Music and Synagogue Life: The 19th and 20th centuries Introduction The history of Jewish music in Italy is long, fascinating, and filled with contradictions. Its length is due to the very history of Italian Jewry, whose origins go back more that two thousand years. Fascination stems from the meeting of the music of the Jewish Diaspora, represented in Italy by an unprecedented interaction among distinct Italian, Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions, with Italian musical culture and its innumerable cultural, regional and linguistic differences. And the contradictions concern the thousand identities, visible and invisible, of the Jews of Italy: the secrecy of ghettos, places of exclusion and also of explosive musical ferments emblematically represented in the works of Salamone Rossi (ca. 1570-1630); the conflicts and the hidden consonances between Judaism and Christianity, and the distance between the liturgy of the Church and that of the synagogue, at once brief and unattainable; the integration, and the cultural symbiosis, of Jews and Italy, and the shared feeling so beautifully expressed by Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco (1842); the tragic character of the Fascist parable, ended in the Holocaust and the destruction of Italian synagogue life; and finally the “curiosity” represented by the revival of Yiddish song in Italy, an overwhelming phenomenon at the end of the millennium, about which many (especially outside of Italy) express scathing doubts. But the main contradiction that characterizes Jewish music in Italy is that, in spite of its undisputable richness, it is a phenomenon still relatively obscure to the scholars of Judaism. Musicologists and cultural historians often know very little about the Spagnolo music 1 musical traditions of the Italian Jews, and struggle to grasp a cultural landscape made of Chinese box-like specificities, in which Judaism and italianità (“Italianness”) blend seamlessly. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the role of music in the life of the Jews of Italy evolved in many directions, bridging a host of diverse musical worlds, including liturgical, art and popular music, and spanning from the intimate sphere of the synagogue to the realm of public performance. In this period of time, Jewish life changed dramatically many times over, and Italian Jews were confronted with a number of challenges, including segregation in the ghettos, the Emancipation processes, the formation of a new national identity through the Risorgimento, the full participation in Italy’s political and cultural life, urbanization and the eclipse of the many small communities that for centuries animated the Italian Jewish experience, the anti-Semitic legislations and persecutions during the Second World War, the reconstruction of Jewish communal life after the Holocaust, the immigration of Jewish groups from North Africa and the Middle East following the creation of the State of Israel, and, by the end of the 20th century, the phenomenon of “virtual Jewish culture,” or an increased participation of non-Jews in the creation of cultural (especially musical) products that mainstream culture views as Jewish. Since it is intimately intertwined with all cultural and social dynamics of Jewish life, music closely reflected all these changes, representing them through sounds. By examining the Italian Jewish “soundscape” – the combination of performance styles, genres and repertoires, as well as the characteristics of musical events taking place in the synagogues and in public performance spaces – we can thus gain a fuller understanding of Jewish life, and of how the Jews Spagnolo music 2 attempted to represent themselves before their own communities and Italian society at large. As a key component of traditional Jewish lore – the public recitation of the Hebrew Bible and of the texts included in the liturgy and in the para-liturgical celebration of life-cycle events (births, circumcisions, weddings, death) – music is also an important indicator of the elements of continuity that informed social and cultural change. By paying a close attention to the dynamic relationship between sounds and traditional Jewish texts, we can thus attempt to identify how Jewish individuals, families and communities related to their personal and collective past, and at the same time coped with the challenges presented by Italian society and modern life. Sources Our knowledge of Italian Jewish musical life in modern times derives from the combined consideration of an array of different sources. Oral sources, constituted by archival recordings and the lore of living culture bearers (often, but not exclusively, professional synagogue cantors, or hazanim, and rabbis), document the development of the local oral traditions of liturgical and para-liturgical song in the many Jewish communities scattered