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Synagogue choral music of nineteenth-century Vienna, Paris, and Berlin: its repertoire and history

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SYNAGOGUE CHORAL MUSIC OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIENNA, PARIS,
AND BERLIN:
ITS REPERTOIRE AND HISTORY

by

COREEN S. DUFFY

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC DEPARTMENT OF
CHORAL AND SACRED MUSIC
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS
(CHORAL MUSIC)

December 2014

Copyright 2014 Coreen S. Duffy

ii

DEDICATION

With gratitude, I dedicate this document:
To my parents, who dedicated their time and love to me, enabling its completion;
To my husband, who offered rabbinic and cantorial expertise along with loving
support;

and
To my baby girl, Charlotte, who entered this world—and the orbit of this
dissertation—simultaneously. If, as Lewandowski said, “Love Makes the Melody
Immortal,” may you live long with these melodies and your own, knowing that
my love for you is immortal.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer thanks:
To my teachers, Nick Strimple, Jo-Michael Scheibe, Rotem Gilbert, Cristian
Grases, Sharon Lavery, Larry Livingston, and Morten Lauridsen, who have
encouraged and inspired me;

To my dear friend and colleague, Christopher Haygood, for making graduate
school infinitely more fun and rewarding;

and
To Rabbi Cantor Mark H. Kula, Marc Levin, Beno Schechter, and the Second
Avenue Jewish Chorale, for partnering with me to bring this repertoire to light
and to life, through performances, lectures, and celebration.
iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ........................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii
List of Tables .......................................................................................................................v
List of Examples ................................................................................................................ vi
List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ix
Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Jewish Emancipation
and its Precipitation of the Synagogue Choral Tradition ..........................1

Chapter One: “So Wild and Strange a Harmony:”
Synagogue Choral Music of Salomon Sulzer .........................................12

Chapter Two: Synagogue Music Meets the Parisian Opera:
Choral Repertoire of Samuel Naumbourg
and Jewish Opera Composers in France .................................................38

Chapter Three: Synagogue Music Meets Its Master:
Louis Lewandowski ................................................................................81

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................133
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................139

v

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1 Transliteration and Translation for Sulzer, Adôn ôlom ....................................20
Table 2.1 Transliteration and Translation for Naumbourg,
Vajehi Binsoa and Kumoh Adonoï ...................................................................64
Table 2.2 Transliteration and Translation for Seu Scheorim ...........................................70
Table 2.3 Transliteration and Translation of El Adon ......................................................71
Table 3.1 Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski,
Jokor b’ene Adonoj ........................................................................................113
Table 3.2 Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski,
Socharti loch ..................................................................................................117
Table 3.3 Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski,
Enosch ............................................................................................................121
Table 3.4 German Text/Hebrew Transliteration and Translation
for Lewandowski, Deutsche Keudsha............................................................128

vi

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1.1 Sulzer, Adôn ôlom ................................................................................21
Example 1.2 Sulzer, Psalm 21, Adônoj b’os’cho ......................................................25
Example 1.3 Sulzer, B’rôsch haschonoh ..................................................................28
Example 1.4 Sulzer, Volkshynme (quoting a song by Joseph Haydn) ......................33
Example 1.5 Sulzer, Hineh Ma Tôv ..........................................................................35
Example 2.1 Naumbourg, Adon Olam ......................................................................52
Example 2.2 Halévy, Psalm 118 ...............................................................................56
Example 2.3 Halévy, Schema Yisroel .......................................................................58
Example 2.4 Halévy, Baruch Schenosan from Sortie du Sefer.................................59
Example 2.5 Halévy, Romemu from Sortie du Sefer ................................................61
Example 2.6 Naumbourg, Vajehi Binsoa
and Kumoh Adonoï from Sortie du Séfer .............................................63
Example 2.7 Naumbourg, Psaume 150 .....................................................................65
Example 2.8 Naumbourg, Seu Scheorim...................................................................69
Example 2.9 Naumbourg, El Odon ...........................................................................72
Example 2.10 Meyerbeer, “Hymne Triomphal”
from Le Prophète .................................................................................74
Example 2.11 Meyerbeer, Prière d’Enfants ...............................................................77
Example 2.12 Meyerbeer/Naumbourg, Uvnuchoh Jomar ..........................................79
Example 3.1 Lewandowski, Adon Olam ...................................................................95
Example 3.2 Lewandowski, Ma Towu ....................................................................100
vii

Example 3.3 Lewandowski, Hallalujoh, No. 202 ...................................................106
Example 3.4 Lewandowski, Hallalujoh, No. 201 ...................................................108
Example 3.5 Lewandowski, L’cho Dodi .................................................................111
Example 3.6 Lewandowski, Jokor b’ene Adonoj ....................................................114
Example 3.7 Lewandowski, Socharti loch ..............................................................118
Example 3.8 High Holy Day Nusach for the Evening Service ...............................120
Example 3.9 Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 227 ........................................................122
Example 3.10 Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 34 ..........................................................125
Example 3.11 Lewandowski, Deutsche Kedusha .....................................................129

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Cover page of Sulzer’s Schir Zion ...................................................................18
Figure 2 Cover page of Naumbourg’s edition of
Cantiques de Salomon Rossi ............................................................................40

ix

ABSTRACT

In 1623, Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1630) published the world’s first collection of
notated choral music for the synagogue in Western, late-Renaissance style. Following
this singular achievement in synagogue composition, no significant choral activity
occurred in Jewish music until the tenure of Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) in Vienna.
Sulzer’s publication in 1839 of the first comprehensive collection of choral-cantorial
repertoire for the Jewish liturgy unleashed a wave of interest in synagogue choral music
throughout Europe, most notably in two other major compendiums of new Jewish choral
repertoire, published by Samuel Naumbourg (1815-1880) in Paris and Louis
Lewandowski (1821-1894) in Berlin.
Sulzer obtained both a Jewish and Western music education; in addition to being
a cantor and synagogue composer, he was a famous vocalist in the secular world,
specializing in the art songs of Schubert. During his long career as cantor at Vienna’s
Seitenstettengasse Temple, Sulzer published two volumes of synagogue choral music,
entitled Schir Zion (1839 and 1865). These collections tie together three musical
elements; they include edited transcriptions of traditional cantorial chants, new music by
Sulzer, and music that Sulzer commissioned from his non-Jewish contemporaries.
The circumstances that permitted Sulzer’s great achievement in Vienna (and,
ultimately, parallel achievements by synagogue composers in Paris and Berlin) center
around two phenomena of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Jewish
Emancipation, which began its rumblings in the late eighteenth century, opened doors to
x

allow Jews to participate in society. The Reform movement in Judaism inspired Jews to
re-imagine new formats and possibilities for worship; however, it also tended to extend
too far in eradicating important aspects of tradition, such as cantorial chant. Sulzer,
Naumbourg, and Lewandowski managed to preserve much of the traditional art while
also championing new music for Jewish worship.
Samuel Naumbourg brought his German training and sensibility to Paris, where
he worked alongside his Jewish colleagues, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) and
Jacques Halévy (1799-1862), who achieved great fame for their French Grand Operas.
As cantor for the Ashkenazi Temple, Naumbourg composed new music for the
synagogue in Grand Opera style and commissioned other composers, such as Halévy, to
contribute compositions. The primary thematic material of Naumbourg’s prayer setting,
El Adon, appears prominently in Meyerbeer’s subsequent opera, Le Prophète, which is
the opera that particularly drew the ire of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in his pamphlet
Das Judenthum.
Louis Lewandowski’s rise to fame was slower and more methodical than either
Sulzer’s or Naumbourg’s. Although he showed early promise as a cantorial assistant and
a young student of music—the first Jew ever to attend the Berlin Academy of Arts—an
illness set him back from career development. When he recovered, he took a behind-the-
scenes job assisting the cantor in preparing a new chorus to sing Sulzer’s music at the
Heidereutergasse synagogue in Berlin. After years in this thankless position,
Lewandowski achieved the title of music director to accompany his work. Although
evidence shows that he began composing and integrating his own compositions into the
xi

liturgy early in his career, Lewandowski did not begin to publish his music until 1871 (a
volume of largely cantorial and two- and three-part prayer settings, entitled Kol Rinnah
u’T’fillah). He later published a two-volume set of major synagogue choral repertoire:
Todah W’Simrah (1876).
The synagogue music composed by these three masters circulated throughout
Europe and beyond, created a Jewish choral culture that persisted for over a century, and
inspired countless other composers to contribute to the repertoire.
1

INTRODUCTION:
Nineteenth-Century Jewish Emancipation
and its Precipitation of the Synagogue Choral Tradition

Against the spiritual background of Jewish emancipation was written another
chapter in the history of music in Israel; yet this is no longer the story of Jewish
music but the story of music by Jewish masters.
1

The Renaissance period in Western music (c.1450-1600) brought musical
innovation to old and new genres, opening European ears to new approaches to
consonance, melody, voice leading, and counterpoint. The development during this
period extended to secular, Catholic, and newly-developing Protestant music, but left
music of the Jewish synagogues virtually untouched. Jewish communities in Renaissance
Europe, subjected to expulsion and persecution, confined to ghettos, and starkly limited
in the trades and professions available to them, could not access an education in Western
music:
In feudal Europe the Church had been the center of musical science and practice,
and the Jews had for this reason been denied an active participation in European
musical art; in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe another center of

1
Peter Gradenwitz, The Music of Israel: Its Rise and Growth Through 5000 Years
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1949), 161.

2

music making had been created—that is, the aristocratic court—but this, too, was
inaccessible to the central European Jews.
2

Liturgical synagogue music during this time relied on cantillation—improvisation upon a
particular prayer mode—and generally had no relationship to Western notated music.
While synagogue music remained largely insulated, chant-based, and traditional,
developments in polyphonic choral composition for the Catholic liturgy culminated in the
works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525-1594) at the end of the Renaissance.
Just as the fire of the Renaissance period in Western music began to give way to
the Baroque, however, the spark of a wholly different Renaissance—one in sacred Jewish
choral music—ignited in the music of Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1630). A Mantuan Jew,
Rossi managed to obtain employment as a composer and musician outside the Jewish
ghetto, in the court of the Duke of Gonzaga, under the direction of many distinguished
composers, such as Giaches de Wert (1535-1596), Alessandro Striggio (1540-1592),
Giovanni Gastoldi (1550-1622), and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643):
Like Rossi, [these composers for the Mantuan court] variously wrote madrigals,
canzonette, instrumental and sacred works; and like him, they served, sometimes,
as both instrumentalists and composers. . . . Unlike Rossi, though, they were
Christians, which meant that Rossi was competing for favours with the favoured:
his chances of earning recognition as a composer, through commissions or
monetary reward, were inevitably limited.
3

Despite his religious disadvantage, however, Rossi gained international renown for
composing madrigals, canzonette, and trio sonatas before turning his attention, after

2
Gradenwitz, The Music of Israel, 162-163.
3
Don Harrán, Salamone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15.

3

1610, to an unprecedented undertaking: choral music for the synagogue. With the
blessing of Rabbi Leon Modena (1571-1648), Rossi succeeded in composing and
performing a major collection of Hebrew-language, a cappella music for the Jewish
liturgy. This repertoire bears no relationship to Jewish modes or chant; rather, much of it
is in the style of Palestrina’s late-Renaissance polyphony and Monteverdi’s polychoral
sacred music. Before Rossi’s synagogue music could gain a foothold outside of Mantua,
however, the Jewish ghetto was attacked and destroyed, Rossi was likely killed, and the
partbooks from his sacred music collection scattered and largely lost for the next two
centuries.
4

Rossi’s concept of composing notated choral music for the synagogue liturgy
mostly lay dormant for two hundred years, until Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) reimagined
it in Vienna and instigated an international choral movement within European Jewry.
The reason for the two-century delay is manifold: religious persecution, ghetto
confinement, and limitation of trades or professions available to Jews prevented musical
advancement or significant interaction with the Christian musical community. In
eighteenth-century Frankfurt, for example, “no musical culture on a higher level could
unfold within or outside the synagogue,” due to crowding of people and buildings into a
small ghetto.
5

4
Harrán, Rossi, 12.

5
Artur Holde, Jews in Music: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Mid-
Twentieth Century (New York: Bloch Pub. Co, 1974), 7.

4

Throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a custom
took hold in Jewish communities of featuring three singers for services: a chazzan
(cantor) and his meshorerim (two accompanying singers, usually a boy soprano and a
bass). Funding for synagogue music and musicians, however, was scarce, “causing many
communities to forego the permanent engagement of a chazzan” and eventually forcing
meshorerim into a new tradition: that of wandering musicians.
6
Music of the uprooted
meshorerim remained improvisatory, the singers themselves unsure of their livelihood:
The hazzan and his two choristers frequently had to travel from place to place,
since no one community could support them. Even when they were engaged
solely for the service of one community they received no fixed salaries, but . . .
had to depend on contributions from various sources.
7

The uncertainty and short-term engagement of the itinerant meshorerim in any given
community prevented steady musical growth. Music remained improvisatory and based,
almost universally, on an oral tradition:
Most of the singing was done in unison; when harmonies were used, they were
either in thirds or in sixths, with an occasional chord. There were rehearsals, but
it was never certain that the performances achieved at the rehearsals would be
reproduced at the service, for the music was not written down because very few of
the hazzanim or singers were able to read music. The singers were also used for
humming a root tune at certain points while the hazzan sang an emotional
passage, and for the repetition of key words at significant places in the prayer, or
at a cadence. Good singers were often permitted to improvise an introduction to
an improvisation by the cantor.
8

6
Holde, Jews in Music, 2.
7
Irene Heskes, ed., Studies in Jewish Music: Collected Writings of A.W. Binder
(New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1971), 148.
8
Ibid., 148-149.
5

Although the cantors’ movement from town to town prevented any single
community from developing synagogue music in a stable manner, the mobility of the
meshorerim did allow for dissemination of different tunes and traditions throughout
Europe. Often, communities would lure a particularly talented meshorer from his trio,
thus obtaining a treasure trove of music, as the singer “brought popular compositions and
melodies from the previous hazzan to the new one.”
9
In addition, areas with more
freedom and financial stability exported cantors to more culturally impoverished regions:
Well into the seventeenth century it was primarily Germany which supplied
cantors to the East. After the severe anti-Semitic persecutions in Poland and in
the Ukraine, culminating in the Chmelnizki pogroms of 1648, the reverse
movement began. Great masses of threatened Eastern Jews set out for Western
countries, and were, of course, frequently accompanied by their rabbis and
chazzanim. Especially those gifted with fine voices had no difficulty in finding a
new sphere of activity in the large communities of Germany, Holland, Bohemia
and Italy. As an inevitable consequence of this mass transplantation the character
of the service in many Western congregations changed in accordance with the
stylistic peculiarities of Eastern chazzanuth.
10

Despite the interchange of cantors and music among different communities, the overall
quality of musicianship and “composition” was low. As the Enlightenment period in
Europe unfolded and Jews edged toward emancipation, the inadequacy of the traveling
meshorerim system became acute:
The usual synagogue combination of three or more choristers seldom presented
what could be considered an artistic performance; even their best was far below
the quality of the choral singing that was already heard in many non-Jewish

9
Heskes, Collected Writings of A.W. Binder, 149.
10
Holde, Jews in Music, 8-9 (emphasis in original).
6

places of worship in Europe. It was against this musical chaos and inadequacy
that Israel Lovy and Salomon Sulzer revolted some years later.
11

Jewish Emancipation and the dawn of the Reform Movement in Judaism enabled this so-
called revolt against the meshorerim system and the creation of the choral-cantorial
model that would come to dominate synagogue music for more than a century.
Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy began to open European minds to
acceptance of Jews; in this period, “the growing economic power of individual Jews and
changes in the intellectual climate in western Europe at large” helped to soften anti-
Semitic attitudes.
12

Skepticism, deism, and other Enlightenment philosophies broke the monopoly of
Christianity over the intellectual life of the West, opening the way to an
evaluation of Judaism and of the Jewish condition free of the burden of
theological opprobrium (though individual leaders of the Enlightenment such as
Diderot and Voltaire remained contemptuous of Judaism as a superstitious,
obscurantist system, and of Jews as ignorant and clannish).
13

In Austria, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765-1790) “was eager to ‘improve’
the Jews, make them more useful for society, and prepare them for full civil rights—if
they should come to deserve them.”
14
He relaxed anti-Semitic laws and reduced the
Jews’ tax burden. In France, the Revolution of 1789 opened the door for Jews to enjoy

11
Heskes, Collected Writings of A.W. Binder, 149.
12
Raymond P. Scheindlin, A Short History of the Jewish People (New York:
Macmillan, 1998), 163-4.

