Example 1. An eighteenth-century Hodu (Ps. 118: 1–4) for Sukkot.
Jewish Liturgical Music in the Wake of Nineteenth-Century Reform
GEOFFREY GOLDBERG
Background for Change: Music and Emancipation
The music of the synagogue is inseparable from the Jewish community’s struggle for emancipation.1 This chapter focuses particularly on developments in the German-speaking states of central Europe. However, the pace of modernization was by no means uniform with respect to social class, time, or place.2 In eastern Europe, for instance, emancipation came a full century later than it did in the west, bringing with it its own unique religious musical genre: the Hasidic niggun (wordless melody). This largely, though not exclusively, extrasynagogal chant that expressed several mystical concepts, flourished at exactly the same time as the first musical changes were occurring in synagogues in the west. The development of the niggun, however, was motivated by an apolitical ideology, whereas the musical developments of the western Jews can be understood only within a wider political framework. Moreover, the western musical accommodation threatened the loss of authentic Jewish liturgical music as the price to be paid for social acceptance and equality.
This danger was most acute during the early, radical phase of the movement for reform. The aesthetics of premodern Jewish worship were measured against the modern standards of the non-Jewish world and found wanting. The following description from before c. 1775 of such a premodern Ashkenazi synagogue, this one in Amsterdam, would still have been applicable a few decades later:
At my first entrance, one of the priests [sic]3 was chanting part of the service in a kind of ancient canto firmo, and responses were made by the congregation, in a manner which resembled the hum of bees. After this, three of the sweet singers of Israel, which [sic] it seems are famous here … began singing a kind of jolly modern melody, sometimes in unison, and sometimes in parts, to a kind of tol de rol, instead of words, which to me, seemed very farcical. One of these voices was a falset, more like the upper part of a vox humana stop in an organ, than a natural voice…. The second of these voices was a very vulgar tenor, and the third was a baritono. The last imitated, in his accompaniment of the falset, a bad bassoon…. At the end of each strain, the whole congregation set up such a kind of cry, as a pack of hounds when a fox breaks cover. It was a confused clamour, and riotous noise, more than song or prayer.… I shall only say, that it was very unlike what we Christians are used to in divine service.4
This mode of worship was deemed unacceptable by Jews who had moved beyond the parameters of a closed Jewish society and sought instead a religious ambience of order, beauty, and decorum—all three characteristics as defined by western, non-Jewish cultural and aesthetic standards.
Early Reforms in Westphalia, Berlin, and Hamburg
The first opportunity to introduce modern European aesthetics occurred in 1809 in the Kingdom of Westphalia, established by Napoleon two years earlier. In the consistorial—i.e., the state-supervised—school in Cassel (1809), and then in the new temple in Seesen (completed in 1810), a number of musical innovations were introduced by Israel Jacobson (1768–1828). These changes, promulgated from above and by no means enjoying very wide popular support, received government backing in the form of a Synagogenordnung.5 Protestantism provided the aesthetic norms: German prayers, an organ, and hymns. Biblical lections and prayers were read, not chanted, as the traditional sing-song chants were deemed too oriental for modern use. Jewish hymn texts were sung to music taken from non-Jewish sources.6
With the Kingdom of Westphalia’s demise in 1813, Jacobson moved to Berlin where Reform services were held in his private synagogue in the spring of 1815. Between 1817 and 1823 somewhat less radical services were convened also in the home of Jacob Herz Beer (1769–1825), father of the composer Meyerbeer. Halakhic (legal) support for the innovations, especially for the use of the organ, came in the form of four rabbinic responsa entitled Nogah Hatsedek (The Radiance of Light), published in Dessau in 1818. The leading respondent was Aaron Chorin (1766–1844), rabbi of Arad, Hungary. But controversy within the community forced the government to close the private synagogue. The community synagogue remained unchanged, however, leaving unsatisfied a generation of culturally sophisticated Jews. An unyielding rabbinate, a cantor barely possessing western musical skills,7 and a repressive government thus combined to prevent any further substantive musical reforms in Berlin until the 1840s.8
In Hamburg a temple was dedicated in 1817, followed two years later by a new prayer book containing theological modifications that incurred the wrath of rabbinical authorities throughout Europe. The Bible was merely declaimed and German hymns sung, as in Seesen; and a Sephardi cantor was installed, primarily because the music of Sephardi culture and its distinctive Hebraic pronunciation were considered more cultured than their Ashkenazi equivalents.9 A few of the hymn tunes were based on traditional Jewish melodies, but the majority were commissioned from gentile composers of little talent.10 The ensuing result was “a strange combination of Sephardi modes in the Hebrew together with the contemporary style of church music in the German hymns.”11
Salomon Sulzer
This loss of Jewish musical distinctiveness nearly occurred in Vienna, too, where an appeal was made in 1819 by some fifty “tolerated” Jews for reforms according to the Berlin and Hamburg models.12 In 1821, Isaac Noah Mannheimer (1793–1865) was appointed preacher—the government prohibited the title rabbi. Though originally a radical reformer, Mannheimer came to fear that too much change would destroy communal unity. He was persuaded, however, to initiate moderate reform, by a new and youthful chazzan of remarkable musical and vocal ability, namely, Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890), who was appointed in 1826 to lead the services in the new Seitengaße Synagogue.
