelssohn was wired for Bach.”

The famous 1829 Berlin performance, conducted by a then-twenty-year-old Mendelssohn, cut roughly half the piece. Harler wouldn’t touch that version, opting for the 1841 Leipzig edition, which restored many cuts.

“This version is a whole and complete work of art,” Harler said. “I have to believe that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this.”

The evolution from 1829 to 1841 leaves even the brightest scholars a bit baffled. In the earlier outing, Mendelssohn used keyboard accompaniment for the recitatives – not the kind of instrument Bach would have known, but still closer than the two cellos and a bass accompanying the recitatives in 1841, when Mendelssohn presumably had a greater understanding of the piece. And though he probably could have had a children’s choir in that second performance, Mendelssohn chose to stick with the 1829 Berlin approach of having the vocal soloists sing their part.

Roughly forty-five minutes of the piece were still missing in 1841, and theories abound as to what guided that cutting process. Some say Mendelssohn, born Jewish but a Lutheran convert, was on the lookout for anything that smelled of anti-Semitism. A more subtle theory suggests that a more emotional experience, as opposed to the old idea of faith as an act of self-discipline, guided the cuts. In any case, the version is rather less reflective.

A longtime admirer of the St. Matthew Passion, Harler was drawn to the Mendelssohn edition because it allows the large choral forces of his 140-voice Mendelssohn Club – as opposed to the much smaller, historically accurate performances now championed by Choral Arts Philadelphia.

Only in recent years, though, were scores and parts published that made modern performances even possible – which explains why Sunday’s performance is the U.S. premiere of the Mendelssohn version. To better understand Mendelssohn’s journey with the piece, Harler traveled to Oxford, England, to examine his original score, urged on by his Bach advisor, Koji Otsuki, who studied with the famous Japanese Bach specialist Masaaki Suzuki. “It’s really important to see what Mendelssohn thought, what he really wanted to do and, in the end, what he accomplished,” he said.

Studying such documents is a highly intuitive process; what one learns from them can’t always be articulated. One thing Harler observed, though, was the care taken with modifications, often delineated in the lightest of pencil marks – gray for 1829, red for 1841. Perhaps Mendelssohn knew that Bach would have to adopt outer garments that didn’t entirely fit until succeeding generations became more accustomed to his works – and more curious about what they originally sounded like.

“I think Mendlssohn understood the sweep of the piece,” Harler said, “even if having one hundred forty singers makes a racket that Bach never would have heard.”

The event has turned into a major opportunity for the Mendelssohn Club: The group received its largest-ever grant – $240,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage – including money for a documentary film on the subject.

Musically, Mendelssohn Club stands a good chance of making a strong case for for the edition, partly due to the group’s continual artistic upswing over the past decade. Also, Sunday’s performance has a lineup of soloists that would be the envy of much higher-profile organizations: soprano Susanna Phillips, mezzo-soprano Marietta Simpson, tenor Yusuke Fujii, and, most of all, bass-baritone Eric Owens, who recently performed in a staged version of the St. Matthew Passion with the Berlin Philharmonic.

However seasoned the soloists may be, this promises to be a Bach outing unlike any other they’ve done. Admits Harler: “A few have expressed their dismay at certain places.”

David Patrick Stearns – Philadelphia Inquirer

The Mahan Esfahani Challenge

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Interviews, Music Education, Other Artists

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BBC New Generation Artist, British Broadcasting Corporation, Chinese, Cinderella, commission, counterpoint, decibel, Gramophone, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, harpsichord, invention, Iranian, Jews, keyboard, London, long-playing record, Mahan Esfahani, Michael Church, musicology, organ, Persian, Persian tuning, Philip Roth, piano, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Russian, Scarlatti, score, Stanford University, Steinway & Sons, Tehran, The Independent, tuning, Twitter, Wanda Landowska, Wigmore Hall

Mahan Esfahani

Mahan Esfahani

Ten years ago Mahan Esfahani was by his own account a nerdy anorak at Stanford University, obsessively tutoring himself with the aid of old records in the hope of realizing what seemed an impossible dream – to make his living on that Cinderella of keyboard instruments, the harpsichord.

A few months ago, now thirty, he carried off the award for Gramophone magazine’s Baroque instrumental album of the year, and the Guildhall School has appointed him professor of harpsichord. Not bad from a standing start, and for a total outsider. But perhaps – in addition to exceptional talent, and sheer slog – that outsiderness is the key.

When he was four, he and his parents left Tehran to join the Iranian expatriate community in America, where making good financially was the imperative. Mahan started playing the piano at six and developed an obsession with Bach from the moment he was first given the score of a two-part invention. “The counterpoint sounded so exotic as to be almost Chinese, and so logical” – he dashes over to my piano to demonstrate – “that I knew I was going to spend a lot of time with music like that. Something clicked for me.”

But his parents wanted him to be a doctor, and at Stanford he started a pre-med course, only to realize after two lectures that it wasn’t for him. Law was their next idea – “as I like talking” – but he gravitated instead to the organs and harpischords of the music faculty and began to immerse himself in scores, contemporary accounts of Baroque music-making and the recordings of his heroes, with the great harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who had been virtually self-taught, prominent among them.

His next eureka moment came when he heard a recording by that sacred monster of harpsichordism, Wanda Landowska: “And I realized why the Bach I had been playing and hearing had never sounded quite right. I now know that she wasn’t particularly ‘authentic,’ but to me she got the spirit of Bach, and I think he would have nodded in approval if he’d heard her play. What I like about her is [that she doesn’t] let a set of prescribed rules for performance practice dictate what [she’ll] do with the music.”  This is said with a pugilistic fire to which we will return.

Without a harpsichord of his own, and with no agent or sponsor, he knocked about playing to anyone who would listen until 2008, when an invitation came out of the blue to join up as a BBC New Generation Artist. “They’d been quietly watching me. They said it need not entail much, and I wouldn’t have to live in London; I’d just do a couple of projects per year. I replied that I didn’t actually have a career, I didn’t have any concerts planned, and I had no income, so why didn’t I just come to Britain? And I presented them with a long list of projects I could do. I came here to live, and one thing led to another.” One of the perks of the scheme was a Wigmore recital which got him his first-ever reviews (one of them by me). “That was my first properly paid concert – when I got the check from the Wigmore I’d never seen that much money, £1,800! I thought – wow – I could really make this work.”