13
Ibid., 164.
14
Ibid.
7

some of the attendant benefits of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité, and confirm their status
as French citizens; in 1806, Napoleon cemented their equality:
Under the influence of various measures undertaken with regard to the Jews, there
will no longer be any difference between them and other citizens of our empire.
15

The Napoleonic Wars extended French Jews’ emancipation, reaching German territories
occupied by Napoleon and creating new economic opportunities for German Jews:
16

The unquestionable economic ascent of German Jewry began well before the era
proper of industrialization, most markedly at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
Jewish tradesmen and pedlars [sic] clearly gained from the profit opportunities
created by commodity shortages and army provisioning, which were at that time a
source of remarkable capital formation in the trade and commerce sector. We
may assume that a fair number of the later flourishing Jewish middle-sized firms
accumulated their first capital in these years, especially in the Rhineland. What
followed was a general, although occasionally interrupted and not regionally
uniform, process of economic advancement and consolidation. In the process of
‘loosening traditional structures and the redistribution of economic opportunities’
the Jews were evidently on the winning side.
17

Along with the Emancipation came an interest on the part of late seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century Jews to re-imagine their relationship to religion and revise the
Jewish liturgy. The resultant Reform Movement began in Westphalia, where Israel
Jacobson (1768-1828) set out to “modernize” the German-Jewish worship service,
bringing it more closely in line with Protestantism, introducing “a sermon in German,

15
H.H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1976), 756.

16
Scheindlin, A Short History of the Jewish People, 166.

17
Avraham Barkai, “Jews at the Start of Industrialisation,” in Revolution and
Evolution, 1848 in German-Jewish History, Werner E. Moss, Arnold Paucker, Reinhard
Rürup, and Robert Weltsch (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981), 129.

8

German hymns, and a mixed choir with organ accompaniment.”
18
Jacobson and the
radical reformers eliminated traditional prayer modes and discarded the role of the
chazzan altogether. Their goal was to make the Jew “a modern European human being
by stripping off all the medieval and Oriental elements still clinging to him,” and to retain
“the youth which started to drift away from their people and culture and to become
absorbed by the Christian environment.”
19

The ultra-Reform movement failed to gain a major, long-lasting following, but it
did instigate large-scale interest in modernizing Judaism while retaining “inherited
treasures.”
20
In Vienna, Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) became the literal and figurative
voice of the new music of Judaism, developing a balance between traditional, cantorial
nusach and contemporary, Western choral music. With his world-famous voice,
extensive connections to secular composers, and compositional talent, Sulzer published—
and popularized—the first major collection of Jewish choral-cantorial repertoire:
Sulzer’s original choral settings of liturgical texts were his most radical break
from tradition. A music that had been solo-dominated became choral; a repertoire
that had been monophonic became polyphonic; an art that had been improvised
became notated; a liturgy that had been chanted in Middle Eastern modes was set
in European diatonic modes. Since Sulzer had virtually no precedents (that he
knew of), he simply composed in the part-song style with which he had become

18
Heskes, Collected Writings of A.W. Binder, 149.
19
A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (New York:
Schocken Books, 1956), 242.

20
Ibid., 246.
9

familiar: unaccompanied, top-voice-dominated homophony in four parts, with
balanced phrases.
21

Sulzer’s model for Jewish music in Vienna became famous internationally, among Jews
and Christians alike. His choral-cantorial model quickly inspired others to follow suit.
The next major output of new choral music for the synagogue came from Samuel
Naumbourg (1817-1880) in Paris. Naumbourg gained employment in a community that
had already benefitted from four-part choral music innovated by Israel Lovy (1773-
1832), who held the cantorial post in Paris from 1818 until his death.
22
Although Lovy
achieved recognition in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for his fine
baritone voice and his composition of choral music, his “reform endeavors melted away”
after his death, making “no impression on the chazzanim, as they left no trace upon the
course of modernization of the Synagogue Song in the beginning of the nineteenth
century.”
23

Although [Lovy] was endowed with all the gifts required for a reformer, this role
was accorded not to him but to Sulzer in Vienna, to Naumbourg in Paris, and to
Lewandowski in Berlin. The explanation may be found in the fact that Lovy was
an extremist, as we see from his compositions, whose effort was to break with the
past and tradition and to introduce entirely new tunes—an effort in line with the
general attempt to do away with the old Jewish life and create an entirely new
Jews and Judaism.
24

21
Joshua Jacobson, "Franz Schubert and the Vienna Synagogue," The Choral
Journal 38, no. 1 (1997): 13.

22
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 228.
23
Ibid., 229.
24
Ibid.
10

Lovy’s music largely disappeared from the Paris synagogue after his death in 1832, but
his legacy of choral music did open the door for German-born Naumbourg to take the
Parisian Jewish community by storm with his quick publication of comprehensive
collections of choral-cantorial repertoire for the synagogue. Naumbourg included in the
collection not only his own compositions, but works by his predecessor, Lovy, and by
famed opera composer Fromental Halévy (1799-1862), among others.
Naumbourg’s music shows a marked connection to that of his famous Jewish
colleagues in Parisian Grand Opera: Halévy and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864).
Although his synagogue compositions have been criticized for lacking “Jewish character”
and being melodically “trivial” and “predominantly homophonic,” Naumbourg’s strength
appears in his dramatic writing for the liturgy in operatic style.
25
In addition to gleaning
inspiration from his operatic contemporaries, there is evidence that Naumbourg’s music
influenced and impressed his famous friends, as well. One of Naumbourg’s early
synagogue compositions, for example, bears striking—in part, nearly identical—
resemblance to a dramatic hymn from Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète (1849). Naumbourg,
naturally, pointed out that his own composition pre-dated Meyerbeer’s by five years.
Sulzer and Naumbourg ignited the synagogue choral music spark, but it was
Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894) who composed choral repertoire that permeated Jewish
liturgical life in Europe—and later, in the U.S.—throughout the late-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Lewandowski came of age in Berlin, where he was the first Jewish

25
Holde, Jews in Music, 20.
11

student ever to gain admittance to the Berlin Academy of Arts.
26
Unlike Sulzer, who
won fame in his youth as a vocalist before gaining recognition as a composer,
Lewandowski was not much of a singer beyond boyhood, and instead endured a long,
slow rise to fame in the Berlin Jewish community based upon his skill as a synagogue
choral director and composer.
Lewandowski’s music draws heavily from Mendelssohn’s style; it is “richly
euphonious,” with “voices in imitation and short fugati appear[ing] frequently. By far the
majority of the choral sections is in major keys.”
27
Lewandowski’s talent was as a
melodist; this strength, as well as his success at creating sing-able, well-crafted
compositions for cantor and chorus, helped set him apart from Sulzer and Naumbourg
and perhaps allowed his considerable collection of choral-cantorial music to stand the test
of time better than the other two great nineteenth-century synagogue composers.
Regardless of the disparate levels of success that their works found in the
twentieth century, all three of these pillars of nineteneth-century synagogue choral
composition—Sulzer in Vienna, Naumbourg in Paris, and Lewandowski in Berlin—
deserve to be reexamined, their music studied and performed, in the twenty-first century.
The following three chapters devote much-needed attention to the careers and works of
these three pioneers of synagogue choral composition in the nineteenth century.

26
Aron Marko Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews (New York: Barnes, 1960),
106.

27
Holde, Jews in Music, 22.
12

CHAPTER ONE
“So Wild and Strange a Harmony:”
Synagogue Choral Music of Salomon Sulzer

Many of Western music’s most influential composers are inextricably linked with
Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the first Viennese School; and Schoenberg,
Berg, and Webern in the second. Jewish music scholar Peter Gradenwitz argued that a
new category of “Viennese school” should be added: the school of Jewish music by
Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890).
1

Sulzer’s birth in Hohenems, Austria, coincided with a flurry of growth in Jewish
business and culture in Austria, especially Vienna. Eighteenth-century Austria had been
particularly inhospitable to its Jewish residents, as Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa

1
Peter Gradenwitz, “Jews in Austrian Music,” in The Jews of Austria, ed. Josef
Fraenkel (London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co. Ltd., 1967), 17, n7.

13

(reigned 1740-1780) imposed severe financial and cultural restrictions against all Jews.
2

Under the Empress’s orders, Austrian Jews were largely constrained to ghettos; they
could not own land or build a synagogue, were subject to heavy taxation, and were
required to wear yellow arm badges.
3
These restrictions largely prevented Jews from
partaking in or contributing to Austrian musical culture of the Enlightenment period.
An Edict of Toleration, implemented in 1781 by Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II
(reigned 1780-90), eradicated many restrictive policies, making the new Holy Roman
Emperor “one of the first European monarchs to relax anti-Jewish legislation.”
4
What
would become known as “Jewish emancipation” soon spread across Europe as nations
began to abolish discriminatory laws, tear down ghetto walls, and allow Jews to
participate in society.
5
“For the first time since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
and the termination of Jewish autonomy in Israel, Jews could claim individual citizenship
in a state.”
6
Inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Vienna commenced the building of
infrastructure, including a hospital, a Hebrew printing press, and plans for a new

2
Elaine Brody, “Schubert and Sulzer Revisited,” in Schubert Studies, ed. Eva
Badura-Skoda and Peter Branscombe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
49. The Empress Maria Theresa referenced here should not be confused with Maria
Theresa of Naples and Sicily (1772-1807), a patroness of Haydn, who later became the
last Holy Roman Empress and the first Empress of Austria.

3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Introduction: Sulzer, Idelsohn, and the Revival of
Jewish Music,” in Music in Jewish Thought: Selected Writings, 1890-1920, ed. Jonathan
L. Friedman (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 7.

6
Marsha Bryan Edelman, Discovering Jewish Music (Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society, 2003), 54.
14

synagogue building, which would be called the Seitenstettengasse. This synagogue—
with its renowned cantor-composer Salomon Sulzer—would become the European leader
in Jewish liturgical music.
To complement the marked improvement in quality of life in Vienna at the turn of
the nineteenth century, Jewish reformers sought to join the Jewish Enlightenment
movement that was gaining followers in Western Europe. Reformers opined that worship
services should evolve to reflect Jews’ newfound immersion in secular society. German-
Jewish reformers began integrating vernacular prayers, use of the organ, and
congregational singing into regular services.
7
Israel Jacobson (1768-1828) established
the first Reform temple in Seesen, Germany, where he instituted an extreme reform of
music for worship:
[Jacobson] provided the temple with a bell for calling the worshipers to prayer; he
introduced German chorale tunes set to Hebrew and German texts; he abolished
the chanting of Torah cantillation as well as synagogue prayer modes (nusach ha-
tefillah), and with this last change went the abolition of the hazzan [cantor].
8

In Vienna, the Jewish community recruited Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer (1793-
1865) to devise for its synagogue “an order of divine service in keeping with the era of
enlightenment,” which later became known as the “Mannheimer Rite” or “Vienna Rite.”
9

However, the Seitenstettengasse members required Mannheimer, a radical reformer from

7
Abraham W. Binder, “A Rebirth of Biblical Chant,” in Studies in Jewish Music:
Collected Writings of A.W. Binder, ed. Irene Heskes (New York: Bloch Pub. Co, 1971),
277.
8
Ibid.
9
Eric Mandell, “Salomon Sulzer, 1804-1890,” in The Jews of Austria, ed. Josef
Fraenkel (London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co. Ltd., 1967), 222-224.

15

Copenhagen, to modify his outlook somewhat to suit their views, which were far more
conservative than Jacobson’s.
10
In 1826, Mannheimer demonstrated his break from the
severity of Jacobson’s musical model by inviting a young cantor from Hohenems named
Salomon Sulzer to work with him in reforming the Seitenstettengasse service. Whereas
Jacobson had eliminated traditional chant and the cantor’s role entirely from Jewish
worship, Mannheimer, the son of a cantor, chose to appoint the best Jewish baritone
voice in Austria to reform synagogue music at the Seitenstettengasse.
Sulzer strongly disagreed with reformists’ “opinion that the regeneration of the
service can be achieved only by a complete break with the past, by abolishing all
traditional and inherited historically-evolved liturgy.”
11
He believed that Jacobson’s
limitations of “the entire service to a German hymn before and after the sermon”
amounted to giving “a certificate of divorce to tradition.”
12
Rather, Sulzer advocated that
“Jewish liturgy must satisfy the musical demands while remaining Jewish; and it should
not be necessary to sacrifice the Jewish characteristics to artistic forms.”
13
His
convictions contrasted sharply with that of other Jewish youth in Europe, who found

10
Brody, “Schubert and Sulzer Revisited,” in Schubert Studies, 51-52.
11
Salomon Sulzer, Denkschrift (Vienna, 1876), quoted in Gradenwitz, , “Jews in
Austrian Music,” The Jews of Austria, 19.

12
Sulzer, Denkschrift (Vienna, 1876), quoted in Friedmann, preface to Music in
Jewish Thought, 12.

13
Ibid., 3.

16

“Christian-style worship an attractive alternative to ‘out-moded’ Jewish rituals.”
14
Sulzer
believed that traditional Jewish chant was not only worth saving, but also deserving of
integration into a new musical format with choral harmony, given his strong background
in three areas of study: Jewish ritual, vocal performance, and music composition.
Sulzer’s accomplishment his goal in an extremely influential manner resulted from his
strong religious and musical training, his exquisite baritone voice, his commitment to
building, maintaining, and providing music for an excellent choir, and his charismatic
personality.
According to legend, Sulzer, a mischievous child, once wandered off and nearly
drowned in a flooded creek in his native Hohenems.
15
His mother, thankful that he was
spared, dedicated her son to a life of rabbinic service.
16
The boy, however, already
showed interest in music and preferred to study to be a cantor rather than a rabbi. By the
time of his Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen, Sulzer regularly lead prayer services at his home
synagogue and formally applied for the position of cantor.
17
The government regulated
the appointment of religious officials; in this case, the Emperor Franz Josef “personally
endorsed the 13-year-old Sulzer’s appointment as cantor of Hohenems community on the

14
Friedmann, introduction to Music in Jewish Thought, 11.

15
Mandell, “Sulzer,” in The Jews of Austria, 222.
16
Benjamin F. Peixotto, “Solomon Sulzer: Reminiscences of Vienna (1890),” in
Music in Jewish Thought, 136.

