rear pew mirror • doug brook
Fiddler of the Opera
Problem Yards Our Specialty
Jewish opera. Sounds crazy, no? If one imagines fiddlers falling off roofs like chandeliers crashing to the stage floor, then it’s crazy, yes. But, yes, Virginia, there is Jewish opera. Jewish composers have not historically been confined to their prevalence in Broadway musicals and Christmas songs. While the Jewish presence in opera is sparser than in these other musical genres, their presence is felt in both composing and sometimes in providing subject matter. Among better-known Jewish opera composers are George Gershwin (“Porgy and Bess”), Leonard Bernstein (“A Quiet Place”), and Arnold Schoenberg (the unfinished, dodecaphonic “Moses und Aron”). But there have been numerous others. For example, soon after composing the music for Brecht’s “The Threeshekel Opera,” featuring the hit mohel song “Mack the Knife,” Kurt Weill composed an opera called “The Eternal Road.” Weill composed for it on the eve of World War II to shine a light on the tenuous tenor of those times for German Jews. Set in a synagogue and including melodies derived from German Jewish liturgical music, its story features Jews hiding in a synagogue throughout the night while a pogrom rages outside. It premiered in New York in 1937 and went unstaged again until the year 2000 commemoration of Weill’s birth and death, which were 50 years apart. The long gap between performances is potentially explained by — even after the piece was cut so substantially that Mack the Knife would need a nap — the opera’s running time was still six hours, making it nearly as long as most High Holy Day sermons. While not Jewish, despite his first syllable, Giuseppe Verdi composed the Italian opera “Nabucco” which depicts the trials and exiles the Jews faced under the Babylonski king Nebuchadnezzar II. Verdi is best-known for operas that retroactively provided inspiration to Shakespeare such as “Otello” and “Falstaff,” and also for his 1871 collaboration with Elton John and Tim Rice, “Aida.” This early opera about Judaic woe established Verdi’s career and is performed more than infrequently in modern times. Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German Jewish composer, was one of the most-performed opera composers of the 1800s. He was so prominent — he was said to be as popular in his day as Beethoven — that the renowned composer and eternally mispronounced antisemite Richard Wagner eventually waged an extensive campaign against Meyerbeer, which some say ushered his legacy into obscurity. A Frenchman named Fromental Halévy was the son of a cantor and is most remembered for his first successful opera “La Juive” (“The Jewess”) — a medieval tale about love, death, revenge, and other similar things that arise at most people’s Seder tables even today. And there’s an actual Seder scene in Act Two. Jacques Offenbach composed almost 100 operettas which, if you add them together, do not equal 50 operas, any more than combining two Haftarahs equals one Torah. However, Offenbach also composed the opera “The Tales of Hoffmann,” which he left unfinished at the time of his death, in part because
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September 2024 • Southern Jewish Life
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