throughout the Italian peninsula. These traditions were kept with a varying degree of accuracy by each community (or family) throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, on the basis of the ritual diversity that characterizes Italian Jewry. Local variants of Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and French liturgical customs (or minhagim) remained in the oral tradition, and progressively disappeared over time, either because the communities that maintained them vanished (due to urbanization, assimilation, or persecution), or because originally distinct Spagnolo music 3 traditions merged with one another, creating new musical (and liturgical) hybrids. The degree to which the oral traditions disappeared during these two centuries is staggering. A statistical survey from 1865-1866 (F. Servi in Educatore Israelita, XIII/1865: 364-366 and XIV/1866: 363-364) attested to the existence of one hundred and eight synagogues (or sites of worship), located in sixty-six different Italian centers. By the end of the 20th century, only a handful of Jewish communities maintained an independent living oral tradition, and even fewer more than one (i.e., distinct Italian, Sephardic or Ashkenazi liturgical traditions within the same geographical location). Thanks to the field recordings made during the 1950’s by the Italian-Israeli researcher, Leo Levi (1912-1982), we are able to reconstruct a fragmentary soundscape involving musical testimonies from twenty-seven distinct liturgical traditions, preserved in the Jewish communities of twenty-four Italian locations, many of which were already extinct at the time of the recordings. Regardless of their number, oral sources are invaluable, as they convey a first-hand account of the actual musical life of the Jews. With the corroboration of written sources, they can help us pinpointing the repertoires and the performance styles in the synagogue and in the Jewish homes, and thus constitute the primary evidence of Jewish daily life in Italy in modern times. Music manuscript and printed sources present us with the written testimony of Jewish musical practice. Written sources documenting Jewish music in Italy since the 16th century are relatively rare, and include original liturgical compositions, among which are the settings of Hebrew texts by Salamone Rossi, Hashirim asher li-shlomoh (Venice, 1622-23), as well as the transcriptions of synagogue songs from the oral tradition, such as Benedetto Marcello’s in Estro Spagnolo music 4 poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724-27). Beginning with the first decades of the 19th century, however, the number of sources of synagogue music increases dramatically. By the middle of the century, virtually each Italian congregation collected tens of new polyphonic compositions specifically devoted to synagogue worship. Additionally, since the 1880’s, individual musicians and researchers began transcribing synagogue melodies, leaving them in manuscript form (Marco Amar in Alessandria, David Ghiron in Casale Monferrato, Amadio Disegni in Rome), and in some cases publishing them in articles and books (Federico Consolo on Livorno, 1892; Elio Piattelli on Rome, Piedmont and Florence, 1967, 1986 and 1992). A recent survey of manuscript sources from Piedmont, for example, unearthed over seven hundred musical scores of compositions from the music archives of six Jewish communities, today preserved in communal and university archives in Italy, Israel and the United States. Similar studies are currently being carried out about the archives of several Italian Jewish communities, including Rome (whose musical records are spread among community and private collections in Italy and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem), Venice, Florence, Padua, Mantua, etc. These written sources are essential to the understanding of the degree to which the Emancipation prompted Italian Jews to innovate their liturgical “sound” by commissioning amateur and professional musicians (both Jewish and non-Jewish) to write for the synagogue, and by collecting Jewish liturgical works by other European composers – like Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), Emile Jonas (1827-1905) and Samuel Naumbourg (1815-1880) – who were often connected with the Reform movement. The content of these scores allows us to reconstruct a synagogue sound reminiscent of several non-Jewish musical Spagnolo music 5 worlds: melodies evoking Opera (and operetta), the liturgy of the Catholic Church, and the hymns of the Risorgimento were sung by small choirs of children and adults (at times also including women), and accompanied by the organ or, depending on the space and the resources made available by each synagogue, by the harmonium. The names of the composers, and often of the performers, appear together with the scores. Among them were local amateurs, whose