17
Mandell, “Sulzer,” in The Jews of Austria, 222.
17

express condition that he first devoted himself to further cantorial studies.”
18
For three
years, Sulzer “embodied the post-Emancipation preference for attaining both Judaic and
worldly knowledge”
19
by studying at the Yeshiva in Endigen, Switzerland, the musical
center of Karlsruhe, Germany, and then as an apprentice to cantors in Switzerland,
France, and Germany.
20
Upon his return to Hohenems, Sulzer developed a reputation as
an exceptional singer, a founder of a choir at his synagogue, and as an athlete and thrill-
seeker:
Anecdotes are told of Sulzer at this time which picture him as a combination of
physical vivacity and serious piety. He was passionately fond of riding, and
would often be met galloping madly into town to be in time for afternoon prayer.
He is said once to have plunged wildly down a precipitous mountain side in order
to reach the synagogue in time.
21

Sulzer became cantor at the Seitenstettengasse in 1826, at the age of twenty-two.
He confronted the chaotic state of synagogue music directly, seeking to overhaul what he
saw as a buildup of “foreign accretions and popular styles” in synagogue chant while
integrating Western harmonizations into newly-composed choral responses.
22
Sulzer
soon embarked upon an unprecedented, four-fold task: (1) to identify, isolate, purify, and
notate traditional Jewish chants; (2) to harmonize these chants and compose choral
responses to them; (3) to compose new choral-cantorial works for the liturgy; and (4) to

18
Ibid. at 222-23.
19
Friedmann, introduction to Music in Jewish Thought, 10.
20
Brody, “Schubert and Sulzer Revisited,” in Schubert Studies, 49.
21
Peixotto, “Sulzer,” in Music in Jewish Thought, 136.
22
Friedmann, introduction to Music in Jewish Thought, 3.
18

commission new choral-cantorial works from well-known Viennese composers. The
results of this monumental undertaking appear in two volumes of music for the
synagogue, entitled Schir Zion [Song of Zion] (Figure 1), published in 1839 and 1865,
respectively.
23

Figure 1: Cover page of Sulzer’s Schir Zion (reprinted in 1905; edited by Joseph Sulzer)

23
Salomon Sulzer and Joseph Sulzer, Schir Zion: Gesänge für den israelitischen
Gottesdienst (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann), 1922. All subsequent musical
examples come from this edition.
19

Many of Sulzer’s choral works in Schir Zion are newly-composed settings of
liturgical prayers, quite often set in triple meter. In many cases, such as in Adôn ôlom
[Eternal Master] (Example 1.1 and Table 1.1), a single prayer setting may include
homophonic sections, monophonic cantorial interludes, call-and-response segments
between cantor and chorus, and polyphonic components.
24

The form of Adôn ôlom is ABCA’: it begins with triple-meter, G-major
homophony in a mostly syllabic setting, which fits the contour of the regularly metered
text in Iambic tetrameter. Well-balanced ATB voices support the soprano section’s
melody. Dynamic indications are abundant, with Sulzer supplying every nuance and
accent. The brief 6/8 section beginning at measure 23 prepares the B section, which
begins at measure 26 with call and response between the cantor and choir on “w’hu
hojoh.” The cantor then proceeds, at measure 41, to sing a solo in the C section (with
optional organ accompaniment) on the text, “w’hu echod w’en scheni.” Sulzer then
changes the texture again in a section resembling a miniature Development at measure
47, presenting cantor solo with a small men’s “soli” ensemble, winding briefly through
tonicizations of B major and A major before working back to a variation on the A
section, in G major, at measure 53. This variant returns the opening melody to a “soli”

24
The transliterated Hebrew published in Schir Zion (as well as in music by
Naumbourg and Lewandowski) follows the Ashkenazic pronunciation favored among
Eastern European and Yiddish-speaking Jews through 1948. (Contemporary Israeli and
American Jews use the Sephardic pronunciation, originating with Jews from Spain.) For
example, Sulzer transcribes the Hebrew Adonai (God) as adônoj. Throughout this
document, the author preserves each composer’s idiosyncratic transliteration as it appears
in the score.

20

soprano section, but also provides a countermelody to the cantor, as well as
accompanying material to the small choir. At pickup to measure 61, the opening texture
resumes to close the piece with SATB choir.

Table 1.1: Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Sulzer, Adôn ôlom
Hebrew Transliteration (Germanic) English Translation (by de Sola Mendes/Duffy)
Adôn ôlom ascher moloch
Beterem col jezir nivro
Le’es na’asoh b’chefzô kôl
Asaj melech sch’mô nikro.
W’achare kich’lôs haccol
L’vadô jimlôch nôro
W’hu hojoh w’hu hôweh
W’hu jihejeh besiforoh

W’hu echod w’en scheni
L’hamschil lô l’hachbiroh
B’li reschis b’li sachlis
w’lô ho’ôs w’hamisroh.

W’hu eli w’chaj gô’ali
W’zur chevli b’es zoroh
W’hu nisi umonôs li
M’nos côsi b’jôm ekro

B’jodô afkid ruchi
b’es ischan w’o’iroh
W’im ruchi g’wijosi
adônoj li w’lô iro.
The God of all, who reigned supreme
Ere first Creation’s form was framed;
When all was finished by God’s will
God’s Name Almighty was proclaimed.

When this our world shall be no more,
In majesty God still shall reign,
Who was, who is, who will for aye
In endless glory still remain.

Alone is God, beyond compare,
Without division or ally;
Without initial date or end,
Omnipotent God rules on high.

God is my God and Savior too,
To whom I turn in sorrow’s hour—
My banner proud, my refuge sure—
Who hears and answers with God’s power.

Then in God’s hand myself I lay,
And trusting, sleep; and wake with cheer;
My soul and body are God’s care;
My God doth guard, I have no fear!

21

Example 1.1: Sulzer, Adôn ôlom, No. 52 (mm 1-25) from Schir Zion II, pp. 73-75

22

Example 1.1 (continued): Sulzer, Adôn ôlom, mm 26-51

23

Example 1.1 (conclusion): Sulzer, Adôn ôlom, mm 52-77

24

Much of the time, Sulzer’s choral works are dramatic, well-crafted settings that
largely employ Western tonal harmony.
25
For example, in Sulzer’s C major setting of
Psalm 21 for mixed choir, baritone, and organ (Example 1.2), majestic choral entrances
proclaim that “the king shall rejoice in the strength of the Lord.” The outer voices enter
imitatively, beginning at the pickup to measure nine, each proclaiming the word Adônoj
[God] twice, using pitches outlining the C major triad, while the inner voices adorn the
regal proclamation of the soprano and bass. The pair of upper voices then declaim the
word b’os’cho [strength] in a high tessitura, as if to emphasize that the king’s strength
comes from above. At measure fourteen, on the word melech [king], the phrase cadences
in the relative minor, harmonically underlining the relationship between God (C major)
and king (A minor).

25
Only one composer had previously sought to create a comprehensive collection
of choral settings of the Jewish liturgy: Salamone Rossi (ca. 1570-1630), whose
publication of a cappella¸ polyphonic Jewish choral music, Ha-shirim asher li-Shlomo
(The Songs of Solomon), remained largely hidden in obscurity during Sulzer’s lifetime.

25

Example 1.2: Sulzer, Psalm 21, Adônoj b’os’cho, No. 494 (Schir Zion II), p.415 (Choral
parts (mm. 8-14))

Schir Zion contains a vast array of cantorial chants and choral responses for all
types of services in the liturgical year; some of these are unaccompanied, some include
optional organ accompaniment, and others feature significant organ solo passages.
26
The
best of these integrate traditional chant melodies in their proper prayer modes (nusach
ha-tefillah) with complementary choral writing featuring Western harmony molded to
follow the modal contour of the nusach. For example, Sulzer’s dramatic setting of

26
Tina Frühauf, The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 38. Sulzer originally opposed the use of the organ, but
his perspective evolved to the point where he argued that “an instrumental
accompaniment for the singing in the worship service should be introduced everywhere,
in order to ease the active participation of members of the congregation in the same. . . .
To provide the requisite accompaniment to this end, the organ deserves to be
recommended, and no religious reservations conflict with its use on the Sabbath and holy
days.” Cf. Frühauf, The Organ, 230, n4.

26

B’rôsch haschonoh yikkosewun [On Rosh Hashanah it is Written] (Example 1.3), a prayer
for the High Holy Days, seamlessly alternates between Western tonic-dominant harmony
and the Freygish mode (Phrygian mode with raised third), which is linked with the prayer
Ahavah Rabbah [With Abounding Love].
27
The text graphically depicts the awe-
inspiring significance of the period between Rosh Hashanah [the New Year] and Yom
Kippur [Day of Atonement], and offers an opportunity to reassess the precious nature of
life, the severity of God’s judgment, and the promise of renewal:
On Rosh Hashanah it is written,
on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be;
who shall live and who shall die;
who shall see ripe age and who shall not;
who shall perish by fire and who by water;
who by sword and who by beast;
who by hunger and who by thirst;
who by earthquake and who by plague;
who by strangling and who by stoning;
who shall be secure and who shall be driven;
who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled;
who shall be poor and who shall be rich;
who shall be humbled and who exalted.
But Repentance, Prayer and Charity
temper judgment’s severe decree.
28

Sulzer’s setting (Example 1.3) of the B’rôsch haschonoh prayer begins with unison bass
voices, pianissimo and slowly climbing from the depths of B-flat minor to pause on the
dominant. The cantor’s part—which Sulzer wrote for his own baritone voice—picks up
where the basses left off, on F3, and presents material based on the nusach motif from the

27
Sulzer, “No. 354, B’rôsch haschonoh,” in Schir Zion, 266-67.
28
Chaim Stern, Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of
Awe = Shaʻare Teshuvah (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1996),
108-09.
27

Kol Nidre prayer (sung on the Eve of Yom Kippur) before leaping up an octave to F4.
To accommodate the Kol Nidre nusach, Sulzer found it necessary to raise the sixth scale
degree in measure four (from G-flat to G-natural), which either provides a Dorian
sensation in B-flat minor or hints at a tonicization of F minor. The intervallic ascension
of a twelfth from the basses’ opening pitch on Rôsh haschonoh, when God’s decree is
written, to the cantor’s high F on Jôm Kippur, when it is sealed, underscores the expanse
and importance of the period between the two holy days. Sulzer used exactly ten
different pitches in the first five measures of B’rôsch haschonoh, perhaps representing
the ten days of prayer and reflection between the New Year and the Day of Atonement.
On the word jôm [day], the cantor soars to a new pitch—the high F—emphasizing that
this is the day of judgment and forgiveness.
The first thirteen bars of B’rôsch haschonoh use pitches in B-flat minor almost
exclusively. At measure fourteen, however, the cantor, alone and pianissimo, utters the
question, mi jichjeh [Who shall live?]. For this most dramatic moment, an augmented
second signals a departure from Western tonal harmony: the cantor’s line rises from B-
flat to a raised D-natural, then descends through an exotic C-flat on its way back to B-
flat, only to flutter up to a D-flat grace note, passing again through C-flat toward B-flat.
The tenor and bass voices in measure fifteen echo the text, parlando and pianissimo, on
an open fifth. For the question, mi jomus [Who shall die?], both cantor and choir swell
from B-flat minor to a C dominant-seventh chord on the word mi [who]. Then the cantor
finishes the question alone, in measure eighteen, returning to B-flat, suggesting that death
returns a person to his place of origin.
28

Example 1.3: Sulzer, B’rôsch haschonoh, No. 354 (Schir Zion I), pp. 266-67 (mm.1-18)

29

Sulzer won support for his new musical ideas for the Jewish service in no small
part due to his beloved personality and golden voice. His singing melted the hearts of
worshippers at the Seitenstettengasse. According to a biographical sketch about Sulzer
by New York rabbi Adolph Guttman (1854-1927), one of Sulzer’s co-workers, a Dr.
Adolph Jellinek, marveled at Sulzer’s vocal abilities:
That voice, who can describe it? Its strengths and its softness, its richness and its
tenderness, its fervor and its pathos. That voice charmed, overpowered and
inspired, opened the gates of heaven and penetrated the depths of the soul. That
was the expression of an honest, tender heart. For he was, in the fullest sense of
the word, a “messenger of the congregation.”
29

Sulzer’s vocal prowess and accomplishments in both choral sound and
composition drew praise from various sources. One, a “prolific writer of Romantic
travelogues” named Frances Trollope, marveled at the music she heard at the
Seitenstettengasse.
30

There is, in truth, so wild and strange a harmony in the songs of the children of
Israel as performed in the synagogue in this city, that it would be difficult to
render full justice to the splendid excellence of the performance, without falling
into the language of enthusiasm. A voice, of which that of Braham in his best
days was not superior, performs the solo parts of these extraordinary cantiques;
while about a dozen voices 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.
31

29
Adolph Guttman, “The Life of Salomon Sulzer (1903),” in Music in Jewish
Thought, 143.

30
A. L. Ringer, "Salomon Sulzer, Joseph Mainzer and the Romantic a Cappella
Movement," Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 11, no. 1/4
(1969): 355-56.

31
Frances Trollope, Vienna and the Austrians With Some Account of a Journey
Through Swabia, Bavaria, the Tyrol, and the Salzbourg (London: R. Bentley, 1838, Vol.
30

Seitenstettengasse attracted and delighted diverse throngs of synagogue-goers.
Many of them were non-Jewish international tourists seeking musical uplifting, like
Frances Trollope. Sulzer’s music program attracted significant attention outside of
Vienna’s Jewish community for two reasons. First, Sulzer regularly reached out and
interacted with non-Jewish musicians and statesmen. For example, upon moving to
Vienna, Sulzer studied with Ignaz von Seyfried (1776-1841), who had studied with
Haydn and socialized with Mozart and Beethoven. Sulzer also studied composition with
Seyfried’s student, Josef Fischhof (1804-1857). He commissioned liturgical
contributions from both of these masters, as well as Joseph Dreschler (1782-1852), who
turned out to be “Sulzer’s most industrious Christian collaborator, eventually contributing
no less than fourteen Hebrew numbers to the first part of the collection Schir Zion.
32

Most famously, Sulzer associated and collaborated with Franz Schubert (1797-
1828). Scholars suggest that Sulzer may have met Schubert through Seyfried, who had
composed operas based upon Old Testament subjects.
33
The two forged a friendship;
Schubert “considered Sulzer’s lyrical yet vigorous tenor voice ideal for the rendition of
his songs.”
34
According to one account, Schubert once requested that Sulzer sing Der

I), 367, quoted in Ringer, “Sulzer,” 356. Trollope’s comparison of Sulzer to “Braham”
references Jewish tenor John Braham (ca. 1774-1856), a star on the London opera stage.