Together, Sulzer and Mannheimer established a form of service known as the Vienna rite, which became a model of moderation and beauty. This dignified service had an enormous impact throughout central Europe, even among many acculturated Orthodox synagogues, and in eastern Europe as well.
What is remarkable is that Sulzer’s assumption of the Vienna cantorate coincided with two decades of decline in musical taste and performance standards following the deaths of Beethoven (1827) and Schubert (1828). Gentile visitors were deeply impressed by the music they heard in the Vienna synagogue. Following his visits there between 1826 and 1828 the German-born music critic, Joseph Mainzer, expressed:
To whatever religion one may happen to belong, I declare that it is impossible to bear witness without emotion, and even not to be actually edified by the conduct of the service which is so simple, so noble, so elevated, and purified from all vain display by a reform in accordance with the times in which we live…. This Temple shines in new glory and can serve for a second time as a model for the Christian churches.13
Mainzer also declared that “never, except for the Sistine Chapel, has art given me higher joy than in that synagogue.”14 Other gentile visitors included Franz Liszt; the critic Eduard Hanslick, who was of Jewish descent; and Frances Trollope, the writer of romantic travelogue, who testified:
A voice, to which that of Braham [John Braham, 1774–1858, born Abraham, son of a chazzan, Abraham Singer of Prossnitz, and a celebrated English tenor] in his best days was not superior, performs the solo parts of these extraordinary cantiques; while about a dozen voices or more, some of them being boys, fill up the glorious chorus. The volume of vocal sound exceeds anything of the kind I have ever heard; and being unaccompanied by an instrument, it produces an effect equally singular and delightful.15
The first volume of Schir Zion, Sulzer’s collection of synagogue music, appeared in 1840. The preface (written in 1838) contains some of Sulzer’s objectives: “I see it as my duty … to consider as far as possible the traditional tunes bequeathed to us, to cleanse their ancient and decorous character from the later accretions or tasteless embellishments, to restore their original purity, and to reconstruct them in accordance with the text and the rules of harmony.”16 Sulzer also endeavored to attain
A restoration that had to rest upon historical foundations…. One had to resume the given tradition and restore it in a dignified and artistically correct manner…. The Jewish liturgy … must not renounce its Jewish character … the old national melodies and modes had to be rediscovered, collected and arranged according to the rules of art.17
Several of Sulzer’s objectives require a commentary.