desire to write and perform music was often accompanied by monetary donations to the community; Jewish professionals (among them Michele Bolaffi and David Garzia in Livorno; Bonaiut Treves and Ezechiello Levi in Vercelli; Giacomo Levi in Florence and Turin; Settimio Scazzocchio, Saul Di Capua and Amadio Disegni in Rome; Alberto Zellman in Trieste; Benedetto Franchetti in Mantua; Sabato Errera in Verona; Vittorio Orefice in Padua; Vittorio Norsa in Milan, and many others); and non-Jewish instrumentalists and composers, whose varying professional backgrounds ranged from experience with the Catholic Church (Eugenio Testa in Casale Monferrato), to the composition of music for official circumstances (G. Smoltz, also in Casale Monferrato), to Opera, as in the emblematic case of Carlo Pedrotti (1817-1893), a central figure in 19thcentury European musical theater, whose works for the synagogue served both the community of his hometown, Verona, and the synagogues of Piedmont during his tenure as director of Turin’s Teatro Regio (1868-1882). The scope of the music collections of the Italian Jewish communities is indeed strikingly wideranging, and highly revealing of the breadth of musical and cultural interests of their leaderships. It also paints a social and cultural network that connected virtually each community with others in the Peninsula and in Europe, as well as with the surrounding non-Jewish world. Musical composition for the synagogue Spagnolo music 6 continued well into the 20th century, when female and mixed-gendered synagogue choirs became increasingly more popular, but came to an almost complete halt after the Second World War, when liturgical customs started to be directed increasingly more towards a reframed ideal of Jewish orthodoxy. Choirs and organs were progressively abandoned, polyphony was left to the occasional initiative of a few individuals, and the religious leadership tried to efface their existence from the collective consciousness, and at times from the synagogues themselves. When the main synagogue of Milan was renovated at the end of the 1990’s, its organ – the work of the celebrated Lingiardi organ-makers of Pavia (Opus 218, built in 1892) – was dismantled and carried away with the debris resulting from the renovation. Literary sources dating from as early as the 16th century, including liturgical texts, rabbinic responsa, personal and communal papers, letters, etc., help understanding the context, and sometimes even the details of the performance practice of music in Jewish life. Since the 19th century, these sources are complemented by the invaluable addition of the Italian Jewish press. The pages of the Rivista Israelitica (Parma 1845-1847), Educatore Israelita (Vercelli 18531874), Corriere Israelitico (Trieste 1862-1914), Vessillo Israelitico (Casale Monferrato and Turin 1874-1922), and Rassegna Mensile di Israel (since 1925) contain a veritable treasure-trove of information, ranging from the dates and details of many synagogue performances, establishment of choirs, special liturgical ceremonies, to full-fledging debates about the role of music in synagogue life, the impact of the Reform, the role of ethnography in maintaining (or reconstructing) older musical traditions, and the involvement of Jewish musician in the Italian and European music scene. Spagnolo music 7 Areas of Musical Interaction The combined information derived from literary sources, written and oral musical documents yields to painting a vivid and complex landscape. It also helps understanding the extent to which the changing social processes impacted traditional Jewish music or, conversely, left some pre-existing repertoires untouched by the attempts to modernize Italian Judaism that characterize this era. Furthermore, the wealth of musical sources underscores the pivotal role music has had in shaping Italian Jewish cultural identity, as it touched on virtually all aspects of the Jewish experience: from the intimacy of Jewish home rituals and life-cycle events to the communal “stage” of the synagogue and of community schools, to the public realms of academia, the theater, the concert hall and the mass media. Music, which by definition operates across blurred physical boundaries, in this case acted as a connective agent among different Jewish cultures, as well as between Judaism and the surrounding non-Jewish world. The role of music in the Jewish home and in life-cycle events is best perceived by considering how the pace of social changes changed the texture of family and communal life during the 19th and 20th centuries. Urbanization, and later persecution, brought about the relocation of many family groups across the Peninsula and eventually the entire Mediterranean Basin, causing oral traditions once separated by well-defined geopolitical boundaries to come into proximity with one another. More than in the past, the composition of