32
Ringer, "Sulzer," 357, n9.
33
Brody, “Schubert and Sulzer Revisited,” Schubert Studies, 53.
34
Ringer, "Sulzer,” 357.
31

Wanderer three times in a row.
35
The camaraderie between the two musicians
culminated in Sulzer’s commission of Schubert to compose a new choral setting of Psalm
92 in Hebrew (Tôw l’hôdôs) [It is Good to Give Thanks]. Sulzer’s extensive study and
collaboration with prominent non-Jewish musicians such as Schubert certainly helped
him to build a strong musical reputation and attract interest to his synagogue beyond the
Viennese Jewish community.
A second reason for significant non-Jewish interest in Sulzer’s music at the
Seitenstettengasse relates to the diminished state of Viennese music in general following
the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert.
36
The first Emperor of the new Austrian Empire,
Francis I (reigned 1804-1835), along with his chief minister, Metternich (who also served
as chancellor of Austria from 1821 to 1848), imposed restrictive policies of censorship
and regimentation of the arts. Viennese opera, church music, and orchestra suffered and
so disappointed both local and non-local music lovers that the Seitenstettengasse earned a
reputation for being one of the few venues where one could experience quality—even
transcendent—music in the city. Frances Trollope complained bitterly about the state of
the Vienna opera house in 1836, writing: “They have not a single voice in any degree
capable of sustaining an opera in such a style as one seems to have a right to expect in
Vienna.”
37
Moreover, after attending high Mass at St. Stephen’s, she wrote, “the voices

35
Ibid., citing Aron Friedmann, Der synagogale Gesang: eine Studie. Zum 100.
Geburtstage Salomon Sulzer's und 10. Todestage Louis Lewandowski's (1904) nebst
deren Biographien (Berlin: C. Boas Nachf, 1904), 125.

36
Ringer, "Sulzer," 355-56.
37
Ibid., 355.
32

of the Jews of Vienna have made those of the Christians appear feeble by comparison.”
38

Joseph Mainzer, a German-born priest who later popularized choral singing in England,
first visited the Seitenstettengasse in 1827 (“at a time when it had not yet become
fashionable to do so”) and later wrote extensively about what he saw and heard.
39
For
example, Mainzer noted: “The Synagogue was the only place where a stranger could
find, artistically speaking, a source of enjoyment that was as solid as it was dignified.”
40

The praise lavished upon Sulzer and his choir was extraordinary, especially
considering that virtually none of the non-Jewish devotees had had previous experience
with Jewish music or worship, and many in fact were also anti-Semitic. Trollope, for
example, “heartily disapproved of Judaism and frankly expressed her contempt for Jews
in general, and Viennese Jewish bankers in particular.”
41
Mainzer, however, felt
somehow relieved of his anti-Semitism through his experiences at Seitenstettengasse:
In seven months I did not miss a single service. One has to attend no more than
once, however, in order to find oneself instantly freed, as if by some sudden
reaction, of all the odious prejudices against the Jews instilled in us with baptism
in early childhood.
42

Perhaps the most famous composer to write of his own transcendental experience
with Sulzer’s voice and music was Franz Liszt:

38
Ringer, "Sulzer," 356.
39
Ibid., 359.
40
Ibid., 359 (quoting Joseph Mainzer, “La Chapelle-Sixtine à Rome,” Gazette
Musicale de Paris I (1834): 39.

41
Ibid., 356.
42
Ibid., 360.
33

[I]n order to hear [Sulzer] we went to the Synagogue where he was in charge of
the music and performed the principal solo part as well. Only rarely has emotion
taken such a deep hold of us, have we been so irresistibly stirred, surrendered our
entire being without reservation to nothing but prayer and devotion, as on that
night when by the light of a thousand candles the muffled, hollow voices of a
strange chorus arose around us like stars on a vast firmament.
43

In keeping with his manifestation of goodwill toward Jews and Christians alike,
Sulzer adapted and composed several works that seem designed, at least in part, for inter-
faith relations and outreach. For example, Sulzer based a four-part choral setting of
Psalm 21, verse 5, on Volkshymne, a song Haydn had composed for the birthday of Holy
Roman Emperor Franz II in 1797 (Example 1.4).

Example 1.4: Sulzer, Volkshynme: Psalm 21, v.5, No. 495, p. 419 (quoting a song by
Joseph Haydn) (mm. 1-4)

43
Ringer, "Sulzer," 365, quoting Franz Liszt, Die Zegeuner und ihre Musik in
Ungarn (Pesth: G. Heckenast, 1861), 52-53.

34

Sulzer appropriated this secular tune by replacing the original text (which praises
the Emperor), with a Hebrew transliteration of Psalm 21, verse 5 (which extols the
military victories that God has afforded the king). Sulzer’s contrafactum of Haydn’s
song joins a multitude of others, the most famous of which is Deutschland über alles,
which has served as the German national anthem since 1922.
Sulzer also set German texts and translations to his own newly-composed choral
works. For instance, Sulzer composed a new setting of Psalm 133 and included both
Hebrew and German singing texts (Example 1.5). The particular text of Psalm 133 (How
Good and Pleasant it is When Brothers Live Together in Unity!) seems to have presented
a perfect opportunity for Sulzer to reach out both to his Jewish and Christian brothers in
composing this tuneful and well-crafted work for mixed choir, baritone soloist, and
organ. Incidentally, the score calls for “Bariton Solo” rather than Sulzer’s typical
indication of “Cantor,” perhaps suggesting that the composer hoped for performances of
the work outside of the Seitenstettengasse and the Jewish community.

35

Example 1.5: Sulzer, Hineh Ma Tôv: Psalm 133, No. 483 (Schir Zion II), pp. 382-383
(mm12-18)

Twentieth-century Jewish musicians such as Abraham Wolf Binder (1895-1966),
a synagogue composer and music director, criticized Sulzer’s ambivalence between usage
of traditional, Eastern European nusach featuring augmented seconds and Western,
Protestant harmonizations: “Sulzer frequently followed an exquisite cantorial recitative
36

with a choral response in Western style, which was incongruous. He did not achieve the
ability to develop a Jewish tune or mode.”
44
Binder also criticized Sulzer’s mission to
cleanse traditional chant of its inauthentic accretions, claiming that the result was too
thorough: “In paring off unnecessary musical accumulations on the cantorial chant,
which Sulzer set as one of his most important tasks, he sometimes cut down to the bone
and even into the marrow.”
45
Finally, Binder lamented that Sulzer fell “victim” to the
waltz craze that commandeered Vienna during the reign of Johann Strauss, too often
composing prayers in triple meter. In a bizarre and unfortunate twist of history, the
melodies of Sulzer still used regularly in contemporary synagogues are his triple-meter
settings of prayers such as Sch’ma Jisroel [Hear, O Israel] (ostensibly derived from
Sulzer’s melodies) and Ki mizijôn [For From Out of Zion (Will Come the Torah)].
46

For the most part, the great choral-cantorial works contained in the two volumes
of Schir Zion remain largely forgotten in Jewish synagogues, and unavailable and almost
completely unknown to the non-Jewish music community. One possible explanation is
that Binder’s criticisms of Sulzer’s works were largely shared by other twentieth-century
cantors and synagogue musicians, or eclipsed by the music of Louis Lewandowski (1821-
1894) and other synagogue composers who followed in Sulzer’s footsteps.

44
Binder, “Salomon Sulzer’s Legacy to the Cantorate,” in Studies in Jewish
Music, 286.

45
Binder, “Sulzer’s Legacy,” in Studies in Jewish Music, 285.
46
Cf. Friedmann, introduction to Music in Jewish Thought, 14-15.
37

Through a different lens, however, Sulzer’s vacillation between disparate styles
was fitting for a Jew who straddled different worlds in several capacities. Sulzer’s
lifetime began in the vestiges of severe Jewish persecution and ended during a time of
unprecedented Jewish freedom. His music is of and for the people of Vienna, a city that
straddles Eastern and Western Europe. His birth came toward the end of the first
Viennese school, while his death heralded the beginning of the second. When Viennese
secular and sacred music fell into disrepair in the decades following Beethoven’s death, it
was Sulzer, a Jewish composer, who brought a musical flowering—and interfaith
following—to the culturally-beleaguered city. His compositions retain traditional chant
within the context of a new, harmonically vibrant choral structure. His choral-cantorial
hybrid form served as the model for Jewish composers for the next hundred years.
Similar to the composers of the traditional Viennese schools of Western art music,
Sulzer’s works and philosophy of music influenced musicians and listeners far beyond
Vienna. Just as his choral music gained recognition by Jewish and non-Jewish admirers
alike during his lifetime, Sulzer’s music now deserves to be rediscovered and performed
by contemporary choirs of all backgrounds.

38

CHAPTER TWO
Synagogue Music Meets the Parisian Opera:
Choral Repertoire of Samuel Naumbourg and Jewish Opera Composers in France

I bless Emancipation, when I see how the excess of oppression drove Israel away
from human intercourse . . . . I bless Emancipation, when I notice that no spiritual
principle, even such as born of superstitious self-deception, stands in its way, but
only passions degrading to humanity . . . . I bless it, if Israel does not regard
Emancipation as the great goal of its task, but only as a new condition of its
mission, and as a new trial, much severer than the trial of oppression; but I should
grieve, if Israel understood itself so little . . . that it would welcome Emancipation
as the end of the galut [Jewish diaspora] and the highest goal of its historical
mission. . . .
1

Felix Mendelssohn famously reinvigorated interest in the neglected works of J.S.
Bach by conducting the Saint Matthew Passion in 1829. Cantor and synagogue
composer Samuel Naumbourg (1815-1880) likewise instigated newfound interest in a
particular collection of choral repertoire from an earlier epoch: the synagogue works of
early Baroque composer Salamone Rossi (c.1570-1630). Rossi’s a cappella choral music

1
Eric Werner, A Voice Still Heard . . . The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 193 (quoting R. Samson
Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), in Nahum N. Glatzer, The Dynamics of Emancipation
(Boston, 1965), 35-39).
39

for the synagogue—polyphonic settings of the Jewish liturgy and psalms in three to eight
parts—was published originally in 1623 in part books, and scattered throughout Europe
during the ensuing two-and-a-half centuries. Naumbourg, who had already published
multiple volumes of his own synagogue compositions and transcriptions during his
lengthy career in Paris, published the first full-score edition of most of Rossi’s Ha-shirim
Asher Li-shelomo [The Songs of Solomon] in 1877—a collection that had been deemed
lost by many of Naumbourg’s contemporaries.
2
This new edition, published under both
its Hebrew title and the French (Cantiques de Salomon Rossi) was to be the final
publication of its editor’s life (Figure 2).
Naumbourg’s interest in Jewish music history surfaced prior to the publication of
the new Rossi edition. Born in Germany to a family of cantors, Naumbourg moved to
France as a young man and served as cantor at the Ashkenazi Temple on rue Notre Dame
de Nazareth in Paris beginning 1845.
3
In 1874, Naumbourg published Recueil de Chants
Religieux et Populaires des Israélites, a compendium of traditional synagogue tunes that
he had collected and edited throughout his career.
4
The introduction to this collection,
“Etude historique sur la musique des Hebreux,” discusses the development of Jewish and

2
Salamone Rossi, Ha-shirim Asher Li-Shelomoh = Cantiques de Salomon Rossi
Hebréo: Psaumes, Chants, et Hymnes à 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, et 8 Voix, ed. Samuel Naumbourg
and Vincent d’Indy (Paris: S. Naumbourg, 1877).
3
John H. Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians in Paris: 1820-1865,”
Musica Judaica 12, no. 1 (1991-1992): 32-33.
4
Samuel Naumbourg, Recueil de Chants Religieux et Populaires des Israélites
(Paris, 1874). This collection is sometimes referenced by its Hebrew title, Agudath
Schirim, and the preceding historical study as its Introduction.
40

Christian chant, music theory, and composition from ancient to contemporary times, and
also considers questions of choral and cantorial performance practice in the synagogue.
5

Figure 2. Cover page of Naumbourg’s edition of Cantiques de Salomon Rossi

5
Naumbourg, “Samuel Naumbourg’s Introduction to his Agudath Schirim (Paris,
1874),” trans. Harvey Spitzer, Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy 11 (1988-1989): 17-
34.

41

In the appendix to Recueil de Chants, Naumbourg relates his discovery of Rossi’s
Jewish choral literature and recounts his struggle to amass a full set of the disparate
parts.
6
He indicates that “[f]or a long time we had known about the existence of a Jewish
composer named Salomon di Rossi of the famous Adumim family, who was born in
Mantua, Italy around 1570,” but had been unaware of Rossi’s Jewish musical output,
because most historians referenced only Rossi’s secular works.
7
Johann Christoph
Wolf’s Bibliotheca Hebraica (published in Hamburg in 1715) first alerted Naumbourg to
the existence of Rossi’s “psalms and hymns set to music.”
8
However, Naumbourg
complains that Wolf’s listing of Rossi’s title reveals the historian’s ignorance of the fact
that he held merely one small piece of Rossi’s collection: “[Wolf] calls it: Basso.
Haschirim ascher Lischlomoh without questioning the meaning of the word ‘Basso.’”
This sort of musical illiteracy motivated Naumbourg to track down the remaining parts
and “to correct the inaccuracies of previous authors regarding our composer.”
9

In the Appendix to Recueil de Chants Religieux et Populaires des Israélites,
Naumbourg describes the hazards involved in attempting to compile a complete
collection of Rossi’s part books:
It is beyond doubt that Rossi’s collection of Hebrew songs was printed in Venice
in 1623 by Pietro Lorenzo Bragadini, but it is also possible that only a limited

6
Naumbourg, “Samuel Naumbourg’s Appendix to his Agudath Schirim (Paris
1874),” trans. Harvey Spitzer, Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy 12 (1989-1990): 39-
40.
7
Ibid.
8
Naumbourg, “Appendix to Agudath Schirim,” 40.
9
Ibid.
42

number of copies were made and these have become nearly unobtainable. By
very special chance, however, book lovers have been reminded of the composer’s
name. Mr. Moise Schwab recently announced in the Révue Israélite that the Paris
National Library, with which he is associated, had just acquired Rossi’s collection
of Hebrew songs. For several years, I have had the tenor and bass parts of these
songs in my possession without ever having been able to locate the
complementary voices. My curiosity aroused, I hurried over to the National
Library to examine the works in question. I was greatly surprised, however, when
I saw that what was said to be Rossi’s collection was only the “Sesto,” that is to
say, the 6
th
part or voice.
10

Naumbourg attempted to locate the missing part books at the National Library, the Paris
Conservatory Library, and the Brussels Library, without success.
11
The closing
paragraph of Naumbourg’s appendix to Recueil de Chants Religieux et Populaires des
Israélites appeals to his colleagues to assist him in his quest to complete the collection:
I therefore call upon lovers of religious music, scholars of all countries and
particularly my Italian co-religionists who may possess the complete collection of
Rossi’s songs to send me or make copies of the parts I am missing. I will gladly
arrange the score. That this would be a work of very high interest both from the
point of view of musical art and the history of modern Jewish religious song is
most definitely assured.
12

Ultimately, Naumbourg managed to assemble most, but not all, of the part books; he
transliterated the Hebrew singing texts, transcribed the Renaissance-style parts into
contemporary notation, and published the collection in full score.
13
He notes the