Until the end of the eighteenth century—and in some small eastern European communities as late as the Holocaust—the music of the synagogue was transmitted largely orally, as it passed down from one cantor to another. These cantors were unconcerned with such things as western musical notation and vocal technique.18 But in the Enlightenment capitals of Germany and Austria, Sulzer epitomized a new type of cantor who was schooled not only in traditional Jewish learning but also in western music, music theory, and composition.19 He thus appealed to Viennese community leaders who wanted a cantor with a voice that was trained according to western aesthetic standards and with competence in composition and choral technique, together with sound Hebrew grammar. In 1845, similar demands were made of Abraham J. Lichtenstein (1806–1880), who was appointed to succeed Ascher Lion in Berlin. Lion’s musical ability was so slight that he had been unable to decipher handwritten scores of Schir Zion obtained from Vienna, and a young meshorer,20 Louis Lewandowski (to whom we shall return), had to come to his assistance. By contrast, Lichtenstein was required to obtain one letter testifying to his musical knowledge, and another attesting to his Hebraic literacy.21
By “later accretions or tasteless embellishments,” Sulzer meant those musical characteristics of a tradition in decline, which had been so evident in the late eighteenth century, particularly among professional itinerant chazzanim who served the larger communities. The traditional modal prayer chant had been neglected while third-rate, late baroque instrumental or operatic music was absorbed or parodied. Some composers even attempted to imitate instrumental forms, especially the dance forms of the rococo, without regard to the meaning of the text (see examples 1–3).22
We even know of small rural Hungarian communities still largely unaffected by social and religious changes where Orthodox synagogues utilized the dance and vocal models of the minuet, Ländler (a slow Austrian dance), csardas (a fast Hungarian dance), march, and operatic aria.23
Harmony was not entirely unknown in the European synagogue, but it was a three-part harmony, a form of organum, and was performed by meshorerim such as Burney had heard in Amsterdam—although usually with a boy soprano, or singerl, and a bass. They accompanied the cantor, singing in octaves, thirds, and sixths, and also provided musical interludes, frequently in the form of vocalises (wordless songs) in imitation of musical instruments. The vocalise was used by the cantor as well (see example 4, a Kaddish by Joseph Goldstein, written c. 1791, in Bavaria).
Like other chazzanim of his generation, Sulzer had apprenticed as a meshorer. He even brought with him two of his own meshorerim to Vienna, but they were to supplement a four-part choir—instead of the traditional three-part variety—and they were no longer to sing in the improvised manner. Actually, the first four-part choir had been formed by Israel Lovy in Paris in 1822, and in 1832 a stylized trio style was established by Maier Kohn in Munich.24 But of the various choirs, Sulzer’s had the most impact. The old style survived in eastern Europe while increasingly, in the west, it was considered indecorous and detrimental to a devotional spirit.25 Still, aspects of the meshorer idiom continued to pervade some arranged and composed nineteenth-century music, as in a setting of Lekha Dodi by Sulzer himself (see example 5)26 where the three-part harmony provides a textural contrast between the solo section of the cantor and the tutti refrain of the choir.
True to his stated objectives, Sulzer reworked the sung portions of the liturgy, seeking clean-cut melodic lines without excessive coloratura. Giving the meaning of the texts the highest priority, he refrained from breaking up phrases and repeating words. Unfortunately, the free rubato, recitative style was often forced into a regular meter, which does not fit Hebrew prosody, and the modal flavor was sometimes compromised by concessions to western tonality (such as the use of leading tones and transformations of traditional modes to major and minor keys). Similarly, choral responses to a modal chazzanic chant were sometimes awkward (see examples 6a and 6b).
In Sulzer’s Schir Zion we find some recitatives based on the traditional Jewish modes alone, and others in which the modes were augmented by a variety of choral responses. In some of the choral parts of Schir Zion 1 Sulzer was assisted by a number of leading Viennese composers, most of them non-Jewish; even Franz Schubert wrote one setting.28 They composed primarily for liturgical sections that lacked a definitive nusach (customary prayer chant) or conventional musical emphasis. In Schir Zion 2 the traditional element clearly predominates. In his settings for the festivals and High Holy Days we see Sulzer’s skill in restoring “old melodies … arranged according to the rules of art.” The juxtaposition of tasteful choral sections and refined but expressive modal recitatives is shown in the following excerpt from the prayer for Tal (dew), recited on Passover (see example 7).29
Innumerable cantors came to Vienna to study with Sulzer, some at the request and expense of their own communities. Most came from western and central Europe; others came from the east, from as far away as Odessa. Among these latter were Osias Abrass (1820–1884), Baruch Schorr (1823–1904), and Pinchas Minkowsky (1859–1924).
Hirsch Weintraub and Samuel Naumbourg
Another regenerator of synagogue music was Hirsch Weintraub (1811–1881). He had studied general music and violin in Vienna and Berlin. After first succeeding his father, a cantor in Poland, he was appointed chief cantor in Königsberg in 1838. His eclectic collection, Schire Beth Adonai (1859), provides a fascinating reflection of a community in transition from east and west. On the one hand, he included traditional chant settings, and often designated them as Alte Melodie, or even Uralte Melodie, and indicated their connection to the eight western medieval and Renaissance church modes. On the other hand, there are chorales, some utilizing traditional themes and others new in inspiration. Some have fugal endings and a few are to be sung in German, whether as translations of well-known prayers or for new occasions such as confirmation. The final section of the publication includes the highly elaborate recitatives of his father, to which he added his own simplified versions that were more in accord with the tastes of his congregants.