families and of entire communities encompassed individuals and groups that followed different liturgical customs, including the recitation of different texts and melodies for the same liturgical occasions. This inevitably caused the transformation of the traditional musical repertoires. Home rituals characterized by musical Spagnolo music 8 performance, like the meals on the even of Shabbat and the major holidays, the Passover seder, the vigil before a circumcision (or mishmarah), and the festive celebration of a bar mitzvah, either changed radically in their nature, or were relocated to the public realm of synagogue life, or simply disappeared. Passover sedarim began to include melodies (and texts) originating from different, and once distinct, local traditions, thus creating new “traditions.” Weddings and bar mitzvah ceremonies increasingly took place inside the synagogue, while the mishmarah, a nocturnal ceremony involving prayers and songs that until the late 19th century was still practiced within several northern Italian communities, altogether ceased to be celebrated, exception made for the Roman community (where it had been the object of a reform in the earlier part of the 18th century). The synagogue increasingly became the main focus of Jewish life, with the transformation of old rituals and the creation of new ones to accommodate the needs and wants of a newly emancipated population. Musical sources clearly demonstrate how 19th-century synagogue life gave place to a “liturgical compromise” in which certain holidays (typically Shabbat and the High Holy Days) remained devoted to the preservation of older, orally transmitted, repertoires, while others (especially the Festivals, and the shabbatot preceding and following them in the Hebrew calendar) became the lieu of musical innovation. With almost no exception, all extant choral musical compositions written since the beginning of the 19th century are in fact settings of liturgical texts for Passover, Sukkoth and Shavuot. The remaining ones are original compositions for new rituals, like the hag haherut, or the Festival of Emancipation, celebrated by many Italian communities in March since 1848 (and by some until the early 20th century), to commemorate the edict promulgated that year by Carlo Alberto of Spagnolo music 9 Savoy to emancipate the Jews. Similarly, the bat mitzvah ceremonies – religious confirmation celebrations pioneered by the communities of Modena (1844) and Verona (1846), soon followed by almost all other major Italian congregations – took place in the synagogue, and marked the opening of the space of worship to the female voice. Following the Second World War, however, most of these musical innovations were removed from the ritual: female and mixed choirs (and often choirs altogether, along with the organs accompanying them) ceased to exist, and their repertoires either disappeared, or where transformed in melodies that could be performed by one voice, in a monodic style that was perceived to be more “traditional.” The 19th century also brought about a radical change in the way in which music and ritual were included in the curriculum of Jewish communal schools and in traditional Jewish education. The rigid atmosphere of the heder, in which pupils learned by heart traditional texts and melodies, gradually gave place to the many “collegi,” in which youth were instructed on how to reconcile their religious identity with the demands of modernity. Instruction in chanting traditional texts according to the melodies of the prayer and the te‘amim progressively became the task of bar mitzvah tutors, and less the matter of oral tradition. Following the creation of the State of Israel, music re-entered the experience of Italian Jewish youth, both at school and in youth camps, mostly as a way to reinforce, through the teaching and communal performance of Zionist and Israeli songs – which were also soon incorporated into synagogue repertoires – the connection with the Jewish State. Overall, in the realms of synagogue and family life, the 19th and 20th centuries were marked by a gradual decrease in musical activity among Italian Spagnolo music 10 Jews. On the contrary, the public sphere – academia and the performing arts – showed an opposite trend. Thanks to the Emancipation, Jewish musician who once only served their religious congregations progressively expanded their area of activity beyond the Jewish world, reaching mainstream culture. The field of academia is especially revealing of this trend. In the 19th century, Livornese composer and musicologist Abramo Basevi (1818-1885) – who wrote for the synagogue and the Opera, inspired the Società del Quartetto of Florence, and became a leading music critic, whose groundbreaking articles on Giuseppe Verdi were collected in a volume published in 1859 – and opera composer Alberto Franchetti (1860-1942), who also wrote