10
Naumbourg, “Appendix to Agudath Schirim,”40.
11
Ibid., 43.
12
Ibid.
13
As a result of the missing part books, three of Rossi’s compositions “are
lacking in [Naumbourg’s] edition: Psalm 111 for eight voices; Psalm 121 for five voices;
and Leviticus 23:4 for three voices.” Eric Werner, “The Emancipation in Germany and
France” in A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 317n42.
43

tremendous accomplishment that Rossi had made, not only in publishing Jewish choral
music, but in successfully penetrating the highest echelons of secular Italian musical
culture during a time of extreme anti-Semitism:
It is really quite astonishing to think that in the early seventeenth century, at a
time when there was still so much prejudice, fanaticism and persecution against
the hapless remainder of the Jewish people, an obscure Jew could have forced
open the gates of the ghetto of Mantua and, with his talent, succeed in winning a
place and a name among the best musicians in Italy.
14

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Naumbourg’s publication of the Rossi compendium
is his editing collaborator: a young Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931), who would later
become “[t]he most famous—and most vocal—antisemitic [sic] composer in late
nineteenth-century France.”
15
In his book Richard Wagner et son influence sur l’art
musical français, for example, “d’Indy charged ‘the heavy hand of Judaism’ with having
set back French music a century.”
16

The dichotomous career of a French musician like d’Indy, who first worked side
by side with a synagogue cantor to edit a major collection of Jewish Renaissance music,
then turned perniciously against his Jewish colleagues, is an extreme example of a
somewhat typical trajectory of opinion regarding Jewish composers in France in the
nineteenth century. The Emancipation of French Jews in 1791 had opened the doors to
nineteenth-century Jewish composers who wished to write secular music:

14
Naumbourg, “Appendix to Agudath Schirim,” 42.
15
James H. Johnson, “Antisemitism and Music in Nineteenth-Century France,”
Musica Judaica 5, no. 1 (1982-1983): 82.
16
Ibid., quoting Vincent d’Indy, Richard Wagner et son influence sur l’art
musical français, trans. James H. Johnson (Paris: Librairie Delagrove, 1930): 11.
44

The revolution in 1789 suddenly overthrew not only a decadent monarchy and the
nobility but long-cherished tastes and prejudices as well that had been imbedded
in law for centuries. In 1790-1791 came the declaration of liberty, equality, and
brotherhood for all citizens, and for the first time since the fourteenth century
Jews were recognized in France. . . . After the fall of Louis XVIII in 1830, Jewish
integration into French society accelerated; and, although some anti-semitism
[sic] persisted, Jews participated fully in French life.
17

Two Jewish composers who achieved dizzying secular fame in French grand
opera by the 1830’s were Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) and Jacques-François-
Fromenthal-Élie Halévy (1799-1862). Both men were active in the Parisian Jewish
community, but Halévy placed his religion squarely before the secular world in his opera
La Juive (1835), which features a Jewish protagonist and takes up issues of historic anti-
Semitism:
Halévy’s most famous work, of course, is La Juive, a five-act grand opera, whose
story, written by Eugene Scribe, suited Halévy’s aims perfectly. In an era of
religious tolerance and acceptance of Jews, he felt that it was time for non-Jews to
be confronted with the horrors that Jews previously had faced for centuries in
France. Since it was thought perhaps too sensitive an issue for some, the setting
of the story was moved to Constance, Switzerland, but the brutal insensitivities of
Eleazar’s tormentors were nonetheless displayed overtly and decisively.
Reinforced by Scribe’s collaboration, the opera is the statement of a Jew to the
French as well as to the world that Jewish sensitivities, emotions, history, and
liturgy can legitimately form the material for serious art—no less than Christian
concerns.
18

The subjects of Meyerbeer’s French operas, on the other hand, are not Jewish;
rather, “two of his most important operas for Paris—Le Prophet [sic] (1849) and Les
Huguenots (1836)—are concerned with major Christian subjects.”
19
Meyerbeer’s operas

17
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians in Paris,” 32.
18
Ibid., 38.
19
Ibid., 41.
45

were wildly popular with the public; Robert le Diable (1831), for example, “remained
enormously successful in France for thirty years.”
20
Spectacle played a large part in
attracting crowds: “This was the age of splendid scenery and lavish productions, when
singers dazzled audiences with trills, runs, and sparkling cadenzas.”
21
In addition to the
commercial success of the operatic productions, Meyerbeer’s music itself earned
astounding critical acclaim:
Hector Berlioz (1803-69) praised Meyerbeer’s work as ‘magnificently beautiful,
perfectly nuanced, of incomparable precision and clarity,’ adding that Meyerbeer
could not hope for a better reception anywhere in Europe. Balzac was bowled
over by Meyerbeer’s operas, Goethe considered him one of the best composers of
the age, and Georges Bizet (1838-75) went as far as to call him the Michelangelo
of music.
22

This success led aspiring musicians and composers to seek out Meyerbeer as a
potential contact who could help them in the opera world: “Visiting singers considered it
essential to their careers to sing for Meyerbeer.”
23
One such musician was a young,
admiring Richard Wagner (1813-1883), who sought Meyerbeer’s advice and
recommendation beginning in the late 1830’s.
24
Over the course of the next decade,
Wagner ingratiated himself to Meyerbeer, hoping that the latter might use his influence to

20
Johnson, “Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France,” Musica Judaica, 80.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., quoting Hector Berlioz, Mémoires (Paris: Cahier-Flammarion, 1865),
128-29; and citing Laurence Davies, César Franck and His Circle (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1970), 23.

23
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 41.
24
Joan L. Thomson, “Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Jew and His Relationship with
Richard Wagner,” Musica Judaica 1, no. 1 (1975-76): 63.
46

help promote Wagner’s operatic composition.
25
The young Wagner’s entreaties were
quite successful; Meyerbeer took Wagner under his wing, introducing him and sending
his music to powerful players in opera throughout Europe, including publishers, opera
directors, singers, and the Intendant of the Royal Theater of Berlin.
26
Wagner responded
to Meyerbeer by emphasizing his great appreciation:
When you said that you always think of protecting me, that caused me deep
emotion. Oh! If you knew what immense service you render me; if you could
sense toward what infinite recognition you have pushed me by this simple and
flattering evidence of your interest in me. I can only tell you eternally: thank you!
thank you!
27

Wagner also rewarded Meyerbeer’s attention by extolling the great composer’s virtues in
print:
Meyerbeer has written the story of the world, the story of the heart and its
impressions. He has broken the barriers of national prejudice, destroyed the
borders which restricted language, written the exploits of music, music like that
which Handel, Gluck, and Mozart practised. They were Germans, and Meyerbeer
too is a German. . . . He has guarded his German heritage. . . .
28

The intensity of Wagner’s tribute to Meyerbeer as a German in the early 1840’s
equals the extremity of his subsequent vitriol against the same composer. In 1850,
Wagner stripped away the German identity he had previously bestowed upon Meyerbeer,
disavowing Meyerbeer’s—or any Jew’s—capability of identifying with any nation: “No

25
Thomson, “Meyerbeer and Wagner,” 64-65.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., quoting Richard Wagner in Albert Soubies and Charles Mahlerbe,
Wagner et Meyerbeer: Documents inédits a propos du centenaire de Meyerbeer, (Paris:
Bureaux de la Revue d’art dramatique, 1891), 5-6.

28
Ibid., quoting Wagner in Soubies and Mahlerbe, Wagner et Meyerbeer, 9.
47

matter to what European nationality he belongs, [the Jew] has something disagreeably
foreign to that nationality. . . .”
29
Wagner published his views on Jewish composers in
general, and Meyerbeer in particular, in two installments: Das Judenthum in Musik
(1850) and Oper und Drama (1851). In these writings, Wagner contends with the
phenomenon of the Jewish emancipation, claiming that it caused the unintended, inverse
effect of enslaving non-Jews:
Tracing the breakdown of ghetto life and the gradual integration of the rich Jews
into German social life, [Wagner] explained that like other Germans, he favored
the ‘abstract principle’ of removing restrictions from the lives of the Jews. He
made it clear, however, that those who agreed with him, and he himself, were
‘stimulated by a general idea, rather than by any real sympathy. For . . . we
always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them
[Jews].’ The result of emancipation had been, ironically, not only contact; the
Jew evolved to the position of ruler. ‘It is rather we who are shifted into the
necessity of fighting for emancipation from the Jews.’
30

Wagner foreshadowed his future vendetta against Meyerbeer in a letter to Franz Liszt
(1811-1886) in 1849, in which he accuses Meyerbeer of greed, premeditates his attack,
and attempts to recruit Liszt as a compatriot:
. . . I want money as much as M., or really more than M., or else I must make
myself feared. . . . Well, money I have not, but a tremendous desire to practice a
little artistic terrorism. Give me your assistance. Come here and lead the great
hunt; we will shoot; and the hares shall fall left and right.
31

29
Thomson, “Meyerbeer and Wagner,” 70, quoting Richard Wagner, Sämtliche
Schriften und Dichtungen, 5
th
ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1911), 83.
30
Ibid., quoting Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften, 80-81 (emphasis in original).
31
Johnson, “Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France,” 90, quoting Richard
Wagner in Léon Poliakov, History of Antisemitism (New York: Vanguard Press, 4 vols.,
1965-1975), III, 435.

48

Two years later, in 1851, Liszt wrote to Wagner, asking whether he had authored Das
Judenthum, which elicited this response:
You ask me about ‘Das Judenthum.’ You must know that the article is by me.
Why do you ask? Not from fear, but only to avoid the Jews’ dragging this
question into a matter of personalities, did I appear in a pseudonym. I felt a long-
repressed hatred for this Jewry, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall
is to the blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me
most, and so I broke forth at last.
32

Meyerbeer’s grand opera, Le Prophète (1849), was the “damnable scribbling” that so
“annoyed” and propelled Wagner to write Das Judenthum. Wagner criticized various
aspects of Le Prophète in print; ironically, he attacked features that he would eventually
espouse and take credit for in his own operatic writing:
Like Meyerbeer in his own time, Wagner is venerated for passionate dramas,
intense dramatic concerns, extraordinary vocal requirements, for the development
of the orchestral writing in the opera pit, the lengthy grand opera, the capacity to
build tremendous musical climaxes, impressive processionals, and for ‘religious’
content.
33

Two other features of Meyerbeer’s operas drew Wagner’s ire: the composer’s treatment
of large choruses, and his text setting, which was allegedly inferior due to its similarity to
prayer settings in the synagogue:
In exhibiting a total deficiency of understanding of synagogue musical practices
and materials, Wagner [wrote] that a people whose lack of concern for the text is
shown by melismatic settings cannot be the ‘folk’ source for the Jewish
composer. . . . ‘That this composer invented thrilling situations and the effective
weaving of emotional catastrophes need astonish no one who understands how

32
Thomson, “Meyerbeer and Wagner,” 68, quoting Wagner in Franz Liszt,
Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, trans. Francis Hueffer (New York: Scribners, vol.
1, 1897), 145-146.
33
Ibid., 79.
49

this sort of thing is wished for by those whose time hangs heavily upon their
hands. . . .
34

Wagner also compared a congregation’s alleged distraction during a synagogue service to
an audience’s boredom during a Meyerbeer opera: “Whoever has observed the
shamefulness and the absent-mindedness of a Jewish congregation, throughout the
musical performance of the Divine Service in the Synagogue, may understand why a
Jewish opera-composer feels not at all offended by encountering the same thing in a
theater audience . . . .”
35
Wagner’s comparison of French grand opera to synagogue
music, though designed as an insult and shrouded in ignorance of Jewish text, melody, or
prayer, nonetheless resonates in that the music and composers of the mid-century Parisian
synagogue and opera were indeed tightly interwoven.

In 1808, Napoleon assigned each region of France its own Jewish governing
body, or consistoire israélite.
36
The year 1822 saw the construction of a new Ashkenazi
Temple on rue Notre Dame de Nazareth in Paris, which would become “the focal point of
most Jewish religious life in Paris until the 1870’s.”
37
The first major cantorial force to
grace the Paris Consistoire was Israel Lovy (1773-1832), who had connections to the
opera world; his “early career had included oratorio and Lieder singing,” and both Haydn

34
Thomson, “Meyerbeer and Wagner,” 71, quoting Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften,
97.

35
Ibid., quoting Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften, 96-97.
36
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 32.
37
Ibid.
50

and Rossini had praised his voice.
38
Lovy served as cantor on rue Notre Dame until his
death in 1832; he composed some synagogue music there, which Naumbourg later
integrated into his three-volume collection of synagogue music, Zemirot Yisrael (also
referred to as Semiroth Israel) [Songs of Israel].
39
From 1832 until 1845, Jewish musical
leadership in Paris changed hands several times, without ever gaining much momentum.
After the resignation of the latest in a series of cantors in 1845, Samuel Naumbourg of
Germany applied for the position.
40

One of the most prominent members of the Consistoire was Jacques Halévy, who
reviewed Naumbourg’s application and wrote a letter in support of the prospective
cantor.
41
Thus, a camaraderie between the two composers was born, which would link
Naumbourg closely to the Parisian opera world. Within two years of his appointment as
cantor of the Ashkenazi Temple at rue Notre Dame de Nazareth in Paris, Naumbourg

38
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 33.
39
Ibid., 33-34.
40
Ibid., 35.
41
Ibid. Another member of the Paris Consistoire who reviewed Naumbourg’s
application was Charles-Henri Valentin Alkan (1813-1888), a great Parisian piano
prodigy and keyboard composer. Alkan may have written a letter in support of
Naumbourg, but none survives. The relationship between the two musicians must have
been good, however, because Naumbourg later included Alkan’s music in the third
volume of Zemirot Yisrael. See Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 35.
51

published the first of three installments of Zemirot Yisrael [Songs of Israel], a collection
of choral and cantorial music for Shabbat.
42

Although Naumbourg was relatively new to Paris, he established the French
character of Zemirot Yisrael immediately by opening the collection with his new choral
setting of Adon Olam [Eternal Master] in French (Example 2.1).
43
Adon Olam opens
with a twenty-bar solo organ or piano introduction (and closes with an eight-bar organ
coda), which, at first blush, makes sense, as the Ashkenazi Temple in Paris introduced its
first portative organ in 1844.
44
The synagogue used the organ, however, only on Friday
evenings and for special events such as weddings and concerts; the organ was not played
on Sabbath mornings, holy days, or festivals.
45
Yet, Zemirot Yisrael begins with an organ
prelude for Adon Olam, which is the closing prayer recited on Shabbat and weekday
mornings.

42
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 30, 35. Baron credits Rabbi
Geoffrey Goldberg with assessing more accurate publication dates for the original
editions of Zemirot Yisrael (which had previously been misidentified): Volume I
(Sabbath music), Paris, 1847; Volume II (music for the major holy days), Paris, 1852;
Volume III (hymns and psalms), Paris, 1857.

43
Samuel Naumbourg, Semiroth Israel: Chants Liturgiques de Sabbath (Paris:
chez l'auteur, 1847.), 1. All subsequent references to the Sabbath volume of Semiroth
Israel come from this edition.

