The Rarest of the Rare: Jewish 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 CoDirector 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 Montferrato—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. 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 the transliterated 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 colatura soprano, with florid, swooping runs over “hallelu-yah.” Lidarti’s
Classical-era vocal fireworks may 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 Montferrato 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 Montferrato 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.