for the synagogue and directed the Music Conservatory of Florence, paved the way for an active engagement of many Jewish musicologists and music educators in Italian academia. These include Alberto Gentili (1873-1954), who held the first chair of Music History in an Italian university (Turin, 1925) and pioneered the Vivaldi renaissance, Fernando Liuzzi (1884-1940), who taught musical aesthetics at the Universities of Florence (since 1923) and Rome (1927) and who focused on the revival of medieval music and on early Christian hymns (laude), and Enrico Fubini (b. 1935), whose research on music aesthetic actively engages Jewish music in its many manifestations, as well as two leading figures in Italian musical ethnography, Leone Sinigaglia and Leo Levi, whose family origins were immersed in the world of synagogue music. The 20th century witnessed an increased activity on the part of Jewish musicians, who often balanced an intense production of mainstream music with the exploration of Jewish themes. Among them were several composers, whose professional lives were crushed by the anti-Semitic legislation, including Leone Senigaglia (1868-1944), Guido Alberto Fano (1875-1961), Mario Castelnuovo Spagnolo music 11 Tedesco (1895-1968), Aldo Finzi (1897-1945), Renzo Massarani (1898-1975), and Vittorio Rieti (1898-1944). Popular music also witnessed Jewish participation: 19th-century operetta authors/conductors like Giacomo Levi in Turin and David Garzia in Livorno, whose livelihood also depended on their work for the synagogue, were followed in the 20th century by musicians whose activity entirely took place in the secular world: among them are Icilio Sadun (1872-1947), whose compositions animated the Viareggio Carnival, the Dutch-raised Leschan sisters, whose popularity as “Trio Lescano” was unsurpassed in the 1930’s, and, in the second half of the century, song-writer Herbert Pagani (1944-1988) and producer David Zard (b. 1943), both born in Libya and immigrated to Italy after the Six Day War. Musical Representations of the Jews During the 19th and 20th centuries, both art and popular music also became conscious vehicles for the public representation, and staging, of Jews and Jewish themes. This phenomenon can be witnessed both inside the synagogue and in theaters and concert halls, and is the product of a musical collaboration between Jews and non-Jews. Its historical antecedents can be found in the era of the ghettos, when Gentiles entered the segregated Jewish urban spaces to attend liturgical ceremonies, often with a Kabbalistic bent, like the 17th- and 18th-century Hebrew cantatas for Hosha’na Rabah composed in Venice (1682) and Casale Monferrato (1732, 1733 and 1735) or the musical ceremony for the inauguration of the synagogue of Siena (1786). The Emancipation, however, moved this musical interaction between Jews and non-Jews to more public arenas, namely the new monumental synagogues built in the major Italian cities, and the theater Spagnolo music 12 stage. The staging of Gioacchino Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (Naples, San Carlo, 1818) and of Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabuccodonosor (Milan, La Scala, 1842) had a lasting impact on Italian Jews, who perceived their own history – and their physical presence as a people on the opera stage – as the object of mass attention. In a similar vein, the inauguration ceremonies of all major new synagogue buildings throughout the 19th century (Vercelli 1878, Florence 1882, Milan 1892, etc.) were staged before large, ethnically mixed, audiences, and often included both Jewish and non-Jewish musical selections. In the 20th century, the Opera stage continued to pay attention to Jewish themes: the world premiere of the Sacred Service by Swiss composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) took place in Turin in 1933, and Darius Milhaud’s (1892-1974) David opened at La Scala in 1955. It is with the end of the 20th century, however, that this phenomenon acquired fullblown proportions, as Italy developed a local version of the worldwide revival of “Klezmer music” (a traditional East-European wedding music repertoire that also includes Yiddish songs), brought to the theater by director Mara Cantoni and actor/singer Moni Ovadia in the late 1980’s. Following Ovadia’s popularity, Jewish themes and music – often connected with a reflection upon the Holocaust and its representation through artistic means – reached all major Italian theatrical stages, radio and television, ensuring a lasting visibility nationwide. What characterizes these representations is that they are rarely connected with the history and musical heritage of the Jews of Italy, who, in spite of decreasing demographics, continue to maintain the oral traditions reconfigured after the Holocaust, and to transmit them in the context of family and community life. Spagnolo music 13