In 1845, on the recommendation of Jacques Halevy, Samuel Naumbourg (1815–1880), once a chorister with Maier Kohn in Munich, was appointed cantor in Paris, where he proved instrumental in the musical revival of the French synagogues. His three-volume Semiroth Israel (1847–1864), based on his own native south German chant, contains some of the most archaic elements of Ashkenazi song. Despite the imprint of opera comique here and there, most melodies are worshipful and exude a delicate quality. Several contributions were made by Halevy and Meyerbeer. Another Naumbourg work (copublished with Vincent d’Indy), a study of the newly discovered synagogue music of Salamone de Rossi (c. 1570-c. 1630), represents one of the first contributions to the historical study of Jewish music.
Louis Lewandowski
Only Louis Lewandowski (1823–1894) rivaled Sulzer as a composer of synagogue music.30 The first Jew admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin, Lewandowski studied with Adolf Bernhard Marx, the music theorist, and Eduard Grell, contrapuntalist and organist. Though born into a cantorial family, Lewandowski functioned not as cantor but as director of music, the first Jew to hold such an office in the history of the synagogue. Appointed to this position in Berlin’s Alte (Old) Synagogue in 1844, he directed a choir considerably larger than Sulzer’s in Vienna. From 1845 on Lewandowski worked with Abraham J. Lichtenstein, the chief cantor, whose recitatives he studied and rearranged. In 1866 Lewandowski transferred his activities to the cathedral-size Neue (New) Synagogue, which had been provided with an organ (although he personally opposed its use in the synagogue).
Lewandowski’s first significant publication was the Kol Rinnah U’T’fillah (Berlin, 1871), for cantor and two-part choir for Sabbaths, festivals, and the High Holy Days. It supplied an immediate need of smaller and medium-sized congregations that had neither the means nor the ability to perform the complex compositions of Sulzer or Weintraub. Despite the rapid urbanization of German Jewry at this time, most Jews still lived in smaller towns and villages. Kol Rinnah offered these communities an opportunity to participate in simplified congregational singing. Sulzer himself had already compiled a collection of simple rearrangements of some of his pieces entitled Dudaim (Vienna, 1860), intended for school children and smaller congregations; and Naumbourg, too, later produced a collection of songs, Agudat Shirim (Leipzig, 1874), that was far superior to Sulzer’s. The most interesting feature of Naumbourg’s work was the inclusion of Sephardi melodies as part of a plan to fuse the Sephardi and Ashkenazi rites. After years of negotiations, the plan was narrowly rejected. Even so, some Sephardi tunes did enter Ashkenazi synagogues.31
Lewandowski can thus be credited with setting modern synagogue congregational song on a firm foundation. Critical of Sulzer for providing choral sections that required the choir to lead the congregation in its responses and thus, in effect, silenced the congregation, Lewandowski provided congregational tunes to be sung with or without the choir, in addition to the two-part choral compositions. He also criticized some of Sulzer’s monotonal choral responses and attempted instead to write responses to fit the nusach of a particular section of the service (see example 8).32
The Kol Rinnah’s chant settings served many a cantor of modest vocal abilities, giving rise to a generation of Kol Rinnah chazzanim. Lewandowski also simplified many of Lichtenstein’s recitatives, which were decreasingly appreciated by the congregations33 (see examples 9a and 9b).34
Example 9b. Simplified version of Lichtenstein's setting of Barukh atah Adonai by Louis Lewandowski.
Lewandowski himself excelled in the cantabile style—that region between recitative and more metrical, tuneful melody. While Sulzer often reflected the style of Schubert, Lewandowski was deeply influenced by Mendelssohn.
Lewandowski’s full potential was realized through his Todah W’simrah (Berlin, 1876 and 1882), for four-part choir, cantor, congregation, and organ. The organ accompaniment usually only doubled the choral parts, making most pieces suitable for use in synagogues that had no organ. Lewandowski’s music thus cut across denominational lines,35 and his influence extended far beyond Berlin.