But he’s not averse, when necessary, to biting the hand that feeds him, and the BBC’s obsession with presenting the musicians of the past as being “just like us” makes him bristle with scorn. “That’s really dumb – people in the past were very different. If you ever found your grandmother’s habits strange, how could you seriously imagine that you could understand people who lived three centuries ago? We laugh when we hear recordings from eighty years ago, so how can we possibly claim to know how music was played in the much more distant past?”

More ire is directed at the early-music industry. Disdaining the conventional keyboardist’s tight-arsed silence – “This isn’t a gun club, it’s music!” – he talks to his audience, illuminatingly and amusingly, between the pieces he performs: he may be a serious musicologist, but he wears his learning lightly.

Get him on prevailing attitudes to his instrument, and he really takes off, becoming very exercised about critics who, while praising his recordings, add the ritual rider that his playing “transcends the harpsichord’s limitations.” “If someone comes up to me on Twitter and says they hate the harpsichord, I always offer them a free ticket, saying come and see what you think. And nobody has ever said afterwards that they didn’t like it. They say ‘I didn’t know that it could sing like that’. But of course it can, it’s an incredibly vocal instrument. Its sound is clear and precise, and has a great deal of color.” And the spurious contest between harpsichord and Steinway should emphatically not, he argues, be seen in terms of decibels. “That shirt you are wearing is not a ‘loud’ shirt, but it has a lot of colors in it, it’s loud in a different way. The harpsichord enables you to hear much more subtlety, and it has a sensual quality. If any pianist wants to slam it” – and one prominent pianist routinely does – “be ready to have a public discussion with me, and have a piano and a harpsichord ready on stage.” Any takers?

This engaging contrarian is full of future plans, including a Scarlatti splurge, new commissions for his instrument, and – something really original – commissioning a keyboard that will allow Persian tuning. He leads a dedicated life, practicing most of the day and reading fiction by the great Russian masters plus his favorite American novelist, Philip Roth. ‘“An American Jew, he speaks to me as an Iranian – the irony, the overbearing mother, the guilt complex.” How Iranian does Esfahani feel? The answer comes out like machine-gun fire: “I’m sentimental, quick to judge, and quick to apologize; I’m a loyal friend; I like good food; and I hang on every word from my mother. Yes, I’m very Iranian.”

And his ultimate ambition? “To record on the harpsichord every keyboard piece Bach wrote. I reckon it will take me twenty years.” That’s him sorted, then.

Michael Church – The Independent

Adversaries Sharing a Love of Bach

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Other Artists

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A Song of Good and Evil, antisemitism, Augusto Pinochet, Beethoven, Berlin, Bełżec, Bosnian, Brahms, Cambridge, Chopin, crematorium, Croatian, death penalty, Debussy, Der Freischütz, Donald Rumsfeld, Erbarme dich mein Gott um meiner Zähren Willen, Fourth Symphony, Frédéric Chaslin, Friedrich Franz Stampe, Fritz Weidlich, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Geduld Geduld!, German, Gerne will ich mich bequemen, ghetto, Guillaume de Chassy, Hans Frank, Hay Festival, Heinrich Himmler, Herbert von Karajan, Hermann Goering, Hersch Lauterpacht, Hitler, Holocaust, Human Rights Watch, In the Shadow of the Reich, Jews, Joseph Goebbels, Karlsruhe, Knin, Kraków, Laurent Naouri, Lawless World, lawyer, Leonard Cohen, Leonora Overture, London, Lviv, Majdanek, National Socialism, National Socialists, Nazis, Niklas Frank, Nina Brazier, Ninth Symphony, Nuremberg, opera, Philippe Sands, piano, Purcell Room, Raphael Lemkin, Ravel, Red Army, Rock Under the Siege, Sarajevo, Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Schubert, Serbian, Seventh Symphony, Shoah, Siegfried Ramler, Sobibór, Srebrenica, St. Matthew Passion, Stefan Zweig, Stern magazine, Strauss, Swiss, Thalia Theater, theatre, Third Reich, Tony Blair, Torture Team, Treblinka, Turkish, Twickenham Studios, Vanessa Redgrave, Vienna, Waiting for Godot, Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Zhovkva

Niklas Frank, author of In the Shadow of the Reich

Niklas Frank, author of In the Shadow of the Reich

In the dock at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946: Hans Frank, born in Karlsruhe; once Adolf Hitler’s lawyer and governor general of Poland for the Third Reich, now charged with crimes against humanity for his part in the murder of three million people, including those in the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec and Majdanek.

For the prosecution: Hersch Lauterpacht, who grew up in the Austro-Hungarian empire, near the city now known as Lviv in Ukraine, and who, after studying law in Vienna and London, went on to teach at Cambridge. He was a key figure in developing the idea of “crimes against humanity”, laying the foundation stones for international law and the modern laws of war. In his 40s, he was part of the British prosecution team at the trials of Frank and others.

There were strange connections between the two men, on opposite sides in the courtroom. The area in which Lauterpacht had grown up had been invaded by the Germans in June 1941. Lauterpacht was in England during this period and had been unaware that most of his family had been among the three million exterminated on Frank’s orders.

And there is this: as the trial proceeded, Lauterpacht would repair to listen to his favorite piece of music, from which he took inspiration for this onerous task: St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Meanwhile, Frank, in his cell, discussed with the prison psychiatrist and summoned up in his head – seeking not only solace but affirmation – St. Matthew Passion.

Each man heard in the great masterwork – in the same sublime solos and chorales – an entirely different, indeed contradictory, message; two opposed promulgations in the same score, two contrary cries in the same edifice of beauty.

Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands came across this unsettling coincidence while researching a book about his own family, to be published in 2016. He has now turned this compelling discovery, and other circumstances around the trial of Hans Frank (for example, also working for the prosecution was Raphael Lemkin, who had studied in Lviv – in the 1920s, when it was part of Poland and called Lwów – and had recently coined the term “genocide”. Sands believes that his family, too, had been obliterated on Frank’s orders), into a remarkable event to be staged at the end of this month by one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera, Nina Brazier. It combines narrative, which Sands will read with Vanessa Redgrave, images and music (from Bach via Ravel to Leonard Cohen), with Sands’s friend from childhood, French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri, accompanied by Guillaume de Chassy on piano.