44
Baron, “A Golden Age for Jewish Musicians,” 34.
45
Ibid.
52

Example 2.1: Naumbourg, Adon Olam, No. 1 (mm. 1-41) from Zemirot Yisrael, vol. 1

53

That Naumbourg would choose to open his collection of music for Shabbat with a
keyboard introduction that could not be used during the service for which it was intended
suggests several possible considerations. First, the organ prelude itself is self-contained
and does not overlap with vocal material, so it could easily have been excluded on
Shabbat morning. The four-part vocal writing that follows could have been performed
either a cappella or doubled by the keyboard. Naumbourg may have considered that a
text such as Adon Olam, performed in the vernacular as Hymne a l’Être Suprème, would
be useful for festive or civic occasions beyond the Sabbath morning. Or, he might have
predicted that the Ashkenazi Temple would eventually decide to include the organ in
worship services, as many synagogues in Europe did.
In either case, the opening organ material, marked Andantino, is reminiscent of
the Baroque French Overture, with its dotted rhythms, slow tempo, and pronounced
Phrygian cadence at measure 7. The harmonic language, however, is fully Romantic,
replete with an exotic shift in the last five bars of the organ introduction from tonic D
major to B-flat major, then passing through G minor before arriving back at D major.
The choral material that follows is less showy and set strophically, as the text of
Adon Olam comprises five equal stanzas. The French translation by Louis Ratisbonne
does not maintain the strict iambic tetrameter of the original Hebrew poetic meter, but
Naumbourg manages to evoke a metered sense of regularity in his repetitive, dance-like
thematic material. The first choral theme nods to Haydn in its immediate but brief
tonicization of the mediant (F-sharp minor) in measure 24. Chromaticism continues in
54

the consequent phrase (mm 29-33), as the harmony leads briefly into G major before
returning to tonic.
Naumbourg’s decision to begin his first volume of liturgical synagogue music
with a French-language Adon Olam demonstrates his eagerness to identify with his new
nationality. Nambourg was born in Dennenlohe, Bavaria, into a long line of cantors, and
moved to Munich—the capital of Bavaria—as a boy to sing in the synagogue choir and
study music theory.
46
In 1826, the synagogue in Munich “had begun to ‘modernize’ its
synagogue. . .; in many respects it followed the pattern of Vienna.”
47
The new cantor,
however, had “negligible” musical training, so the synagogue established “a choral
society to adorn the worship service.”
48
The new choral director, Maier Kohn, was a
grade-school teacher “of poor musical abilities and less musical education,” who hired
Caspar Ett, “father of modern Catholic church music in Germany,” to assist him in
arranging and composing choral selections for a new collection of synagogue music.
49
A
young Samuel Naumbourg sang as an “active member of Maier Kohn’s chorus” at this
time:
[Naumbourg] contributed one or two pieces to Kohn’s collection, published in
1838, a collection that was completely eclipsed by Sulzer’s Schir Zion of the same
date. It must have been this unhappy coincidence and the comparison of the two

46
Aron Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews (New York: Barnes, 1960), 108.
47
Eric Werner, A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenzic Jews
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 199.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid.
55

works that caused the highly intelligent, well-educated, and vocally endowed
Naumbourg to leave Munich.
50

Naumbourg departed Germany for France: he held positions in two cities there before
moving to Paris, first as choirmaster in Strasbourg and then as cantor in Besançon.
51

By the time he went to Paris to seek the vacant cantorial position at the Ashkenazi
Temple on rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, Naumbourg was acquainted with French-Jewish
culture and “well provided with letters of introduction to the leading Jewish circles.”
52

As discussed above, Naumbourg’s most important letter of recommendation came
from Halévy, and the two musicians began a lifelong affiliation. Halévy contributed a
substantial number of compositions to Zemirot Yisrael; one of Naumbourg’s favorites
was Halévy’s a cappella setting of Psalm 118, v.5-25 (Example 2.2).
The beginning of the fifth verse of Psalm 118 speaks of distress: “In my anguish I
cried to the Lord.” To illustrate the sentiment of affliction, Halévy’s setting begins in C
minor; the low choral voices, in unison and in pianissimo, outline the beginning of the C
minor scale, then return to tonic on the text min hammetzar [from the depths]. At the
utterance of the word horosi [I cried], the unison voices leap up a tritone, to F#, painting
the speaker’s anguish with the exotic and grating augmented fourth.

50
Werner, A Voice Still Heard, 199.
51
Rothmüller, Music of the Jews, 108.
52
Werner, A Voice Still Heard, 199.
56

Example 2.2: Halévy, Psalm 118 (v. 5-25), No. 69 (mm. 1-16) from Zemirot Yisrael, vol.
1, p. 74

Halévy resolves the cries through stepwise motion up to G on joh [God], then proceeds
up to an A-flat—the highest point of the opening phrase—at the downbeat of measure 3,
57

before descending stepwise back down to C on the text ononi [You answered me]. The
phrase ends at measure four by presenting a mirror image of the first three pitches of the
piece on the text that resolves the distress: “He answered me by setting me free.” That
Halévy would place freedom in the same three stepwise pitches where anguish began
suggests that God’s answer does not necessarily bring a person to a new place, but rather
puts reality into a new perspective.
The consequent phrase, beginning at the pickup to measure 5, adds the treble
voices but otherwise begins in unison, in the same manner as the antecedent phrase. This
time, however, the phrase ends by outlining the E-flat major triad at measure 8: in this
second utterance of anguish, God’s answer of freedom leads to a different resolution—in
the key of the relative major. At this point, the cantor (listed in the secular manner as
Tenore solo) enters and proclaims, in E-flat major: Adonoï li lo iro [The Lord is with me;
I will not fear] in forte dynamic, fanfare-like, with the choral voices supporting as if a
brass choir. The eight-bar phrase proceeds in operatic fashion, with the cantor singing as
a dramatic tenor:
The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?
The Lord is with me; he is my helper.
I will look with triumph on my enemies.

Throughout this section, the a cappella choir supports the operatic cantor by echoing his
dotted-eighth-note rhythms in march-like fashion.
Naumbourg wrote of his admiration for Halévy both as a composer and a Jewish
scholar, and particularly mentioned this setting of Psalm 118:
58

As for Halévy, I can say that he was a Jew at heart and was keenly interested in
everything that might contribute to the advancement of our religious music. A
distinguished scholar as well as musician, Halévy knew Hebrew perfectly and was
kind enough to encourage the author of this collection with precious advice and
even agreed to compose for the author’s first work (Zemiroth Israel) six pieces in
which one recognizes (especially in Psalm 118 which I consider a true
masterpiece) all the qualities of his masterly style. If all the other Jewish
composers had had the same respect for our religion, how many beautiful works
might have enriched the collection of our religious songs!
53

Halévy’s other contributions to Zemirot Israel are equally as dramatic as Psalm
118; one example may be found in his setting of the brief but centrally important prayer,
Schema Yisroel [Hear, O Israel] (Example 2.3). The tempo marking is Maestoso, fitting
for a setting of one of the most important texts in the Jewish liturgy: “Hear, O Israel, the
Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” The text of Halévy’s Schema is fully declamatic—
exactly one note per syllable—and the articulation of the harmony is clear and precise,
matching the solemnity and regality of the text.
Example 2.3: Halévy, Schema Yisroel, No. 17 (mm. 9-16) from Zemirot Israel, vol. 1, 33

53
Naumbourg, “Introduction to Agudath Schirim”, 33.

59

After nearly four bars of stationary tonic/dominant/subdominant harmony (beginning at
m. 9 of Example 2.3), the music passes through D minor before making a surprise
landing on A minor at the second Adonoi [God] at measure 13 of the Schema. The
impact of this harmony intensifies as the choir holds the chord for six beats, before
resolving the harmony (IV-I) by affirming that “the Lord is One.”
Halévy composed a Torah service entitled Sortie du Sefer (to be performed as the
Torah scroll is taken out of the Ark for the week’s portion to be read) that functions,
musically, as a cycle of unique miniature compositions. One of the movements, Baruch
Schenosan [Blessed be He Who Gave (the Torah)], opens with a baritone soloist singing
a folk-like march tune (Example 2.4).
54

Example 2.4: Halévy, Baruch Schenosan (mm. 1-27) from Sortie du Sefer, No. 152, in
Zemirot Israel, vol. 2, pp. 181-182

54
Samuel Naumbourg, Semiroth Israel: Chants Liturgiques des Grandes Fêtes
(Paris: chez l'auteur, date unknown). All subsequent references to this volume come
from this edition.
60

Example 2.4 (continued): Halévy, Baruch Schenosan (mm. 15-27)

The first ten measures of baritone solo (Example 2.4) begin squarely in D minor and
close with an implied modulation to F major. The choral entrance at measure 11 offers
an abrupt and exquisite shift to A minor, replete with a raised B-flat: the resulting
sonority foreshadows Bartók’s Eastern European folk music settings. Measure 17 brings
an elided cadence, with the close of the choral phrase overlapping with the reprise of the
opening solo baritone material. This time, however, the demi choeur joins the baritone
four bars later, also in unison, until the movement abruptly closes with dominant-tonic
harmony in the key of F major.
Halévy’s Baruch Schenosan stands out, both within the composer’s own
repertoire and in Zemirot Yisrael as a whole, due to its folk quality, its quiet yet march-
like insistency, and its irregular harmonic language. Another movement from Halévy’s
Sortie du Sefer that deserves attention is the Romemu Adonoi Elohenu [Exalt Ye the Lord
61

Our God] section of the movement Lecho Adonoï [Yours, O God, (is the Greatness)]
(Example 2.5). The melody, presented first in the solo baritone part, is a variation of the
same tune first introduced in the beginning of this movement, the Lecho Adonoï. This
time, however, in the Romemu section, the melody is set against a three-part trio of
soprano, tenor, and bass soloists.

Example 2.5: Halévy, Romemu section of Lecho Adonoï (mm. 33-56) from Sortie du
Sefer, No. 152, in Zemirot Israel, vol. 2, 183

62

The tranquil simplicity of the melody in Romemu provides a curious companion
to the text:
Exalt ye the Lord our God,
and worship
at His holy hill;
for the Lord our God is holy.
The opening of this movement, Lecho Adonoï (not included in Example 2.5), is in two-
four time, and marked Andante and piannisimo. The last dynamic marking before the
Romemu section is piano, which is how the quartet must begin at the opening of Example
2.5. Most composers’ settings of Romemu are up-tempo and march-like, in keeping with
joyous exaltation of God and the march around the sanctuary with the Torah. Here,
however, Halévy’s setting is slow, quiet, and reverent; its gentle, lullaby-like melody,
first in the solo baritone and then in the choral soprano I and II parts, builds to a high
point at measure 37 (and 45). This crest of the hill on the high F, followed by a stepwise
descent on veshischtachavu (and you shall bow down) paints the textual description of
worship at God’s holy hill.
Naumbourg wrote two Torah services of his own, which, like Halévy’s, feature
brief movements that quickly develop thematic material before moving on to the next
prayer. Naumbourg’s choral setting of Kumoh Adonoï [Arise, O Lord] , which
immediately follows a cantorial recitative of Vajehi Binsoa [And Behold, We Lift Up (the
Ark)] (Example 2.6), emerges as one of the most creative of his Torah service
movements.

63

Example 2.6: Naumbourg, Vajehi Binsoa and Kumoh Adonoï from Sortie du Séfer, No.
155, mm. 1-23, in Zemirot Israel, vol. 2, pp. 186-187

64

The opening cantorial recitative, Vajehi Binsoa, provides the simple germ of thematic
material that develops in Kumoh Adonoï. The Hebrew text and English translation from
Example 2.6 appears in Table 2.1, below.

Table 2.1 Transliteration and Translation for Naumbourg, Vajehi Binsoa and Kumoh
Adonoï
Hebrew Transliteration
(Germanic)
English Translation
Vajehi binsoa ho’oron
vajomer moscheh,
Kumoh adonoï v’jofutzu
ojevecho v’jonusu m’sanecho
miponecho
Ki mizijon tetze soroh
u-d’var adonoï miruscholajim.
“Whenever the Ark moved forward,
Moses would exclaim:

‘Arise, O Lord, and may Your enemies be
scattered;
May Your foes be put to flight before You.’”
“From Zion shall come forth Torah
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

The choral voices at the beginning of Example 2.6 prominently declaim, homophonically
and in G Major, “Arise, O Lord” before the parts fragment and enter imitatively on
v’jofutzu ojevecho, becoming musically as “scattered” as the Lord’s enemies. On the
text v’jonusu m’sanecho mibonecha [May Your foes be put to flight before You] at
measure ten, the harmonic language unexpectedly takes flight in the form of a fast-
moving sequence of secondary dominants and dissonant suspensions that lead from G
minor through F
7
to B-flat major, then E-flat major, D-minor
7
, and back to G minor,
which then ends up at D major via a Baroque-sounding Phrygian cadence.
65

The Andante section that follows at measure 14 on the text Ki mizijon tetze soroh
[From Zion shall come forth Torah] provides an augmented version of the melody
presented at the beginning of Example 2.6. This time, a new, ascending beginning to the
melody is set imitatively, but in a harmonically straightforward way. The exotic
jazziness of the previous phrase is now replaced with standard I-IV-V harmony; the
movement concludes with a double iteration of a plagal cadence.
In general, Naumbourg’s music, like his setting of Kumoh Adonoï, vacillates
between passages of harmonically static material and sections of remarkable richness and
creativity. Many are laced with operatic drama, influenced by Naumbourg’s colleagues,
Halévy and Meyerbeer. One example of a synagogue choral work with great dramatic
flair is one of Naumbourg’s settings of Psalm 150 (Examples 2.7).

Example 2.7: Naumbourg, Psaume 150, No. 252 (mm. 1-10), in Zemirot Israel, vol. 2, p.
302

66

Example 2.7 (continued): Naumbourg, Psaume 150, No. 252 (mm. 11-36), p. 303

67

Example 2.7 (continued): Naumbourg, Psaume 150, (mm. 37-55), p. 304

The A-major Psaume 150 opens with an antecedent halelujoh in F major from the bass
section, which is answered by the choir in A major. The pattern continues in F major
again in measure three, which functions as a flatted VI chord that then melts into
dominant harmony at measure four. This harmonically destabilizing yet fanfare-like
opening contrasts sharply with the material that immediately follows. At measure five,
68

the new theme begins piano on the text, “Praise God in his sanctuary,” with several bars
of relatively tame alternation between I, IV, and V in the tonic key of A major, before
building dynamically to: “Praise Him in His mighty heavens. Praise Him for His acts of
power.” At measure twelve, the phrase concludes by modulating to E major, only to
swirl into the next variation of dotted rhythms and call-and-response texture, this time as
an alternation between C major and E major, between low and treble voices (see Example
2.7, mm. 13-19).
The opening material returns in measure 29, this time in augmentation, on the
text, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” From this point to the end of the
work, Naumbourg varies and expands upon the opening ideas, all on the word halelujoh,
still featuring dotted rhythms, call-and-response texture, and dynamic contrast, but this
time remaining in A major. The dynamics, which start fortissimo at measure 37, quickly
shift to piano and dolce at measure 44, then become quieter and quieter through measure
52, only to face a lengthy, dramatic pause before the final, fortissimo declamation of
halelujoh in A major to conclude.
The similarity between French operatic writing and synagogue composition in the
1840’s and 1850’s is rarely more pronounced than in Naumbourg’s Seu Scheorim [Lift up
your heads, O Gates!”] from Psalm 24, v.7-10 (Example 2.8). In similar fashion to the
opening of Halévy’s Psalm 118 (Example 2.2), Seu Scheorim begins in a minor key with
low voices, in unison.

69

Example 2.8: Naumbourg, Seu Scheorim, No. 162 (mm. 1-28), in Zemirot Israel, vol. 2,
p. 195

70

Table 2.2 Transliteration and Translation for Seu Scheorim (Psalm 24, v.7-10)
Hebrew Transliteration
(Germanic)
English Translation
Seu scheorim roschechem,
vehinnos’u pische olom,
Vejovo melech hakovod.
Mi seh melech hakovod,
Adonoï issus vegibbor,
Adonoï gibbor milchomoh.

