But of course there was no single Jewish pathway into modern music. One of the great virtues of Haas’s book is his careful attention to the full range of aesthetic choices made by early-twentieth-century German and Austrian Jewish composers. For every Mahler and Schoenberg, he reminds us, there was a Hans Gál or an Egon Wellesz, talented neo-classicists who leapt backward over Wagner in pursuit of Mendelssohnian purity. The great Alexander Zemlinsky eschewed atonality for a temperate modernism that looked forward harmonically without completely letting go of the nineteenth century. Still others, such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, rejected all hint of the avant-garde in search of a neo-Brahmsian rapture. Like so many of those exiles fortunate to escape to Hollywood, he took his gift for theatrical composition into a successful career in Hollywood, where he virtually created the modern film score. Late Romanticism lived on as well in the works of major composers such as Erich Zeisl and Walter Braunfels. The latter, raised a Protestant, a convert to Catholicism, was branded half-Jewish in the Nazi campaign against Entartete Musik, or “decadent music.” In the early 1940s, while in internal exile, he composed a stunning set of string chamber works, often compared to Beethoven’s late quartets, that offered a damning capstone to the German Romantic tradition. Although Haas barely touches on it, the most original Jewish musical responses to Wagner came from those composers outside Germandom. Further east and west in pre–World War I Europe, a cohort of composers attempted to refute Wagner directly. Flipping his theory on its head, they argued that precisely the Ashkenazi musical accents that Wagner had ridiculed as “the sound of Goethe being recited in Yiddish” could be the kernels of a new Jewish national music. Composers such as Ernest Bloch and Darius Milhaud in France and Mikhail Gnesin, Moyshe Milner, and Alexander Krein in Russia danced a complex dance with fictive twin shadows, embracing the clichés of Jewish Orientalism—ornament, melisma, lyricism—but transvaluing them into positive emblems of national identity. Instead of “Judaized music,” they sought their own Jewish variations on tonal modernism. The result was an entire Jewish national school of composers that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s across the Soviet Union and Central Europe. Russian Jewish folklorism also left its lasting musical mark in the mid-century oeuvres of Dmitri Shostakovich and his forgotten Jewish musical partner, Mieczysław Weinberg, the last great composer to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain. The Hebrew and Yiddish operas, symphonies, and chamber music now emerging from the archives promise a reevaluation of Jewish musical history as a whole.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 03:38:33 +0000
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