Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern ComposersRosenfeld, Paul
History
Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers
Rosenfeld, Paul
Composers; Music -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an
authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his
that is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than
the synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and
color that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music the
harsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures
of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created the
race and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternal
Egypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this music
makes one feel as though an element that had remained unchanged
throughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and by
which every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in it
and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are the
very impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make it
seem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court of the
king had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114th
Psalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the passage of the Red
Sea, the very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance. The
voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have
called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's
22nd Psalm?
And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation
of the third of the "Poemes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters
his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity
of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to
erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts
itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly
limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first
movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old
Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its
flowing voices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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