Among the more extraordinary elements will be a “hymn” written to Hans Frank by Richard Strauss, the text for which appeared in a book by Frank’s son, Niklas, who has himself been involved in preparations for the performance. “We became immediate friends,” says Sands of Niklas, “after an initially strange handshake with the man whose father murdered my grandfather’s family, and three million other people.” There will also be never-before-seen film from the Kraków ghetto found in Niklas Frank’s family archive.

Philippe Sands is an Anglo-French lawyer with Jewish family origins around what is now Lviv also. He is best known for his books Lawless World, which detailed the illegality of Tony Blair’s war in Iraq, and Torture Team, about instructions for interrogation from US secretary for defense Donald Rumsfeld that led to calls for him and others to be indicted for war crimes. On a wall at his home beside Hampstead Heath in London hangs a map of the small town of Zhovkva, whence his great-grandmother came, from the same street as Hersch Lauterpacht.

Sands’s staging tells how Lauterpacht left for England, Lemkin for America and then converged home, in their way, to the trials at Nuremberg. (Sands’s own career has proceeded in the slipstream of the work of Lauterpacht and Lemkin.) Hans Frank was Adolf Hitler’s lawyer in cases dating back before the Führer’s rise to power, a loyalty for which he was appointed governor general of Poland in October 1939, to which he promised: “We bring art and culture.” He also guaranteed that “the Jewish problem will be addressed”.

Frank was a man of letters, a talented pianist and friend of Strauss. The remarkable book by his son is unprecedented in Holocaust literature (published by Alfred Knopf in America as In the Shadow of the Reich, but incomprehensibly refused by British publishers) and a monument to his German generation’s reckoning with the Shoah. It is a visceral challenge to the father, whom the text addresses in the second-person singular like an open letter, but also describes him thus: “You could play Chopin so beautifully. You loved Beethoven. You were friends with Richard Strauss.” At the end, as the Red Army rolls back the Wehrmacht’s conquests, “even in the chaos of battle, culture and the arts maintained their same important place on your scale of values”. Towards the end of the Reich, recalls his son, Frank was even chastised by Heinrich Himmler for “gluttonous and inappropriate behavior, with those theatre and opera performances of yours”.

Sands’s narrative includes Frank’s inauguration of a new theatre, “sanctuary of art” in Lviv; Frank wanted rising star Herbert von Karajan to conduct the opening night’s performances of Beethoven’s Leonora Overture and the Ninth Symphony. (He got instead “an unknown Austrian conductor,” Fritz Weidlich.)

In his engrossing book, Niklas quotes from his father’s diary: “This evening I was . . . at the great festival concert which [Wilhelm] Furtwängler conducted at the Philharmonic Hall for the German People’s Winter Benefit for the Needy.” Hitler, Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels were also there. “It was a powerful, profound, thrilling experience,” writes Frank Sr., “to hear this true giant of a conductor recreate the overture to Der Freischütz, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh. A magnificent evening of consecration. With indescribable emotion, I felt the years I have experienced pass before me, accompanied by this glorious music.”

So what did Hans Frank the war criminal and Hersch Lauterpacht who wrote the law on crimes against humanity hear in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion? “I do not stake any claim to expertise in music,” Sands says. “I’m an amateur enthusiast, and not even that when it comes to Bach. But I’ve read and thought a lot about this, and there is an interpretation whereby Bach used the passion of Matthew to register a Lutheran affirmation of the creativity of the individual against the Catholic commitment to the centrality of the group, the whole. It’s about the direct relationship between the individual and God in which, one may infer, Lauterpacht found an inspiration for his idea of individual human rights.

“I wonder about Frank,” muses Sands. “Whether he was an intelligent and cultured man, and if he was, did he really understand St. Matthew Passion? Frank may have heard in these glorious chorales an assertion of the collective, the rights of nation over those of the individual, which was the basis for his defense, such as it was. But there’s an irony here, because Bach writes in such a way as even the chorus sings in the first person singular – ‘ich.’ This is the individual celebrant communing with the deity, which opposes the Catholic idea of communion through celebration.”

In open court, Frank said: “I bear the responsibility” and: “I am possessed by a deep sense of guilt.” In his cell, Frank converted to Catholicism – to the derision of his son, whose book goads the father on his final pleas for divine mercy, for himself and family. Sands is less immediately dismissive: “It’s debatable why he converted, but having done so, he invokes the St. Matthew Passion as an affirmation of his conversion. Which is strange: he must have known that Bach and his intellect were Lutheran. I think Frank’s conversion was a strategic one and as such it reminds me of Blair. They were incomparable, of course, and we assume they converted in good faith, but in a way, Catholicism is the easy way out to self-absolution, and that is one of the things Bach takes issue with in this music.”

Sands explains how he and Laurent Naouri had to choose a section from the St. Matthew Passion to illustrate the obsession of each man. “For Lauterpacht I wanted Geduld, Geduld!” Sands says, “which means ‘patience’, but Laurent said it wasn’t in his range.”

“We chose Gerne will ich mich bequemen,” Laurent says: “‘Gladly would I, fear disdaining/ Cross and cup, without complaining’ – which is about determination and patience. And for Frank, it has to be Erbarme dich – ‘Have mercy . . . regard my bitter weeping’ – praying that he will live. I think he probably knows that he won’t [Frank was executed in 1946], but there is a part of him attuned to this music, some last feeling of hope.”

But did Hans Frank believe his own defense? If anyone can be the judge of that, it would be Sands, who has faced people in Frank’s shadow when he has acted for Human Rights Watch against General Augusto Pinochet, or cases in international courts involving Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone, and who now confides what everyone wonders about trial law: “When you are involved in a case, there’s a moment where you may come to believe your own arguments, however implausible. Frank was a courtroom lawyer too, and in a courtroom there can be this suspension of disbelief. I think Frank as a defendant may well have gone through that process, of not necessarily believing his own argument, but believing it enough to think it might get him off the hook. I don’t think he believed he was innocent, but I think he may have thought he was not sufficiently culpable to warrant the death penalty.” Sands befriended an interpreter from the trial, Siegfried Ramler, who told him: “I looked Frank in the face and thought, ‘This is a man who knows he has done wrong.’ He was looking for mercy, but not exoneration.”

