#schelomo

The University Symphony Orchestra presents a program featuring Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony no. 7 and Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, with Andrew Molina, cello, winner of the Biennial Concerto Competition. Admission is free with donations requested at the door ($10 general/$5 students and children). Information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/203744186671860/

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Reflecting upon his career in 1954, Ernest Bloch — who was renowned for composing specifically Jewish music — wrote the following to his friend and New York Times music critic Olin Downes:  “It is Godet, the friend of Debussy, … and the creator of Hitler in a way, who is responsible for my Jewish music. …  It is the absolute truth, but who could understand it?  How could anyone who writes the story of my life reconcile this kind of contradiction?”  Twists and turns, contradictions, incongruities and irreconcilable conflicts: how can these make up an identity?  How can a person, or the art that person produces, be defined by such an extraordinary paradox?

Both of the compositions featured on tonight’s program emerged from moments of acute self-doubt and crisis, while simultaneously representing their composers’ identities in perhaps their purest forms.  For Ernest Bloch, it was his Jewish identity, filled with complexities and conflicts, that would come to fruition in Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra, the crowning work of his Jewish Cycle.  For Antonín Dvořák, his Symphony No. 7 marked the apex of the composer’s internal struggle between his provincial roots and his international aspirations.

Each of these celebrated works implores us to wonder: what defines a person? a nation? a religion? a race?  What in music is universal, and what is deeply personal?  It was Bloch again who wrote:  “Art for me is an expression, an experience of life and not a puzzle game or icy demonstration of imposed mathematical principles,” yet the same sentiment could apply to either of tonight’s composers, in whose works the most intimate inspirations coexist with the most public statements of identity.  

Ernest Bloch:  Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra

Ernest Bloch was born to Maurice (originally Meyer) and Sophie Brunschwig Bloch in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 24, 1880.  Music was so thoroughly entwined with Bloch’s identity even as a child that, before the age of ten, he wrote out his intention to become a composer on a scrap of paper, went into the countryside, and set his vow ablaze upon an altar of stones.  His identity as a musician came, in a sense, before his identity as a member of the Jewish faith — despite his being known today mainly as a Jewish composer.  Bloch’s upbringing was secular:  his father, who had once planned to study for the rabbinate before deciding instead to become a merchant, was content to celebrate only the major religious holidays.

Nonetheless, Bloch’s ancestral heritage was essential to his Jewish and musical identity, even though he came to fully embrace the religion only later in life.  Despite his father’s lack of profound faith, the elder Bloch sang Hebrew melodies around his children, including the traditional gemara nigun or teaching melody that would later form the basis of the second half of Schelomo.  This familial connection to Jewish music-making forms one of the many tangled threads that compose Bloch’s complex musical identity, but like all of these threads, it was often pulled tight and frayed by internal conflicts.  Maurice Bloch was vehemently opposed to his son’s desire to become a composer, calling his son’s compositions Scheiss Musik [“garbage music”] and making it abundantly clear that his son was to follow his father into the family business.

It was ultimately Robert Godet, the aforementioned anti-Semite and critic, who brought Bloch’s own Judaism to the composer’s attention, with his 1904 anonymous review of Bloch’s Symphony in C♯ minor.  The composer observed:  “It was that man who, in an article in the Times, drew my attention to what could be Jewish in me, in citing Franz Liszt’s marvelous passage on Jewish themes.”  Godet was one of the young and timid first supporters of Bloch, and the two struck up a deep friendship that would last ten years.  Godet encouraged Bloch to express his Jewish heritage in his compositions, a decision also supported by Bloch’s close friend, and the librettist for his opera Macbeth, Edmond Fleg.

In 1917, Bloch declared:  “I am a Jew.  I aspire to write Jewish music because racial feeling is a quality of all great music which must be an essential expression of the people as well as the individual.”  Judaism was an essential part of Bloch’s aesthetic, but it was not limited to the surface features so often mentioned in relation to his music:  i.e., the augmented seconds, the liturgical modes and exotic scales, the allusion to the shofar through the use of perfect fourths and fifths, the flexible meter, and the typical Scotch snap rhythm.  Indeed, Bloch’s approach was quite the opposite:  he insisted that he did not think of his Jewish music in terms of these external characteristics, but instead “hearkened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, burning, an instinct rather than any cold, dry reasoning process.”  It was Bloch’s Jewish heritage as a whole, rather than any surface characteristics, that inspired and drove his musical output.