Seu scheorim roschechem,
vehinnos’u pische olom,
Vejovo melech hakovod.

Mi hu seh melech hakovod,
Adonoï zevo’os hu melech
hakovod, Seloh.
Lift up your heads, O gates!
Lift yourselves up, O ancient doors!
Let the King of Glory enter!
Who is the King of Glory?
The Lord, strong and mighty,
The Lord, valiant in battle.

Lift up your heads, O gates!
Lift yourselves up, O ancient doors!
Let the King of Glory enter!

Who is the King of Glory?
The Lord of hosts; He is the King of Glory.

Seu Scheorim, an excerpt from Psalm 24 that is used during the Torah service on High
Holy Day mornings, opens with a low-register, monophonic, fanfare-like call in D minor
for the gates to open and admit Adonoï, the King of Glory. The low, unison choral voices
give way at measure nine to an ostinato, robust accompaniment. The melody they
accompany—introduced first in the solo soprano—is triumphant, majestic, and fitting for
a description of God as king, valiant in battle. The operatic melody over a march-like,
military rhythm, sets a dramatic scene for the clergy’s march around the sanctuary with
the Torah scroll before returning it to the ark.
Naumbourg’s Seu Scheorim became one of his best-known choral works,
performed both in service and concert settings throughout the twentieth and into the
71

twenty-first centuries. During Naumbourg’s own lifetime, however, another of his
compositions earned recognition, though for quite a different reason.
The poem El Odon [Master of Creation] [Table 2.3] dates sometime from the
second to fourth centuries C.E., and is textually similar to the medieval prayer Adon
Olam [Eternal Master] with which Naumbourg opened his first volume of Zemirot
Yisrael (cf. Table 1.1, infra).

Table 2.3 Translisteration and Translation of El Adon (lines 1-14)
Hebrew Transliteration (Germanic) English Translation
El odon al kol hama’asim
baruch um’voroch befi kol
neschomoh
Godlo vetuvo mole olom
da’as usvunoh sovevim oso

Hamisgo’eh al chajos hakodesch
V’neh’dor bechovod al hamerkovoh
S’chus u’mishor lifne chiso
Chesed verachamim lifne chevodo
Tovim me’oros scheboro Elohenu
jetzorom beda’as bevinoh u’vhaskel
Ko’ach ug’vuroh nosan bohem
liheyos moschelim bekerev tevel
Melehem siv u’mefikim nogah
no’eh sivom bechol ho’olom
God, Master of all creations,
blessed and praised by every soul

His greatness and goodness fill the universe
knowledge and wisdom surround Him

He is exalted above the celestial beings
and adorned in honor above the chariot
Virtue and honesty stand before His throne
grace and mercy are abundant in Him
Good are the luminaries created by our God
crafted with knowledge, wisdom and insight
Strength and might He placed in them
to reign over the universe
Full of brilliance, they radiate brightness
beautiful is their brilliance throughout the
world
Adon Olam generally serves as a closing hymn of a Shabbat morning service, while El
Odon is one of the first blessings recited on Shabbat morning, before the Shema.
72

Naumbourg’s a cappella setting of El Adon (Example 2.9) opens exultantly, with the
cantor declaiming the poetry syllabically in a triumphant A major. The men’s choral
voices provide homophonic support until the full choir provides a consequent phrase at
measure 5.

Example 2.9 Naumbourg, El Odon section of Hakol ye romemu, No. 43 (mm. 1-16), in
Zemirot Israel, vol. 1, pp. 54-55

73

El Odon comes from the first volume of Naumbourg’s Zemirot Yisrael, which was
published in 1847. Members of the Parisian Jewish community no doubt noticed when,
in 1849, Meyerbeer featured a dramatic hymn in his grand opera, Le Prophète
55

(Example 2.10), which bears a striking resemblance to Naumbourg’s triumphant theme
from El Odon.
Naumbourg was apparently perturbed by the acute similarity between his melody
and Meyerbeer’s, but not because Meyerbeer had appropriated his El Odon melody.
Rather, Naumbourg’s concern seems to be that people might see Naumbourg’s
composition and accuse him of having stolen from the much more famous composer. In
a subsequent edition of the first volume of Zemirot Israel, Naumbourg included a note
along with his setting of El Odon, clarifying that his own version came first:
Ce Morceau a été composé et exécuté dans le temple de Paris en 1844, cést à dire
5 ans avant la publication du Prophète de Meyerbeer. Cette observation a pour
but d'écarter toute accusation de plagiat, que l'on pourrait faire peser sur
l'Auteur, à cause de la ressemblance qui existe entre le commencement de ce
Morceau, et l'air triomphal du Prophète (emphasis in original).
56

55
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Eugène Scribe, and A. de Garaudé. Le prophète: opéra en
5 actes (Paris: Brandus & Cie, 1849), 221-222.
56
Naumbourg, Zemirot Yisrael, vol. 1: This piece was composed and performed in the
Temple of Paris in 1844; that is to say, 5 years before the publication of Le Prophète of
Meyerbeer. This observation is made to avoid any accusation of plagiarism that could pose to
the author due to the similarity between the beginning of this piece and the triumphal air from Le
Prophète (emphasis in original).

74

Example 2.10: Meyerbeer, “Hymne Triomphal” from Le Prophète, Act III, mm.1-23

75

Example 2.10 (continued): Meyerbeer, “Hymne Triomphal,” mm.12-23

76

Wagner alleged that there were distasteful similarities between the operas by
Jewish composers and the music of the synagogue. However, he could not have known
the extent to which the secular opera world and the synagogue choral culture in 1840’s
Paris were inextricably linked. One can only imagine Wagner’s reaction had he known
that one of the movements of Meyerbeer’s “damnable scribble,” Le Prophète, was largely
inspired by a choral-cantorial hymn for the synagogue, composed by a cantor.
Naumbourg admired Meyerbeer and regretted that he had not composed music for
the synagogue:
Modern Judaism has produced great musicians whose illustrious names have not
been overshadowed by those of Mozart, Haydn and Weber. One need only
mention Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Halevy. It is regrettable that the first two
have not composed anything for our religion.
57

One contrafactum by Meyerbeer appears in Zemirot Yisrael, but it certainly is not
a work that has any outward connection to Judiasm. Meyerbeer wrote a choral piece
originally published as a Christmas carol entitled Prière d’Enfants (also distributed under
a secondary title in the German: Kindergebet) (Example 2.11). Meyerbeer’s Christmas
carol is scored for three-part a cappella women’s voices, and published with sung text in
three languages: French, Latin, and German.

57
Naumbourg, “Introduction to Agudath Schirim,” 33.

77

Example 2.11: Meyerbeer, Prière d’Enfants, mm. 1-10

78

Naumbourg transformed the carol into a prayer setting for Rosh Hashanah
morning, Uvnucho Jomar [When the Ark was set down] (Example 2.12). The prayer
appears at the end of the Torah service, as the scrolls are being placed back in the Ark;
the translation of the Hebrew prayer is as follows:
When the Ark was set down, Moses prayed:
“O Lord, dwell among the myriad families of Israel.”
Come up, O Lord, to Your sanctuary,
Together with the Ark of Your glory.
Let Your Kohanim be clothed in righteousness;
Let Your faithful ones rejoice.
I have given you precious teaching,
Forsake not My Torah.
It is a tree of life to those who cling to it,
Blessed are they who uphold it.
Its ways are ways of pleasantness,
All its paths are peace.
Help us turn to You, O Lord; then truly shall we return;
Renew our days as in the past.

In his setting, Uvnuchoh jomar, Naumbourg retained the three-part treble voices for some
of the contrafactum, but occasionally modified it to feature SATB texture as well,
ostensibly to suit the mixed-voice choir that he used in the synagogue.

79

Example 2.12: Meyerbeer/Naumbourg, Uvnuchoh Jomar, No. 166 (mm. 1-28), in
Zemirot Israel, vol. 2, p. 206

80

That Naumbourg chose to adapt a composition of Meyerbeer’s for use in his
Zemirot Yisrael is not surprising; after all, the two musicians were colleagues and were
familiar with each other’s work. That Naumbourg chose, in particular, a Christmas carol,
written by a Jew for one of the most holy days of the of the Christian year, to repurpose
for Rosh Hashanah, one of the most holy days of the Jewish year, highlights the extent of
Jewish and Christian integration in musical life in mid-nineteenth century Parisian
society. Christian audiences not only welcomed secular operas by Meyerbeer and
Halévy; they apparently accepted Christmas music by Jewish composers as well.
Parisian Jews regularly heard the latest music by Jewish composers in both the
synagogue sanctuary and the opera house—to the extent that Wagner felt compelled to
comment on the similarity in culture and music in both of these venues. Within the
Ashkenazi Temple at rue Notre Dame de Nazareth, Naumbourg built upon the best of
both his German cantorial upbringing and his Parisian culture of Jewish integration and
famous connections. His Zemirot Yisrael is not only a triumph in synagogue choral
repertoire, but in Jewish music history.

81

CHAPTER THREE
Synagogue Music Meets Its Master:
Louis Lewandowski

In the early nineteenth century, Jews living in German-speaking lands began to
view themselves not as the shunned aliens of the past, but as Jewish Germans, a
result of their emancipation and increased acculturation, as well as the
secularization of their countrymen. Christian rationalists, in particular, tended to
share this view, defining Jewish otherness as merely a difference in religion (as
opposed to culture) and accepting Jews into their social circles. But despite this
shift in enlightened perception . . ., the general populace—and indeed the law
itself—continued to see the Jews as adherents to what Kant had called a “useless,
true-religion-displacing old cult,” and refused to grant them any more than partial
entry into German society. This circumstance led many Jews who had given up
the ritual law . . ., and were therefore Jews in name only, to separate themselves
from Judaism altogether and to accept what poet Heinrich Heine had called the
“admission-ticket to European culture”—baptism. But far from being a simple
bill of admittance, baptism was a virtual Pandora’s box, filled with paradoxes and
contradictions, the most demoralizing of which was surely the continued distrust
Jews faced from the non-Jews who had originally called for their conversion.
1

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), who claimed both a high-profile Jewish familial
heritage and an active commitment to Protestantism, embodied the German-Jewish-

1
Jeffrey S. Sposato, The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the
Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 3.

82

Christian identity paradox. In Berlin in 1816, Felix’s father, Abraham Mendelssohn
(1776-1835), son of influential Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn
(1729-1786), baptized his young offspring in the Lutheran tradition, and later converted
to Protestantism himself, in 1822. This prominent Jewish family’s conversion hardly
represented an isolated incident: “[t]he historian Heinrich Graetz asserted that half of
Berlin Jewry converted. The early nineteenth-century conversion ‘wave’ gained the
name Taufepidemie (baptism epidemic) . . . .”
2

Felix Mendelssohn professed himself to be a devout Protestant.
3
Indeed, he
“rarely addressed the issue of his family’s Jewish past, obeying what Arnaldo
Momigliano once called ‘the taboo . . . deeply ingrained’ within the converted German
Jewish community of Berlin and their discussion of—and their silences about—
Judaism.”
4
Scholars searching for Jewish connections in Felix Mendelssohn’s life and
work have found very little: “Mendelssohn’s relation to Judaism is a song without many
words.”
5
No evidence exists that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ever attended synagogue

2
Michael P. Steinberg, “Mendelssohn and Judaism,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004): 29.
3
R. Larry Todd, “On Mendelssohn’s Sacred Music, Real and Imaginary,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor, ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004): 171-72.
4
Michael P. Steinberg, “Mendelssohn and Judaism,” 26-27 (quoting Arnaldo
Momigliano, “J.G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern
Historiography (Middletown, 1977), 310.
5
Steinberg, “Mendelssohn and Judaism,” 27.

83

as a child, and the composer’s correspondence does not reveal a relationship to Judaism.
6

Rather, the correspondence reflects “both German pride and discipleship to noted
Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.”
7

To assert plainly that Mendelssohn was Protestant rather than a Jew, however,
“simply replaces one conceptually and historically inadequate label with another.”
8
The
issue of religious identity within the Mendelssohn family—like the overall relationship
between Christians and Jews in nineteenth-century Germany—was one in flux. Michael
P. Steinberg suggests:
Mendelssohn’s life and music are both more productively to be understood
according to the subtle negotiation between Jewish and Christian spheres of
culture and memory during the formation of the modern German world—and that
much at a cultural historical moment, moreover, when the boundaries of all three
of these were evolving and unpredictable.
9

Despite Felix Mendelssohn’s prominent Jewish lineage and navigation back and
forth across the murky “Jewish and Christian spheres of culture and memory” in both his
life and compositions, Mendelssohn contributed no surviving repertoire to the Jewish
synagogue repertory. Rather, the Mendelssohn family’s greatest and most direct
contribution to Jewish liturgical music in the nineteenth century may have manifested
itself not in Felix’s composition but in the family’s influence in jump-starting the career

6
R. Larry Todd, “On Mendelssohn’s Sacred Music, Real and Imaginary,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor, ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004): 168.

7
Sposato, The Price of Assimilation, 3.
8
Steinberg, “Mendelssohn and Judaism,” 31.
9
Ibid., 40.
84

of one of the most important composers of synagogue choral music of all time. Felix
Mendelssohn’s cousin, Alexander, helped a particularly promising young Polish musician
named Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894) to be the first Jew ever to gain admittance to the
exclusive Berlin Academy of Arts.
10

Alexander Mendelssohn allegedly befriended a teenage Lewandowski soon after
the boy moved to Berlin from Wreschen, Poland in 1833, at the age of twelve,
11

following the death of his mother.
12
Lewandowski’s father, who came from a rabbinic
familial heritage, had served “in an honorary capacity as cantor for many of the prayers in
the local synagogue” in Wreschen, and had recruited his five sons to assist him.
13
Once
in Berlin, the young Louis Lewandowski studied violin and piano and began serving as a
singerl (child synagogue vocalist who supported the cantor) under Cantor Ascher Lion
(1776-1863).
14
According to Rothmüller, a synagogue congregant named Salomon
Plessner taught Hebrew to Lewandowski and introduced him to Alexander Mendelssohn,
Felix’s first cousin:
Alexander was a well-known philanthropist, and his house was frequented by
many artists; so Lewandowski, who became a regular visitor, was able to mix in

10
Aron Marko Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews (New York: Barnes, 1960),
106.

11
Jascha Nemtsov and Hermann Simon, Louis Lewandowski: “Love Makes the
Melody Immortal!”, (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2011), 23.