Niklas Frank is a man of wit and charm; the dry humor that charges his book with bitterness makes his conversation agreeable. He became a war correspondent for  Stern magazine and we were both in Iraq and former Yugoslavia, though we never met. I talk to him about finding concentration camps run by Bosnian Serbs in 1992 and he talks about “finding books, some in German, left in abandoned houses in empty Serbian villages” after the Croatian offensive around Knin during 1995. “There,” says Frank, “even the animals were dead. I felt like the loneliest man in the world.”

Niklas Frank was born in 1939 and, as he says: “My memories of the Third Reich were those of a child.” He recalls “a harmonium in the attic at our home in Bavaria, up a narrow staircase. I watched him play. He would improvise a great deal and the music always seemed sad to me, as though he knew what his end would be.”

Hans Frank “was so well educated,” says his son. “He was a close friend of Strauss; he knew every kind of classical music and he loved it. When Strauss discussed music with my father, he was on his own level.” In his book, Niklas recounts how such exciting movements as expressionism and naturalism “passed you by,” but in conversation relates how he found something unexpected in the programming of concerts sponsored by his father in occupied Kraków: “There was work there that was not just the usual cliche of Bach and Beethoven. There was modern music from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which would have been considered decadent in Berlin – but this was Kraków. It’s there, being played, and I was astonished to find it.”

To perform such new music, Hans Frank had wanted as his programmer and concertmaster a man called Friedrich Franz Stampe, of whom Goebbels, who controlled the arts, disapproved, “but my father petitioned Goebbels and – amazingly – succeeded.”

The heating system at Laurent Naouri’s home in Paris, where he, Sands and Nina Brazier are rehearsing, has broken, so he has adjourned, as must our conversation, to a hotel on Boulevard Raspail. He gets directly to the point, without so much as a coffee between him and his argument: “Hans Frank was a great pianist; when he had to make a decision, he would play a while on the piano – something beautiful to help him with his thoughts. And it comes as a shock to think of Frank doing this – that he was a mass killer, but he had sensibility, a soul.”

“But the meaning of music is wide open,” Naouri explains. “Most music moves between tension and release, tension and release. Everything is built around the dominant seventh and the tonic, building pressure and the orgasmic conclusion. And this is primal, it affects all beings, whatever their ideology. Why would the same music move Lauterpacht and Hans Frank? Because they are both human beings. They both get hungry and both need food; they both experience these moments of tension that need to find rest. This has nothing to do with morality – it’s physical.”

I ask Naouri about Nazism and the cult of the sublime irrational. “What Bach composes in the St. Matthew Passion is rational,” he replies. “What is irrational is the feeling of sheer beauty that comes out of it. Not how the music was done, but why it does this to us.”

Niklas Frank writes in his book: “Here’s something I don’t want to suppress: a song for you, written by Richard Strauss. Yes, Strauss sang a song for you and accompanied himself on the piano. You were standing next to him, in his home, struck dumb in your vanity, flattered by the fact that this world-famous composer, for you alone, only you, had made up this little ditty and turned it into a song. You hum the melody and I’ll write the text: ‘Who enters the room, so slender and swank?/ Behold our friend, our Minister Frank/ Like Lohengrin sent by God, our master/ To save us all from every disaster . . . ’ What’s he thanking you for, Father? I have yet to discover that,” concludes the author. The song will never have been performed – apart from a dry run at the Hay Festival – until Sands’s event at the end of this month.

Niklas explains: “When my mother died, on my twentieth birthday in 1959, I said to myself, ‘I’ll work through all the papers and pictures, lots of stuff.’ Luckily she had always copied out letters she wrote to my father, by hand that is, words between her and her husband at the time of the Nuremberg trials.

“And suddenly, in the letters she is very excited, as if every danger to his life was passed: a Swiss newspaper had reported Strauss as having written this song to Hans Frank. And she was so excited: Strauss is now saving her husband! We will be free! She was so convinced that in another letter, she plans another child with him.”

Niklas Frank believes the song predates the war. “These are not stupid people,” he argues, “and it’s funny.” He recreates the scenario: “My father is passing by Garmisch, where Strauss lives, and telephones to plan a call at short notice: ‘I’m nearby, why don’t I drop by?’ Strauss thinks up a little welcome, a surprise for his friend. He writes his little song. My father opens the door and there is Strauss at the piano, singing this gay verse. It’s easy-going, an afternoon piece. I think it’s obviously during peacetime; such an occasion wouldn’t make sense during the war.”

The Frank family tried to ascertain whether any music survived, to be told by Schott, publisher of most of Strauss’s music, that it did not. Niklas Frank is unconvinced: “Strauss was a vain character and would never have thrown away even the smallest piece of music. I believe it has been hidden.” Sands was told “it has disappeared.”

But whether the music was lost or is hidden, it does not exist for performance at the Purcell Room. “Could we reconstruct it?” Sands asked Naouri. “We could try,” replied Naouri. “I wrote to a friend, Frédéric Chaslin, a composer, conductor and master of spoof,” he now recalls. “Chaslin brilliantly pastiches Debussy and I asked him to do the same with Strauss. Two days later, back came the score, the full kitchen sink, more Strauss than Strauss!

“It’s not black and white with Strauss,” says Naouri. “He was noted to be in favor of the regime, but he had Jewish relatives. He intervened with the government to keep Stefan Zweig as a librettist. He did what he could for the Jews he knew.” Quotes from his diaries register contempt for a “criminal . . . anti-culture regime”.

In January 1993, Vanessa Redgrave convened a rally at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power, at which Holocaust survivors and deportees from Bosnia shared a platform, to denounce the gulag of camps in Bosnia, siege of Sarajevo and continued desecration by neo-Nazis of memorials built by Germany to Jews murdered during the Shoah.

Now, Redgrave and I sit outside a cafe near Twickenham Studios in London, while she smokes, drinks coffee and talks about these entwinements across history, of horror and defiance, that propel her work, and command her interest and involvement in Sands’s piece.