Bloch experienced a number of setbacks before he wrote his famous Jewish Cycle.  His opera Macbeth, with Fleg’s libretto, was not received favorably in its first production at the Paris Opéra Comique;  critics attacked the opera as “barbaric,” and ultimately the jealousy and hostility among cast members led to the opera being dropped from the program.  Due to this setback, and to his father’s declining health, Bloch withdrew to run the family business in Switzerland before turning firmly towards a Jewish musical identity with the four works of his so-called Jewish Cycle, composed between 1912 and 1916.  These works, of course, include the rhapsodic Schelomo.

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and vexation in spirit… Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  Having turned over these words from the Book of Ecclesiastes in his mind for years, Bloch set about writing his Hebraïc Rhapsody in 1915.  His intent was to set passages from the Ecclesiastes in a vocal work, but the rhythm of the French language seemed wrong to him, as did those of German or English, and he would not begin his studies in Hebrew for many more years.  Instead, a fortuitous meeting with cellist Alexander Barjansky inspired him to use the “soaring unfettered voice of the cello” rather than the human voice.  Of all the works in Bloch’s Jewish Cycle, it is the voiceless Schelomo that seems to speak most directly to the soul.

By the time Bloch began work on Schelomo in 1915, he and Godet had experienced a dramatic falling-out instigated by Godet, who sent Bloch the translation of a book over which he had been laboring for many years.  The book, as it happened, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, an anti-Semitic treatise on the superiority of the Aryan race incorporated so seamlessly by Hitler into his Nazi ideology.  In 1913, with the publication of Godet’s French translation, their friendship shattered — the greatest tragedy of Bloch’s life, as he often lamented.  Even after Bloch left Europe for the United States in 1916, after finishing Schelomo, he attempted to repair his friendship with Godet, who responded by attacking Schelomo in La Revue Musicale.  For the remainder of Bloch’s life, even through his move from Switzerland to America, he kept with him a life-size wooden carving of Christ on the cross, which Godet had encouraged him to buy.  This incongruous object stayed with Bloch until his death, a constant reminder of the mysteries of human relationships and of his own disillusionment.

After having finished Schelomo, Bloch reflected that the voice of the solo cello could be understood as the voice of King Solomon, or King Schelomo in Hebrew.  The solo cello is thus strongly associated with a single character in Schelomo, while the orchestra acts at times in consort with the voice of the King, and at other times works against it, taking on the role of Schelomo’s environment.  The soloist’s part is thus a single, immutable voice, the outcry of an individual soul.  When in 1930 the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, requested to play Schelomo with the solo part performed by four cellos, Bloch responded that “the cello part in Schelomo personifies the one voice of the King.  It is as senseless to give this part to four cellos as to play Hamlet with four actors talking at the same time.”  Bloch’s analysis of the work similarly reveals an understanding of the solo cello as a character capable of speech:  the lamentation that opens the work is the cello’s soliloquy on the idea “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  From the very beginning we hear the cadence of specifically Hebrew speech in the cello’s speech, the supple expressivity of Hebrew prosody expressed in bow strokes.

Then the violas enter, and the world comes into focus around our speaker.  The orchestra slips into a kind of dance, led by the cello, who seems at one moment to guide the orchestral forces and at other times to struggle against them.  Bloch describes the orchestra’s rhythmic dance as the seductive movements of King’s wives and concubines;  and while King Solomon enters into the dance at first, he quickly turns away in revulsion, interrupting the dancing with multiple cadenzas.  The orchestra finally builds to an enormously powerful tutti, which quickly disintegrates into nothing once more.

The next section is built upon that traditional gemara nigun sung by Bloch’s father during his childhood.  The theme is introduced by the solo bassoon before being taken up by the rest of the orchestra; finally, the cello joins in.  The music soon becomes anguished, fevered;  the orchestra is internally divided, shouting in cross-rhythms before abating once more into a pensive cello solo.  Bloch describes Schelomo’s meditation here as a “shudder of sadness” at the orchestra’s wasted effort.

The third and final section Bloch describes as the orchestra’s vision of a better world, where “peace, justice, and love” reign.  The cello is swept up by this enchanting dream, but soon it crumbles again, revealed to be nothing but an illusion.  These orchestral fantasies fail to sway Schelomo, whose voice cuts mercilessly through the orchestral texture and descends, ultimately, into utter despair.  Bloch notes that, alone among his works, Schelomo concludes in complete negation and dejection with the cello’s final statement:  “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”

Antonín Dvořák:  Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70  (first published as Symphony No. 2)