Reform in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe, home to the largest numbers of Jews who lived under medieval-like conditions, did not remain immune to western developments. Larger communities instituted a Chorshul (literally, choir synagogue) modeled on the Vienna rite but nominally Orthodox and never with an organ. The chazzanut of the Chorshul remained typically eastern European, that is, unashamedly oriental in conception; modal, with frequent modulations, often rising to tonal levels similar to the maqamat of Arabic and Turkish music; highly improvisational and melismatic; and unrestricted by regular meters. However, to this style was added a western-inspired choral element.
The leading center of the eastern European Chorshul was Odessa. This cosmopolitan port laying outside the Pale of Settlement—the area of dense Jewish settlement in eastern Europe—rapidly became home to the most important Jewish institutions in Russia.36 It was also the first Russian city to possess an opera house frequented by Jews and non-Jews alike, where cantors could hear the potential of contemporary non-Jewish music.
Appalled by the conditions existing in the main synagogue, a group of German-speaking Jews from Brody, in Galicia, an important center of Haskalah (the name applied to the Jewish Enlightenment), initiated a rival house of worship in 1840 known as the Brody Synagogue. Here Nissan Blumenthal (1805–1903) established a four-part choir.37 Within a few years the Great Synagogue followed suit.
A galaxy of virtuoso chazzanim officiated in Odessa, raising chazzanut to new levels of artistry and competition: cantors like Abrass and Minkowski (mentioned above) and Ephraim Zalman Razumni (1853–1918)38 were imitated throughout the Pale of Settlement, where the synagogue became the only center of musical performance. The Odessa synagogues also employed composer/music directors such as A. Dunajewsky (1843–1911) and David Nowakowsky (1848–1921). The latter’s Schirei David: Kabbalat Shabbat (Odessa, n.d.) and Schirei David: Schlußgebet für Yom Kippur (Moscow, 1895) represent but a fraction of his compositions.39 The stature of this gifted composer with remarkable contrapuntal skills is only slowly being recognized.
Nevertheless, we should not exaggerate the role of the Chorshul in the evolution of eastern European synagogue music, for it was but one band of the spectrum. “What is important here,” writes Mark Slobin, “is … that every community supported a variety of synagogues, ranging from the purposely plain shtiblakh of Hasidic sects, who scorned ornament, through a badly heated shnaydershul (tailor’s synagogue) to the grand edifices of the middle class.”40
The Choir and the Organ: Two Symbolic Issues
The choirs that were introduced in western and central Europe were, at least in the first decades, for the most part comprised men and boys. With few exceptions the traditional separation of men and women in the synagogue remained in full force, even in “liberal” synagogues (as more conservative-oriented non-Orthodox synagogues were called later in the nineteenth century). For the Orthodox, there remained the Jewish legal proscription against listening to a woman’s voice (for the historical context of this rule, see the discussion in Schleifer’s essay, above). As early as 1814, members of the Vienna community had approached one of the leading rabbinical authorities of the day, Rabbi Moses Sofer (1762–1839), for guidance concerning the permissibility of performing a cantata for mixed voices written by Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) for a special service to commemorate the Austrian victory over Napoleon. The Rabbi’s responsum was most strict in its condemnation and added considerable weight to the (musical) exclusion of women from public religious life.41
Before 1850 fewer than ten German communities possessed mixed choirs.42 Independent synagogues, that is, synagogues existing outside the general community structure, such as the West London Synagogue (established in 1842), which introduced a mixed choir in 1859, felt freer to allow women to participate. However, the overwhelming majority of central European synagogues remained within the Gemeinde (community) so that issues concerning worship were decided, not by the rabbi or even the individual synagogue, but by the overall Gemeinde board, which frequently restrained those seeking changes. For example, there was no mixed choir in any Berlin Gemeinde synagogue until 1891, and only in 1893 did women sing in the choir of the Neue Synagogue.43 In Vienna, only men and boys sang until 1939. German Orthodoxy never allowed the participation of women, but starting in the late 1880s mixed choirs began to be used in several middle-class London Orthodox synagogues.44 The only city in eastern Europe with a mixed choir was Odessa, and here in but one synagogue.45
After 1850, many central European communities adopted the organ,46 partially for aesthetic reasons, but also as a symbol of cultural and social parity with the gentile environment. In 1845, a Reform-dominated rabbinical conference sanctioned its use, even by a Jew on the Sabbath.47 The Leipzig Synod of 1869 reconfirmed the 1845 permission and even commended the organ’s introduction.