After a long opening conversation about Bosnia and the world today, she poses the question that pervades this work: “How and why is it possible that the Nazis knew classical music, and listened to classical music, while the crematoria were aflame? It runs though my head all the time.”

But Redgrave is a proud heretic and adds: “Is all this so far from what we’ve been talking about? How do those politicians in the UK sit in a concert hall and enjoy Beethoven while all this is going on? What do they think they are listening to after what they do?” Her eyes dart from behind spectacles, with righteous rage. “Mass murder was committed in Bosnia, with concentration camps, the torture of rape. Outrageous antisemitic acts of arson in Germany, in 1992/3, coincided with lethal attacks against Turkish immigrants. Then came Srebrenica, which was later defined as genocide. Were not European governments complicit?”

Then she invokes the defiance of art, and her profession, the kind of resistance that made for Rock Under the Siege, lunchtime concerts of chamber music and Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: “I remember that both in Sarajevo during the siege, and in Kosovo, the artists and musicians played music and performed to strengthen survival and resistance. At all times music and theatre: to help civilians suffering intolerable hunger and war or the violence of occupation.” However, she adds: “The essential horror is that the perpetrators of war, siege, murder and occupation apparently also need, appreciate and promote music! To assist them in mass murder! Which is why I am glad Philippe has asked me to join him for A Song of Good and Evil.”

“I think,” posits Sands, regarding Redgrave’s last point, kernel of his piece, “that we find this unsettling because we want to hope that beauty, the notion of beauty, only makes us better people, that great art is good for humanity. This story shatters that illusion. It illuminates how bad people, too, appreciate beauty – and use it.”

Why, I asked Niklas Frank, could people such as his father love Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, music of such beauty? “I have never found an answer,” he replied.

Ed Vulliamy – The Guardian

Sara Levy’s World

13 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Music Education

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antisemitism, Berlin, cantata, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Center for European Studies, German, Jewish Enlightenment, Jews, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Mendelssohn, Michele Alperin, Nancy Sinkoff, New Brunswick, New Jersey Jewish News, Prussia, Rebecca Cypess, Rutgers University, salon, salonnière, Sara Levy, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Sara Levy

Sara Levy

Born over a cup of coffee after a chance meeting of two Rutgers professors from different departments, a two-day symposium in New Brunswick, NJ on the life and legacy of one of eighteenth-century Berlin’s most influential Jewish women will open Monday, 29 September 2014. “Sara Levy’s World: Music, Gender, and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin” will celebrate a salonnière and committed Jew who was a seminal figure at the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany.

The great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn, Sara Itzig Levy (1761-1854) performed works by Bach and his sons, hosted weekly salons and recitals, commissioned cutting-edge music, and assembled a large and noted music manuscript collection. Often treated as a footnote, it turns out that Levy is in some ways an “essential figure in the history of German music,” said Rebecca Cypess, co-planner of the symposium and assistant professor of music at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts. “She is the link that kept the tradition of J. S. Bach alive.”

Levy took music lessons from Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach’s eldest son, known as a virtuosic composer and improviser; W. F. Bach even wrote a song for Levy that he gave to her at her wedding, said Cypess.

The symposium will open with an evening concert featuring music owned and played by Sara Levy and continues with a symposium Tuesday that will intersperse academic talks with a reading of a satirical play from the period and a performance of a cantata by C. P. E. Bach.

The era in which Levy lived was “tumultuous,” said Nancy Sinkoff, Cypess’s co-organizer. It was “a time of lots of possibilities and potential, a remixing of the social and cultural boundaries that had existed for centuries in Europe,” said Sinkoff, who is associate professor of Jewish studies and history at Rutgers and director of the university’s Center for European Studies. “The fact that there were such dramatic changes at this moment allowed her to play such an important role in transforming her social, cultural, and religious landscape.”

Each scholar brings to bear on Sara Levy her own disciplinary training: Cypess, her expertise in musical performance and music history, and Sinkoff, her knowledge of Jewish and European history.

Sinkoff explained that the late eighteenth century was the moment of the onset of modernity, particularly for Jews in Western Europe and more specifically in Berlin, the court city of the Prussian empire. “Sara Levy is an extraordinary figure of the period about whom not enough is known,” she said. “It is an opportunity to ask a whole series of new questions and revisit old questions about Jews and Christians, aesthetics, music, gender, antisemitism, modernity, and secularization in a symposium devoted to the whole person of Sara Levy.”

They will not be exploring just Levy’s contribution to music or where she fit in as a Jewish woman, but asking questions that cross disciplinary boundaries: How did her identity as a Jew affect how she studied and made music? How did her musical activities affect how she interacted with other Jewish women and men in her circle?

Levy’s entry into the cultural and social circles of the non-Jewish German elite while remaining fully committed to and invested in her Jewish life requires a rethinking of the way historians conceived of Jewish women’s participation in the Enlightenment, said Sinkoff. “Until now much of the work focused on women who left Judaism,” she said.

The symposium will also cast light on some of the culture wars familiar today, which Sinkoff suggested began in the late eighteenth century. “The entry of Jews into European society, the ability to negotiate as an individual outside of communal boundaries sets in motion many complicated issues about identity that are still being worked out today,” she said.

Michele Alperin – New Jersey Jewish News

The Music of Rebellion

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

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Abraham, Amsterdam, archeologist, Arthur Rubinstein, Avraham, Baruch Spinoza, Beit Midrash, Bible, Concerto in D minor, consumerism, David Cardozo Academy, Glenn Gould, Halacha, Inquisition, Jews, Karl Richter, kosher, Marrano, matzah, Mitzvah, Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, Mount Sinai, Nathan Lopes Cardozo, National Socialists, Nazis, philosophy, Protestant, Shabbat, Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, synagogue, Talmud, Torah, Winston Churchill, yarmulke

RebelscropWinston Churchill once sent a very long letter to a friend. At the end he wrote: I am sorry but I had no time to write a short one.

It takes eighteen minutes to bake a matzah and it comes out flat. JDOV gave me twelve minutes to speak about my life and my love for Judaism and told me that it must sound like Bach’s Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052).

So here we go.

But let’s first listen to Bach.