“A new Symphony (for London) now occupies me, and wherever I go I think of nothing but my work, which should move the world;  God grant that it be so!”  Writing these words to his friend Antonín Rus at the end of the year 1884, Antonín Dvořák found himself poised on the cusp of international recognition.  His Seventh Symphony, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society after the composer’s numerous successes in England — and inspired by the Third Symphony of his longtime friend Johannes Brahms [which the University Symphony performed in March] — seemed bound to elevate Czech music in the eyes of the international musical community. Dvořák had not always enjoyed such success in his career.  Born a butcher’s eldest child in the humble village of Nelahozeves, Bohemia in 1841, he received his musical education first from the village school and later from Kantor Antonín Liehmann in the nearby town of Zlonice.  Having shown great musical promise, Dvořák began his studies at the Organ School in Prague at the age of sixteen, in 1857.  After graduating second in his class, young Antonín joined a dance band as a violist, while also offering piano lessons and privately honing his compositional craft.  Finally, in the late 1870s, his years of hard work paid off in the form of the Austrian State Stipendum, which garnered not only financial support for Dvořák but also the attention of Johannes Brahms, thus launching a lifelong friendship between the two composers.  Brahms went on to recommend the younger composer to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock in Berlin, which — perhaps predictably — resulted in a much rockier relationship.

While the link between Simrock and Dvořák was initially beneficial to our composer, leading to the publication of his Slavonic Dances in 1878, it quickly went downhill when Simrock offered Dvořák too little money and repeatedly changed his name to the German spelling on scores.  Dvořák felt torn between loyalty to his homeland and the desire to appeal to the international musical community, despite having been recently snubbed by the Viennese due to a prevailing anti-Czech sentiment.  Luckily, the composer was received with considerably more enthusiasm in London, where he was celebrated as a musical hero.  The Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned his Seventh Symphony (numbered the Second by Simrock, who acknowledged only the symphonies published by his firm), which he wrote between the end of 1884 and spring of 1885 and which was premiered in London in April of that year.  Although this new D minor symphony would indeed launch Dvořák’s international career, it remained strongly tied to the concerns of the composer’s Bohemian homeland, and to Dvořák’s personal struggles.

The main theme of the Seventh Symphony seems to emerge from some gloomy abyss, the cellos and violas crawling upwards out of an ominous bass tremolo.  The atmosphere is tense and stormy, filled with an indefinable dread;  the melody turns in circles before landing abruptly on a fully diminished seventh chord.  This opening melody, and the ones that follow in the presentation of the main theme, are all strongly motivically linked both to Dvořák’s most political work, the Hussite Overture, and to Tabór and Blaník, the fifth and sixth works in Bedřich Smetana’s Má vlast (a symphonic cycle commemorating the fifteenth-century Hussite Wars and championing Czech religious nationalism).  The symphony’s main theme is thus inextricably tied to Dvořák’s homeland, but these Czech melodies are more richly developed in their presentation here, with dramatic contrasts both in texture and in emotional tone. The second theme, blown in on a gentle exhalation from the flutes, could hardly be sweeter by contrast.  It rocks gently back and forth, until the main theme creeps back in to darken it and bring the exposition to a close.  The development reveals Dvořák’s attention to detail as well as the rigorous development of his themes.  At the dramatic height of the development, the main theme interrupts to bring about a foreshortened recapitulation and coda.

The symphony’s second movement was the first segment of the piece that Dvořák wrote, and truly represents the emotional heart of the work.  Where the first movement presents a dark thundercloud of anxiety, constrained and obsessive, the second is expansive:  it expounds on three themes, developing them luxuriously and reaching multiple climaxes.  The tenderness with which Dvořák treats each theme and the mournful tone of the entire movement reminds one that this symphony was written not just in the throes of Dvořák’s identity crisis, but soon after the death of his beloved mother.

The third movement, a scherzo, hints at the shifting accents and cross-rhythms of the furiant, a type of Bohemian dance.  Swinging wildly between the delicate, the sublime, and the boisterous, this movement is the most uplifting of the symphony.  Its melodies seem to trip over one another in contrapuntal exhilaration, entering and dancing away again, cajoling and subsiding before whirling through to its conclusion.

The finale sweeps in with a cry of despair, a howl that soon descends into a low, insistent march.  The aggressive main theme gives way to a second theme, swaying delicately from the cellos to the woodwinds.  Soon, though, even that gentle theme turns bold and angular.  The first theme returns to prowl through the development, quickly rousing the orchestra into a wild polyphonic display.  The delicate second theme tries to break through but is constantly overwhelmed and frustrated until the recapitulation intrudes with the belligerent first theme once more.  Some may say that the change of mode that ends the symphony in D major rather than the prevailing D minor indicates triumph or exaltation, but it is instead at the very last moment that the most stunning transformation of the opening cry appears, straining upwards before plummeting once more into despair.  To the writer, these final major chords seem not to represent victory or loss, but the most pained outpouring of Dvořák’s troubled soul.

Sometimes I listen to things and can’t stop screaming

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