4 - Jewry in music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
Summary
The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of MUSIC … At this moment … musical Europe is ours. There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under the feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust. Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, springs from our tribe. The catalogue is too vast … enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield – Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn – are of the Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion … as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to ‘the sweet singers of Israel’.
Thus the wise Jew Sidonia to his protégé Coningsby, the eponymous hero of Benjamin Disraeli’s 1844 novel. We may trust Disraeli to go over the top in his enthusiasm; there was not a single drop of Jewish blood in the veins of Rossini, and the sopranos Pasta and Grisi, who had Jewish fathers, can only tenuously be claimed for Israel. Nonetheless Disraeli was doubtless correct about the many ‘feigned names’.
In England, thanks to the popularity of Braham and Mendelssohn and the solid work of Moscheles, and in a society broadly at ease with its national identity, the association of Jews with music was viewed benignly. An obituary of Braham in 1856 cited him as ‘one of the many instances of that aptitude of the Jewish race for music which can scarcely have escaped the notice of any observer of the present age’.
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- Jewry in MusicEntry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner, pp. 257 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011