I was born in 1946 in Amsterdam, by breech delivery. It was very painful. My mother endured it with iron strength. We nearly did not make it. It was the same iron strength that she showed when she saved the lives of all of my father’s family, all Jews, from the hands of the Nazis.

My parents were a mixed marriage: my father Jewish, my mother not.

These two facts – breech delivery and being born from a mixed marriage – set the stage for my life. I see everything upside down and always as an in-outsider. I see great beauty where others see only the ordinary. I see problems where others believe that everything is fine. For me, the average is astonishing.

Our name is Lopes Cardozo. That is a real Jewish name – not Goldstein or Rabinowitz. Those are “goyishe” names.

On my father’s side we come from Spain and Portugal, after the Inquisition, in 1492. We are anusim, Marranos. Our forefathers were raised as Christians, and only in Holland could they start to live a Jewish life again.

My father was a very proud Jew. He could not stop speaking about it. But it had no religious meaning.

My mother lost her parents when she was very young and moved in with my father’s family, so she grew up in a strong, secular, socialistic, but culturally very strong Jewish family and society. Friday night was holy, with lots of delicious food, although they were as poor as church mice. They did not eat kosher, but no treif meat would ever enter the house. Jewish expressions, customs, and jokes were the daily language.

My father was an ardent admirer of Spinoza, the great Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century who walked out on Judaism and was banned by the rabbis. It is the most well known Jewish ban ever. It made him world famous; I am still trying to get a similar rabbinic ban, but to no avail. It would considerably raise the sale of my books.

Spinoza got me thinking. He attacked the Jewish tradition vigorously. There is no God, he said, at least no biblical God. The Torah is not divine, not godly. In fact, it is primitive and nearly meaningless. Judaism is a lot of nonsense, he declared. And so I wanted to know what he was attacking. Why did he have no good word for the Jewish tradition? And what is this Jewish tradition actually all about?

So I started to read without end, speaking with rabbis – Orthodox and Reform; philosophers – religious and non-religious; as well as atheists and believers.

To make a long story short: I became so fascinated with the Jewish tradition that I went to the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Chacham Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, and told him to convert me, since I was the child of a mixed marriage – and so he did.

I was sixteen. Many years later my mother also converted, after I convinced her of the beauty of Judaism. My parents got married three months before I was married to a very nice lady sitting here in the audience – all by the same rabbi in the Sephardic Synagogue in Amsterdam.

I learned twelve years in Chareidi yeshivot, and I have a Ph.D in Philosophy. I love yeshivot, but I never felt that they gave me the full picture. Judaism is much greater than what yeshivot teach.

Let me tell you what happened to me when I was learning in yeshiva. A non-Jewish friend came to visit me and asked to see the Beit Midrash. So I put a yarmulke on his head and told him to come in. He expected a large hall with all the students whispering, like in a university library.  But what did he encounter? Three hundred young fellows walking around nervously, shouting at each other as if the world was coming to an end.

In total shock, he asked me. “What is this, a demonstration against the Queen of England?” ”No,” I said, “they are discussing what God actually said three thousand years ago at Mount Sinai.” “You still don’t know?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Indeed, we still don’t know, and that’s why we are still alive after four thousand years, and because of that we outlived all our enemies. A tradition that keeps arguing with itself will stay alive and grow.”

Now listen to Johann Sebastian Bach.

It is God speaking to us in music – with so many options for how to play it, without end. Like the rabbis speak about God’s words with so many interpretations. Remember Glenn Gould, Richter, Arthur Rubinstein and so many others. Such were Abaya, Rava and many other sages in the Talmud – each one playing totally different music, but simultaneously, with strict adherence to the music notes, to rigid rules of musical genius. An iron fist, and an uncompromising dedication to detail, resulting in a phenomenal outburst of emotion.

That, my dear friends, is what happened at Sinai. God gave heavenly musical notes at Sinai for us to play on our souls. Strict notes, but to be played with infinite passion. To listen to Bach is like being struck by an uppercut under the chin and staying unconscious for the rest of the day. And so it is with the Torah. It is like an archeologist forced to go to rock bottom in search of all the hidden possibilities; to exert himself in order to unearth them and find infinite treasures.

God owes a lot to Bach. He put God in the center of our world. Where would God be without Bach?

But Bach’s music is more than that. It is a rebellion. A rebellion against all earlier forms of music. Against making music sterile, stagnated, boring and flat. It opened new dimensions that people did not want to see or hear.

The same is true about Judaism. It is a religious protest against complacency, spiritual boredom and mediocrity.

Religion means to live in utter amazement, in astonishment. To live like Bach. To walk around in total wonder. And to know what to do with that wonder. To translate it into deep feelings and the solid side of the human deed: The Mitzvah, the Halacha.

Halacha teaches us how to live life in utter amazement. Just as Bach did.

After Moshe Rabeinu [Moses], Bach was the greatest halachist who ever lived in modern times – the iron fist, the heavenly explosion, the rebellion and the strict adherence to rules and detail.

And what did we do with Judaism? We denied Bach’s music to play the central role in Halacha any longer. And so we made it flat and boring.

We tell our children to obey, to conform, to fit in. Not to disturb the establishment. Not to challenge religious and secular beliefs. And by doing so, we have nearly killed Judaism.

Eating kosher is a rebellious act. An act of disobedience against consumerism that encourages people to eat anything as longs as it tastes good. When we go to synagogue, it is a protest against man’s arrogance in thinking that he can do it all himself. Observing Shabbat is an attack on society in a world that believes our happiness depends on how much we produce.

Avraham [Abraham] was the first ultimate rebel who destroyed idols. And so were the prophets.

And so is the Torah – a rebellious text declaring war on a world that has still not learned how to live a spiritual life of incredible greatness while standing firm with its feet on the ground.

And so are we Jews. To be a Jew is to forever swim against the mediocrity of this world. We are a nation of protestors. We are the real protestants. But we forgot who we are.

And therefore I decided to become religious. I love rebellion and spiritual war. I can’t live in boredom.

I will continue to play Bach, the rebellious man of Halacha who introduced me to God and the Torah.

So, just listen to Bach and hear the music of the Jewish tradition.