Nevertheless, the use of an organ remained a divisive issue throughout the century. By 1886, organs had been introduced into approximately sixty-five German communities,48 though not without incurring considerable community bitterness. For instance, with respect to installing an organ in Berlin’s Neue Synagogue, the Gemeinde board elicited opinions on the subject from seven rabbinical authorities, one of whom, the celebrated preacher and scholar, Michael Sachs, even resigned, largely over this issue.49 While Budapest introduced the organ in 1853, Vienna never did so, at least for Sabbaths and festivals, even though Sulzer, unlike Lewandowski, favored the organ and had even drafted a written recommendation for its use. An 1856 conference of French rabbis permitted the organ on Sabbaths and Holy Days, provided it was played by a gentile; and by the century’s end, most acculturated Orthodox synagogues under the supervision of the consistoire used the organ.50 In eastern Europe, as we might expect, Odessa alone used the organ. In 1877 it was first used for a weekday Chanukah service in the Great Synagogue, while from 1901 it was introduced for regular worship in the Brody Synagogue.51
In Retrospect
In the early twentieth century, the attempt by Sulzer, Lewandowski, and others to obtain a musical synthesis of two cultures came under criticism. The mood was for a greater intensity of Jewish musical spirit, often drawing upon Jewish folk music, its freer rhythms and modal tunes. A new harmonic language was sought for a music that was considered oriental, not western, in origin.
Nevertheless, nineteenth-century European achievements in the field of synagogue music are remarkable. Time-honored chants were restored and creativity awakened. The standards set by cantors and composers and the expectations of congregants were raised. The time was opportune for the Jewish composer to reconsider the music of Judaism as a fruitful and worthy field of endeavor. But above all, Judaism’s musical response to the nineteenth century reflected the hopes, opportunities, and uncertainties of a Jewry undergoing a profound social transformation and religious adaptation.
NOTES
1. Cf. Hanoch Avenary, “Music: Modern Times,” Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 12 (Jerusalem, 1972), cols. 636–55; Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music (New York, 1929), chapters 12–14; Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity (Oxford, 1988), chapters 1–5; Eric Werner, A Voice Still Heard (University Park, Penn., 1976), chapters 10–13.
2. The pace of this modernization varied from place to place. See Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Pace of Modernization of German Jewry in the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21 (1976), pp. 41–56.
3. The author, a Christian, assumes the leaders of worship to be priests, whereas, in fact, they would have been cantors.
4. Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces (London, 1775), vol. 2, pp. 229–30.
5. The first such ordinance (Westphalia, 1810) became the prototype for others throughout Germany, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. They regulated all matters relating to liturgy, ritual, music, and decorum in the synagogue.
6. Hebraische und deutsche Gesänge zur Andacht und Erbauung (Cassel, 1810).
8. Modern services did, however, continue in the community school. The musical standards of the Beer Temple were not very high; they were described by one visitor as containing an “out of tune organ and the new, clumsy, shrieking choir.” See Nahum N. Glatzer, “On an Unpublished Letter of Isaak Markus Jost,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 (1977), p. 131.
9. From 1818 to 1833 the hymnal that was used was compiled by Eduard Kley, who was originally associated with the Beer Temple in Berlin. Later the Hamburg Temple produced its own Allgemeines israelitisches Gesangbuch (Hamburg, 1833).
10. Moritz Henle, “Bemerkungen zum Gesang im Hamburger Temple,” Liberales Judenthums 10 (July-August 1918), pp. 76–79. According to Henle, a disproportionately large section of the services was allotted to the singing of these hymns.
11. Meyer, Response to Modernity, p. 57. The Hamburg Temple, which continued in existence until 1939, later reintroduced cantillation, reduced the number of hymns, and restored the Ashkenazi chant.
12. Until 1848 only “tolerated” Jews—those who could afford the property and poll taxes—were allowed to dwell in the city. The Jews of Vienna thus comprised a social elite, similar to the Jews of Munich and, to some extent, Berlin, where immigration from Prussian Posen was restricted.
