Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

Everyone knows the name “Schoenberg.” We recognize it instantly as the surname of Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most important composers of modern times. Because of his artistic stature, and his various later inclusion of Jewish themes in his work, Jews love to claim him as a Jewish composer. But it turns out there was more than one “Schoenberg” in classical music in the first half of the twentieth century. And the other Schoenberg’s story is arguably even more central to the story of Jewish music in our own time.

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Arnold Schoenberg and Jascha Heifetz considered him one of the greatest composers of their generation. He developed a revolutionary new system of playing the violin, which is now considered commonplace. He was one of the most celebrated and influential Jewish nationalist composers and was among the first to incorporate ancient Jewish trop (liturgical chant) into modern concertos, chamber music, and art songs. Today, hardly anyone knows who he is.

 His name is Joseph Achron, the eldest son of a Lithuanian chazan (cantor), and he is one of the greatest composers of the early 20th century.

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Pro Musica Hebraica is pleased to announce its fifth season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The 2011-2012 program features two extraordinary pianists who will explore the different faces of Jewish music — from the lost generation of European composers of the 1920s and 1930s to the greatest French pianists of the 19th century.

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Mark Glanville

My mother left Berlin in 1932. It was nothing to do with the Nazis, just that, fortunately, my grandfather happened to have been offered a journalistic position in London. In England my mother was teased for her German accent. Now people joke that she sounds like the Queen. She claimed, oddly I always felt, to have forgotten most of her German. One thing she remembered was Heidenroslein, Schubert’s exquisite setting of the Goethe poem, proof that the people who had murdered her cousin Theo, and whose crimes formed the substance of the Holocaust litany my father recited at meal times, had a better side. The simple musical setting of a text that describes the plucking of a rose blinded me – perhaps my mother too – to the fact that this was actually a poem about defloration or worse.

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Sholem Aleichem

There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says, “If all men pulled in the same direction, the world would topple over.” Jews have long loved a good argument over politics or religion. And it turns out that the same holds true for Jewish folk songs. As Pro Musica Hebraica gears up for our spring concert, it’s worth recalling one of the stranger disputes in modern Jewish history. The episode in question took place in early twentieth-century Russia, when the founding father of modern Jewish music, composer and critic Joel Engel and the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem squared off in a nasty exchange about Yiddish folk songs. Their argument centered on one question: What is a Jewish folk song?

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