Nathan Lopes Cardozo – David Cardozo Academy

Holocaust Survivor Lives for Music

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Films, Other Artists, World View

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Alice Herz-Sommer, Beethoven, Chopin, concentration camp, Dachau, Holocaust, Jews, London, Malcolm Clarke, National Socialists, Nazis, Nick Reed, piano, Prague, prisoner, propaganda, The Algemeiner, The Lady in Number 6, Theresienstadt, Zach Pontz

Alice Herz-Sommer

Alice Herz-Sommer

At 109 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer can make multiple claims: she is the world’s oldest pianist, as well as its oldest Holocaust survivor. Now she’s also a leading lady, the centerpiece of a film charting her remarkable life, The Lady in Number 6.

Herz-Sommer lives alone in a tiny flat in central London to this day, sitting down daily at her piano, practicing her beloved Bach and Beethoven. But her life wasn’t always so pleasant.

When thirty-nine, Herz-Sommer was sent, along with her six-year-old son Raphael, to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp near Prague used by the Nazis as a propaganda set depicting good treatment of the Jews of Europe during their campaign of terror. There she entertained prisoners and Nazis alike, playing Bach and Chopin along with other musicians forced into captivity.

Despite her ordeal, and despite the fact that her husband Leopold perished in Dachau, Herz-Sommer has been able to maintain a buoyant personality in the years since.

“She just on all things has this philosophy that is incredibly positive. She’s just naturally, instinctively somehow along her journey picked up this process where her brain is always in a positive loop,” said the film’s producer, Nick Reed.

“People who have seen the film are just amazed that this woman has been able to take something like the Holocaust and turn it into a positive,” Reed adds. “I think the experience was really able to show her what matters, which is your health and human relationships. There’s no malice, no hatred, no negativity, everything is just processed into the beauty of the world.”

Reed and Oscar-winning director Malcolm Clarke have compiled a short film, using rare archival footage and interviews, that not only showcases Herz-Sommer’s sanguine approach to the world, but also her passion for music, an artistic medium she refers to in the film as her “God.”

“It started off as an exploration of this amazing woman and what you realize along the way is that she’s even more amazing, ” Reed says.

Zach Pontz – The Algemeiner

Bach, the Misunderstood Musician

06 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, World View

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Augustus the Strong, Auschwitz, Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Berlin, Berlin Cathedral, chorale, circumcision, David Conway, Easter, Frederick the Great, Günter Grass, Good Friday, Hamburg, Handel, Jews, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, John Locke, Leipzig, Martin Luther, Mendelssohn, Muslims, National Socialism, Nazis, Nobel, Oxford University, passion, polyphony, Prussia, Richard Eichenauer, Rick Erickson, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, St. Thomas Church, St. Thomas School, Telemann, University of Leipzig, Wagner, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

The year 2012 is unlikely to go down well in the annals of Jewish-German relations.

In June, a German court ruled that religious circumcision of minors is a criminal act. Two months earlier, Germany’s largest-selling daily broadsheet had published a poem by Nobel prize-winning author – and former SS recruit – Günter Grass, accusing Israel of endangering world peace.

A month before that, parishioners of Berlin’s Cathedral threatened to leave their church should it allow an Easter performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion [BWV 245]. The libretto had been altered by three Jews to make it less “Judeophobic.” They had replaced passages depicting Jews calling for Jesus’s crucifixion with extracts from Jewish liturgy and Muslim poetry. In the event, the altered version went ahead.

Of the three events, the Bach boycott was perhaps the most predictable. Germany, Jews, and music have often proved an unhappy combination. From Richard Wagner’s bitter diatribe against Jews in music to the forcing of musically proficient prisoners to form an orchestra at Auschwitz, the music of Germany has seldom given Jews much cause for celebration.

From Wagner to the orchestra at Auschwitz, Germany, Jews and music have often proved an unhappy combination

Add to this mix Martin Luther, founder of the denomination to which Bach belonged, and it becomes still more volatile. Among Luther’s works, in Bach’s extensive theology library, was his notorious essay, On the Jews and their Lies, which declared: “Be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils. . . . [T]hey are nothing but thieves and robbers . . . one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants . . . eject them forever from this country.” [Rick Erickson notes: “In his Bach’s St. John Passion and the Jews, Michael Marissen reports that ‘Lutheran church bodies have officially repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings.'”]

Given how widely known Bach’s Lutheranism was, it is small wonder the Nazis adulated him. To mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 1935, they helped stage a Reich Bach Festival in Leipzig, where Bach spent his last three decades as cantor of the choir school of the Thomas church and director of church music. It was there he composed his most celebrated choral works, including the St. John Passion.

Of the Leipzig celebrations, a newspaper at the time reported: “The Führer followed the austere music of Bach seriously . . . It is a music in harmony with his spirit – austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through.” This was also the view of Nazi musicologist Richard Eichenauer, who asserted that: “The fugue is blond and blue-eyed.” Eichenauer also said: “The nature of the German chorale in its great era during the religious wars contained nothing specifically Christian in musical terms, but rather something generally and eternally German, i. e., that elemental joy in combat, a characteristic of Nordic man.”

In such a context, some might applaud the three Jews who revised the St. John Passion. Others might wonder why any Jew would bother at all with Bach’s music.

In fact, there is no reason why Jews should not embrace Bach and his St. John Passion. In some ways, they have more reason than most, Jews having played such a decisive role in preserving it for posterity as well as in elevating Bach to his current position among the world’s best known and most widely performed composers.

The St. John Passion is regarded as antisemitic not just through depicting Jews as calling for the death of Jesus, but doing so in a particularly frenzied and discordant manner. However, one should not rush to judgment without some understanding of the nature and history of Christian liturgy.

For a millennium before the Reformation, the liturgy for the Christian Holy Week (the seven days before Easter) included readings from all four gospels of the so-called “Passion” – the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Traditionally, the evening service for Good Friday was given over to reading the account of the Passion according to John.

In time, these Easter readings from John’s gospel became subject to ever more elaborate musical setting. By the time of Bach’s appointment at Leipzig in 1723, part of his duties involved providing a musical setting of the St. John Passion for the Good Friday service.

Unlike Telemann and Handel, Bach could not simply avail himself totally of the 1710 libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes. This was because Brockes had partly précised John’s text, whereas Bach was under instructions to reproduce unaltered in his church music all scriptural passages from which he drew. It is John’s gospel that states Jews called for Jesus’ death. So the way Bach depicts Jews in his St. John Passion proves nothing more than that he was adhering to the terms of his employment contract.