13. Joseph Mainzer, Esquisses Musicales (Paris, 1838), pp. 165–66. At that time Mainzer worked for the Gazette musicale and the Nationale in Paris. He later settled in England to found the forerunner of the Musical Times. See A. L. Ringer, “Salomon Sulzer, Joseph Mainzer, and the Romantic a cappella Movement,” Studia Musicologica 2 (1969): 254–370. During one of his visits, Mainzer did not miss a single Sabbath service during a seven-month period.
14. Ringer, “Sulzer,” p. 360.
15. Frances Trollope, Vienna and the Austrians (London, 1838), p. 373. Quoted in Ringer, “Sulzer,” p. 356.
16. Quoted in Werner, Voice Still Heard, p. 213. On the 1840 date, see Hanoch Avenary, ed., Kantor Salomon Sulzer und seine Zeit: Eine Dokumentation (Sigmaringen, 1985), p. 250.
17. Salomon Sulzer, Denkschrift (Vienna, 1876). Quoted in Werner, Voice Still Heard, p. 212.
18. Even with the completion of Schir Zion 2 in 1865, significant sections of the synagogue services were still not notated.
19. Occasionally we find a musically educated cantor in the pre-Enlightenment era, such as Solomon Lipschütz (1675–1758), who held that “singing without musical knowledge is like prayer without true devotion.” See his Te’udat Shelomo (Offenbach, 1715–1718), fols. 21b–22a.
20. Plural, meshorerim: singers known for their oral mastery of a large repertory. Dependent on oral transmission, cantors sought out meshorerim who could teach them traditional melodies.
21. Cf. Aron Friedmann, “Abraham Jakob Lichtenstein,” in Aron Friedmann, ed., Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren, part 1 (Berlin, 1918), pp. 78–81; and Lewandowski’s “Erinnerungen,” Der jüdische Kantor, vol. 3 ([Bromberg], 1882), no. 11, p. 82.
22. Examples are taken from Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies, vol. 6: The Synagogue Song of the German Jews in the Eighteenth Century (Leipzig, 1932), reprint ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 1–194. Example 1 (no. 443), a Hodu (Ps. 118:1–4) for Sukkot, opens with the traditional melody but becomes a baroque instrumental suite. Example 2 (no. 300) utilizes a traditional tune for Lekha Dodi, the hymn welcoming the Sabbath, which is varied, however, in early classic concertante style. Example 3 (no. 332) is a High Holy Day tune to Melekh Elyon but is augmented with elements of the tune that Franz Joseph Haydn reworked in 1797 into “Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser.”
23. Leopold Low, “Der Gesang in den orthodoxen ungarischen Synagogen,” Ben Chananja, vol. 6 (1863), p. 460.
24. Maier Kohn, arr., Vollständiger Jahrgang von Terzett- und Chorgesängen der Synagoge in München (Munich, 1839).
25. In some communities the rabbis took steps to abolish the meshorerim entirely. This first occurred in the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1810. An attempt was made to abolish them in Württemberg in 1838. See the Gottesdienst Ordnung für die Synagogen des Königreiches Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1838), part 2, paragraph 4.
26. Schir Zion 1, no. 1.
27. Example 6a (Hirsch Goldberg, Gesänge für Synagogen, 2nd ed. [Braunschweig, 1845], p. 65) is the cantor’s chant and response for the first benediction before the Shema on Sabbath eve. The flatted seventh of the Adonai Malakh mode is sometimes disregarded and the response is forced into the key of F major. Example 6b (Samuel Naumbourg’s Semiroth Israel, vol. 2 [Paris, 1864], no. 16) is a more authentic notation of the traditional formula, but it avoids the flatted seventh.
28. Cf. Eduard Birnbaum, “Franz Schubert as a Composer of Synagogue Music,” in Eric Werner, ed., Contributions to a Historical Study of Jewish Music (New York, 1976), pp. 228–40; Elaine Brody, “Schubert and Sulzer Revisited: A Recapitulation of the Events Leading to Schubert’s Setting in Hebrew of Psalm 92, D. 953,” in Eva Badura-Skoda and P. Branscombe, eds., Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 47–60.