In Bach’s day, few Lutherans took seriously their founder’s teachings about Jews. Most of the better educated ones, among whom Bach was decidedly one, were tolerant of and accommodating towards them. For example, in April 1715, the Hamburg Senate issued a proclamation relating to Easter renditions of John’s Passion. It asserted that: “The right and proper goal of reflection on the Passion must be aimed at the awakening of true penitence . . . Other things, such as violent invectives and exclamations against . . . the Jews . . . can by no means be tolerated.”

Their accommodating attitude towards Jews was shared by many of Leipzig’s better educated Lutherans, as is illustrated by a document discovered only in 1994. This is a report, dated 14 May 1714, written and signed by theologians at the University of Leipzig. The report’s existence had long been known of, but not its contents.

The report had been commissioned by Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who had wanted to know, as its title indicates, Whether the Jews Use Christian Blood, in their ceremonies. Many suspect the Leipzig theologians were consulted because Augustus knew in advance they would exonerate the Jews. He needed theological ammunition against his less enlightened subjects who were calling for the banishment of Jews – on whose loans and tax receipts he was reliant.

In no uncertain terms, the report denied there was any evidence that Jews used Christian blood and plenty of reason to suggest they would have considered its use anathema. Among the report’s signatories were two highly progressive Leipzig theologians. One, its principal author, had studied at Oxford during the 1690s, becoming a keen follower of John Locke and translating the English philosopher’s 1693 tract on education. The other, who outlived Bach in Leipzig by two years, venerated that first theologian and also possessed a portrait of the Rabbi of Amsterdam.

It is inconceivable they would not have known and fully agreed with Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, which championed tolerance towards Jews, even supporting their being accorded full citizenship rights, along with Muslims.

Bach seems to have been no less devoid of antisemitism. Although unable to alter John’s account of the Passion, he had discretion over what additional material to include in its musical setting. While he drew on Brockes’s libretto, Bach refrained from borrowing any of its non-gospel passages that some consider hostile to Jews. Instead, the passages he added firmly locate the blame for Jesus’s death in the sinful behavior of all errant humankind. Jews go entirely unmentioned in his St. Matthew Passion [BWV 244], composed two years later; that gospel’s account having not mentioned them by name.

Bach also identified with the Levite musicians of the Temple, whose job was to summon the Divine Presence through music. In his copy of the Bible, he wrote appreciative comments next to verses from the Book of Chronicles alluding to this. And, upon turning fifty, the normally taciturn composer compiled a family tree showing how far back in his male lineage professional musicianship ran. Some have seen in this act a symbolic fulfillment of the biblical injunction for the Hebrews to engage in family reunion in the fiftieth “Jubilee” year.

At the time of Bach’s death in 1750 some fifteen years later, however, it might have seemed that the musical offerings of this Lutheran “Levite” had fallen on deaf ears. Few of his compositions had been published; manuscript copies were scarce and expensive; his polyphonic style unfashionable; and his choral works unperformed.

For the next eighty years, Bach’s musical flame was largely kept alight by a small coterie of Berlin Jews, members of the Itzig and Mendelssohn families. In 1804, union between them was forged through the marriage of Abraham Mendelssohn, son of the philosopher Moses, to Lea Salomon, daughter of the Berlin banker Jacob Salomon and Bella Itzig.

Bella was one of sixteen children of Daniel Itzig, court banker to Frederick the Great of Prussia and a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn. Among Bella’s ten sisters was a younger sister Sara, who married another prominent Berlin Jewish banker, Samuel Solomon Levy.

During their childhoods, Bella and her elder sister Hanna received musical instruction from Johann Philipp Kirnberger, one of Bach’s foremost students. Sara was taught by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and became an accomplished performer of Bach’s keyboard works – and an avid collector of his manuscript scores. After ceasing to perform publicly in 1816, Sara Levy donated her large collection of musical scores to the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a choral, later musical, society established in 1791 by Carl Fasch, assistant to Bach’s second son.

After Fasch’s death in 1800, directorship of the Sing-Akademie passed to his pupil, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who later taught composition to the children of Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn, Fanny and Felix. Abraham and Lea may have met at the informal Sunday gatherings of the Sing-Akadamie, both having joined in their teens.

Like her aunt, Lea Mendelssohn was a keen lover of Bach’s music, as was her husband Abraham. After the death of its last custodian in 1805, Bach’s estate was auctioned. From it, the couple purchased the bulk of Bach’s manuscript scores that they donated to the Sing-Akadamie. The music it thereby acquired included more than one hundred unique autograph scores of Bach’s works among which is likely to have been a manuscript copy of the St. Matthew Passion. For shortly after the donation, Zelter began to perform excerpts at the Sing-Akademie.

Felix Mendelssohn joined the Sing-Akademie in 1819 aged ten, quickly developing such a keen interest in the St. Matthew Passion that his grandmother arranged for a professional copy to be made for a birthday present.

Six years later, in April 1829, Felix Mendelssohn put on and conducted the first public performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since the death of its composer. So well received was it that a second performance was hastily arranged. Practically all of Prussia’s most eminent public figures attended one or other performance. Together they cemented Bach’s reputation in Germany.

To secure their residency rights, rather than out of religious conviction, Abraham Mendelssohn had all his children converted to Lutheranism while young. But Felix, against his father’s advice, never repudiated his Jewish roots or his grandfather’s surname. After his triumphant performance, Felix reputedly quipped to an actor friend who had sung the part of Jesus: “And to think that it must be an actor and a Jew-boy who had to restore the greatest Christian musical work.”

The Nazis made no distinction between race and religion. In their endeavor to erase from Germany all trace of the contribution of Jews to its musical heritage, they removed in 1936 the memorial statue of Felix Mendelssohn from outside of the Leipzig concert hall.

On that basis alone, Jews today should not emulate their practice by ignoring or doctoring the music of Germany’s non-Jewish composers, especially Bach’s. Given how prominent a role Jews have played in preserving and promoting it, they should instead have no compunction in celebrating and enjoying it – with passion.

David Conway – The Jewish Chronicle

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