29. Schir Zion 2, nos, 180 and 181.
30. There is a discrepancy concerning Lewandowski’s date of birth. Some consider it to have been 1821, but I have followed Eduard Birnbaum, “L. Lewandowski,” Jeschurun [Tilsit], vol. 3 (1894), no. 8, p. 102; and E. Ehrenreich, “Der erster Synagogenchor in Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, vol. 19 (1929), no. 3, p. 108.
31. See Morton M. Rosenthal, “History and Stylistic Development of Synagogue Music in France in the Nineteenth Century” (Rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, 1960), p. 38.
32. Kol Rinnah (Berlin, 1871), p. 15, no. 18. The congregational chant for the Shema continues in the same nusach as that intoned by the cantor for the previous blessings. It resembles Naumbourg (example 6). Prior to the regeneration of synagogue music in the nineteenth century it would appear that most congregational responses had degenerated into heterophony.
33. When plans were made for constructing the Neue Synagogue in Berlin, members of the community petitioned the Community board for, among other things, a “simplification of the mode of performance”—an indirect criticism of Lichtenstein, whose chant was by then considered too elaborate. See An die geerhten Mitglieder der hiesigen jüdischen Gemeinde (Berlin, 1865), p. 3.
34. Example 9(a): Lichtenstein MSS, Birnbaum Collection of Jewish Music, Mus. 125, HUC-JIR, Cincinnati. Example 9(b): Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah, p. 101, no. 154.
35. For example, the Liturgisches Liederbuch (Berlin, 1912), a songbook compiled by the Gemeinde of Berlin, is comprised largely of Lewandowski’s melodies and responses and is intended for use by both Orthodox and Liberal synagogues and schools.
36. Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History 1794–1881 (Stanford, 1985), p. 47.
37. Nissan Blumenthal was probably the first Russian cantor to utilize Sulzer’s Schir Zion. See Avenary, ed., Kantor Salomon Sulzer, p. 116.
38. For notations of a number of his recitatives, see Samuel Alman’s Shirei Razumni (London, 1930).
39. Most of Nowakowski’s compositions remain in manuscript form.
40. Mark Slobin, Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (Urbana, Ill., 1989), p. 18.
41. Saul J. Berman, “Kol ’Isha [A Woman’s Voice],” in Leo Landman, ed., Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume (New York, 1980), pp. 45–66. R. Sofer’s ruling was the most stringent of all interpretations based on the talmudic statement that “a woman’s voice is a sexual incitement” (B. Ber. 24a). Rabbi Moses Sofer’s extreme Orthodoxy spurned participation in western culture. By contrast, neo-Orthodoxy, represented by R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, sought a rapprochement with modernity. In Hirsch’s synagogue, decorum as strict as any Reform synagogue was enforced and choral singing—male only—was introduced.
42. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The 1840’s and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement,” in Werner Moss, ed., Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History (Tübingen, 1981), Lowenstein, “Modernization of German Jewry,” p. 269.
43. Aron Friedmann, 50 Jahre in Berlin (Berlin, 1929), p. 20.
44. Indicative of the right-wing trend in post–World War II Orthodoxy in western Europe is the curtailment of the use of the organ in French synagogues and the abolition of mixed choirs in English Orthodox synagogues.
45. “Odessa,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1905), vol. 9, p. 384.
46. Lowenstein, “German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement,” pp. 255–97.
47. The legal (halakhic) issues involved are the ban against imitating gentile practices and the definition of work forbidden on the Sabbath. Reformers argued that the synagogue replaced the Temple, where musical instruments had indeed been played, even on the Sabbath. The organ was likened to the Temple magrefa, which was said to be one such musical instrument. It is highly doubtful that this was actually the case. See Joseph Yasser, “The Magrepha of the Herodian Temple: A Five-Fold Hypothesis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 13 (1960): 24–42.
48. Magyar Zsido Szemele (Budapest, 1886), pp. 506–7.
49. The opinions are summarized in A. Berliner, “Literargeschichtliche Belege über die christliche Orgel im jüdischen Gottesdienste,” in A. Berliner, ed., Zur Lehr’ und zur Wehr (Berlin, 1904), pp. 40–63.
50. S. Debre, “The Jews in France,” JQR, o.s., 3 (1891): 366–435, gives an excellent description of fin de siècle Judaism in France.
51. Cf. Zipperstein, “Modernization of German Jewry,” p. 133; Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Odessa.”