12
A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (New York:
Schocken Books, 1956), 269.

13
Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews, 105-106.
14
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 269.
85

musical circles and to listen to intellectual conversation. About this time he
decided to devote himself entirely to the study of music.
15

According to Idelsohn, Alexander Mendelssohn “became the boy’s patron and supporter”
and ultimately opened the door for Lewandowski to apply to the Berlin Academy of Arts,
where he was admitted as the Academy’s first Jewish student.
16
From here, the facts
surrounding Lewandowski’s life and studies become murky, due to a dearth of reliable
biographical source material and availability only of relatively dubious anecdotes:
Although Lewandowski was one of the best-known synagogue musicians of all
time, many aspects of the condition in which his compositions were written, as
well as his musical career, remain unexplained. The reason lies mainly in the
state of the sources: after his forced retirement in early 1893, he had to transfer
his music manuscripts to his successor, the young Munich choir director Albert
Kellermann (1863-1927). It is not known where the composer’s personal papers
are today—and whether they even exist. The information available to us is thus
based in large part on the portrayals in his biographies. Yet these are not always
reliable.
17

One such questionable account involves Lewandowski’s alleged success in a student
composition contest at the Academy; Jascha Nemtsov disputes its veracity:
Aron Friedman … tells us that Lewandowski had earned ‘the complete sympathy
of his teachers Rungenhagen and Grell’ at the Academy of Arts, and that they
‘often rewarded him with prizes . . . Lewandowski became the pride of the
Academy, and if there was an artistic task to be solved, he was consulted first. In
a contest at the Academy for which a cantata for choir, soloist and orchestra had
to be composed, Lewandowski emerged as the prizewinner. This work, like his
prizewinning symphonies, was . . . performed by the Singakademie to great
applause, in the presence of the teaching staff and an invited audience, under the

15
Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews, 106.
16
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 269-70.
17
Jascha Nemtsov, “The Beginning of Lewandowski’s Musical Career,” in Louis
Lewandowski: Love Makes the Melody Immortal!, Nemtsov and Hermonn Simon, eds.
(Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2011), 23.

86

personal direction of the prizewinner.’ Much about this account is not credible.
Eduard Grell had only become a member of the Academy of Arts in 1841, for
example, so he could not have taught Lewandowski, who had to discontinue his
training in 1836. The Academy of Art’s annual composition prize was generally
given to seasoned musicians, and only rarely to students. For a 15-year-old
student, who had only been studying composition for two years, to be awarded
two of the coveted prizes for large-scale works would have been highly unusual.
In addition, no traces of this have been found. In fact, there is evidence that
Lewandowski was not among the prizewinners in 1836. So this story was
probably more or less fabricated.
18

In any case, Lewandowski left the Academy in 1836, either due to a “continual illness,
during which he had to give up all his activities” (Rothmüller)
19
, or to a “serious nervous
disorder” that “made an end to all his dreams” and caused him to “relinquish his
scholarship at the Academy” (Idelsohn).
20
After a “partial recovery” in 1840,
Lewandowski allegedly felt the weight of an “urgent necessity of sustaining himself,” so
struck out to return to gainful employment.
21
“Although his strength was insufficient to
recommence work along the lines of general music,” Idelsohn claims that Lewandowski
nonetheless “counted it sufficient for participation in the work of Synagogue music.”
22

The congregation of the Old Synagogue in Heidereutergasse must have likewise
counted Lewandowski sufficient for synagogue music direction: in 1840, the

18
Nemtsov, “The Beginning of Lewandowski’s Career,” at 23-24 (quoting Aron
Friedmann, Lebesbilder berühmter Kantoren, Part I (Berlin: C. Boas Nchf, 1918), 115,
and citing Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Berlin, Vol. 38, No. 41, October 1836, pp.
675-676.

19
Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews, 106.
20
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 270.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
87

congregation placed Lewandowski in charge of its new four-part ensemble, and
apparently entrusted him to arrange the services “in conformity with the new tastes.”
23

Lewandowski had previously worked for the synagogue’s cantor, Asher Lion. One of the
first tasks assigned to him, besides singing, allegedly occurred in 1839, when he
deciphered C-clefs in Sulzer’s Schir Zion manuscript for Cantor Lion, who had extremely
limited musical training and had previously worked very little with notated music.
24

(Lion’s “musical ability extended as far as the deciphering of the tones of a tune on a
piano (this with great difficulty and with but one finger).”
25
Ostensibly “swept by the
spirit of reaction” after the government closed the Beer Reform Temple in 1817, Lion
had returned the Old Synagogue in Berlin to the eighteenth-century chazzanuth style of
singing in worship, with cantor, singerl and bass, and so it had proceeded for two
decades.
26

According to Idelsohn, a special Berlin performance by traveling Eastern
European cantor Hirsch Weintraub (1811-1881) and his four-part vocal quartet in 1838

23
Rothmüller, The Music of the Jews, 106.
24
Geoffrey Goldberg, “Neglected Sources for the Historical Study of Synagogue
Music: The Prefaces to Louis Lewandowski’s Kol Rinnah U’t’fillah and Todah
W’Simrah-Annotated Translations,” Musica Judaica 11, no. 1 (1989-1990): 30-31.
Goldberg argues that Lewandowski was born in 1823, not 1821, and alleges that he may
have falsified his date of birth for a yet unknown reason. The widely accepted birth year
of 1821 is used here, with acknowledgment that reliable biographical sources are
unavailable to clarify questions about Lewandowski’s age and to pinpoint the timeline for
his early activity at Heidereutergasse Synagogue in a precise manner.
25
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 272.
26
Ibid., 270.
88

stoked interest in reforming music for liturgy at Heidereutergasse: “Weintraub’s
appearance in Berlin was like a sudden illumination in the darkness. He convinced both
the ultra-reform elements and the ultra-orthodox elements of the possibility of having
music modern in form and really traditional in character.”
27
Weintraub’s music allegedly
exerted a “hypnotic power” over Lewandowski, who had not yet heard “real Jewish
music molded in rich-sounding classic harmonic form.”
28
The subsequent chain of
events, which led Lewandowski to work with a choir and eventually to achieve the
position of Music Director at Heidereutergasse, took several years and major effort on
Lewandowski’s part:
The standard biographical descriptions lead one to assume that Lewandowski
must have made an easy transition from the talented boy soprano . . . to the
organizer of a choir (albeit a rather makeshift one at first)—eventually receiving
an appointment as official Music Director to the Berlin Jewish Community. The
path, however, was not quite so smooth.
29

Idelsohn’s summary of events, though perhaps not entirely reliable from a biographical
point of view, certainly offers an entertaining tale of the trajectory from Lewandowski’s
early singerl employment to his subsequent return from illness, and then to his slow rise
to recognition as expert synagogue musician.
The story begins with congregational pressure mounting on Asher Lion to
modernize the music at Heidereutergasse—to transform the meshorerim (two vocal
assistants to the cantor, singerl and bass) into a four-part ensemble in the style of Hirsch

27
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 271.
28
Ibid.
29
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 31.
89

Weintraub’s traveling quartet. According to Idelsohn, Lion decided that the best way to
reproduce Weintraub’s sound was to poach his singers, and he actually succeeded in
hiring the tenor voice away from Weintraub’s quartet.
30
Little did Lion know that, alas:
[T]he tenor knew his part only, without having any idea of the leading melody of
the soprano, nor any notion of the cantor solos or the bass part. . . . The only
information that Lion could obtain from the tenor was that Weintraub utilized
Sulzer’s music which was still at that time unpublished, and that Weintraub had
obtained from Sulzer his service in manuscript. Lion now demanded of his
committee the procuring of Sulzer’s music, trusting that that aim was an
unattainable one, so that his problem, if not solved, would thus be removed, and
he would be allowed to return to his good old rococo. But soon the old man had
to experience the worst. After the short space of TWO years, a copy of Sulzer’s
manuscript arrived in Berlin. Lion was faced with Hamlet’s problem: TO BE OR
NOT TO BE. Sulzer’s scores were written in the unheard-of system of the four
clefs . . . , while for poor Lion, with the exception of the treble, clefs were
nonexistent.
31

Lion attempted to rehearse Sulzer’s music with the quartet by reading all clefs as if they
were treble; one can imagine the disastrous results of that endeavor. Meanwhile, Lion
also contended with the limitations of the “community bass, the seventy-year-old Kasper,
who never in his life had seen music notes, but who had inherited his art of singing bass”
by imitating the melody an octave below or holding a low pedal point.
32
When Lion’s
efforts failed and created conflict with Weintraub’s understandably frustrated tenor, Lion
allegedly turned to his former singerl, Lewandowski, who, “sickly and without
employment as he was, took over the job willingly.”
33

30
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 272.
31
Ibid. (emphasis in original).
32
Ibid., 273.
33
Ibid.
90

[Lewandowski’s] first task was to transfer the parts from their distinctive clefs to
the treble, in order that Lion might read them; his second, to help Lion drill the
choir. The singers, who conducted themselves most impudently toward Lion,
were overwhelmed by the young Lewandowski’s stupendous musical knowledge,
seeing that he read the parts without any assistance from an instrument.
34

Lewandowski allegedly trained the quartet from the sidelines, allowing Lion to retain
credit. Idelsohn provides 1840 as the year of the quartet’s very successful premiere
performance—using Sulzer’s music and Lewandowski’s expertise. Lion recognized that
Lewandowski was crucial to the new process of music-making in the synagogue, and
quietly retained him to continue his work; meanwhile, Lewandowski “made up his mind
to devote himself to the development of music in the Jewish institutions in Berlin . . . .”
35

Despite Lewandowski’s apparent indispensability to the new musical order at the
Old Synagogue, he functioned for some four years without the title of Music Director. In
1844, when the congregation at last decided to expand the choir, Lewandowski “had to
make official application to the Gemeinde (Community) Board for the position of
Musical Director—his having been the de facto leader of the choir for several years
notwithstanding.”
36

The position nearly fell from his grasp, for M. Heinemann, a music teacher in a
Berlin Jewish school, was appointed first in early 1845. Heinemann must have
had considerable standing in the community, for he had been included in the five-
member commission (December, 1844) charged with improving the condition of
services in the Old Synagogue. For some as yet unknown reason, Lewandowski
was appointed instead several months later. Initially, this was only a provisional
appointment—perhaps because of Heinemann’s and Asher Lion’s wariness, or

34
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 273.
35
Ibid., 274.
36
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 31.
91

perhaps due to jealousy sparked by the granting of such formal public recognition
to the young musician.
37

Despite the unassuming way in which Lewandowski stepped into the position, he
was to carry the role of Music Director for the Berlin Jewish community for his entire
career (1844-1893), first at the Old Synagogue in Heidereutergasse, and later at the New
Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, gaining prominence and power, little by little. In
sharp contrast to Samuel Naumbourg, however, who began publishing collections of his
own, original synagogue compositions almost immediately upon beginning his position at
the Ashkenazi Temple in Paris, Lewandowski did not publish his first major collection of
choral music for worship, Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah, until 1871, which was followed by the
two-volume collection, Todah W’Simrah (1876 and 1882). Scholars disagree about the
reason for the long delay in producing these publications, although all seem to concur
that Lewandowski began his synagogue career by relying on Sulzer’s music, and that he
visited Sulzer in Vienna in 1855, along with prominent Berlin cantor Lichtenstein.
Idelsohn, however, argues that Lewandowski relied exclusively on Sulzer’s music,
hesitating to develop his own courage and compositional voice:
Fortune did not seem to favor Lewandowski in his young years. In 1845, he
succeeded in publishing a song (always a great event in the life of a young
composer); but because the text expressed political ideas too free for the
reactionary Prussian government, the publication was confiscated. . . . For fully
thirty years Lewandowski remained unnoticed, hidden, of no importance—a
choral leader and singing teacher. He published a few little songsters for the
Public School, written in the routine German Lied-style; and a few numbers for
piano and voice which remained unnoticed. For many years his repertoire at the

37
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 31.
92

Synagogue consisted of Sulzer’s music, he himself not daring to compose
anything.
38

Jascha Nemtsov, on the other hand, provides a different reason for the delay, suggesting
that it “is not clear when exactly the two collections were composed.”
39
Nemtsov cites
Lewandowski’s foreword to the second edition of Kol Rinnah u’T’fillah in 1882:
The practice of leaving my compositions on my desk for years at a time, of
periodically re-examining them, altering them, re-arranging them, or discarding
them entirely, has had the negative effect of delaying the publication of my music.
On the other hand, I think that through this self-imposed strictness I have
managed to prevent, insofar as is humanly possible, unfinished goods from
burdening the market and the cantors.
40

Indeed, Lewandowski also writes of the process of composing the “unison congregational
pieces and two-part choral settings” in Kol Rinnah u’T’filla: “This is the product of
many years’ serious work.”
41
These quotations and other evidence lead contemporary
scholars to recognize that Lewandowski likely began performing his compositions long
before their publication dates. Geoffrey Goldberg, for example, contends that
Lewandowski’s music must have been performed widely in Berlin much earlier than
Idelsohn suggests:
Lewandowski’s music may have become predominant in Berlin . . . by the early
1860’s. Apparently Arnold Markson, then the assistant ḥazzan at the

38
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 275.
39
Jascha Nemtsov, “Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah,” in Love Makes the Melody
Immortal!, 27.

40
Louis Lewandowski, Preface to the Second Edition of Kol Rinnah U’T’filla, in
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 45.

41
Louis Lewandowski, Preface to Kol Rinnah U’T’filla, in Goldberg, “Neglected
Sources,” 41.

93

Heidereutergasse Synagogue, visited Sulzer in 1872. He returned so enthused by
Sulzer’s music that the Gemeinde Board in Berlin decided that it should be
introduced (or re-introduced?) in the synagogue services there. This would
appear to imply that, before Markson’s visit to Vienna—i.e., before 1872—
Sulzer’s music either was no longer being sung there or was not any longer a
significant part of the repertoire. It may thus be reasonably suggested that
Lewandowski’s music became the predominant repertoire in Berlin between
1855, the date of his and Lichtenstein’s trip to Vienna, and 1872, the year of
Markson’s visit.
42

Moreover, Lewandowski himself claimed that his own choral pieces had been performed
successfully in Berlin over time: “The large number of choral pieces that have, over the
years, proved successful in the Berlin community synagogues are suitable for
introduction to a wider public.”
43

Lewandowski’s preface to his 1876 collection of four-part choral works for the
synagogue, Todah W’Simrah, offers further insight, not only into the delay in publishing
the new volume, but a clue as to why any publication took so much time:
The favorable, appreciative reception of the Kol Rinnah u’T’fillah, and its rapid
circulation, should have caused me to fulfill more quickly my promise made in
the introduction to that work: to publish a work of four-part choral pieces and
organ accompaniments.

However, official and professional obligations have delayed the publication of
this work. These include [writing] the music for the religious services of the
Jewish communities of Nuremberg and Stettin, for which—in addition to the
liturgical sections and choral pieces in Hebrew—I composed thirty to forty
psalms for choir, solo and organ, with German texts. Also [the task of] reviewing

42
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 34.
43
Lewandowski, Preface to Kol Rinnah U’T’filla, in Goldberg, “Neglected
Sources,” 42.

94

my accumulated materials from over a period of many years has caused no few
obstacles.
44

Lewandowski also confirms in the same preface that he wrote the majority of the music
in Todah W’Simrah for the Old Synagogue, where he worked until the dedication of the
New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, in 1866.
45

Lewandowski’s first published collection of music, Kol Rinnah u’T’fillah,
appeared in 1871, and consists mostly of transcriptions of chazzanut [solo cantorial
melodies for the liturgy]. It also features “two-part choral settings in simple, accessible
form.”
46
Lewandowski explained the need he saw in the Jewish community for such
arrangements:
In order to facilitate execution, and because smaller—and, not infrequently,
larger—congregations lack suitable singers and [the means for realization of the]
limitless opportunities afforded by harmony and modulations, I have restricted
myself exclusively to flowing melodies and simple voice leading. Even those
pieces that I have treated contrapuntally are quite easy to execute.
47

One such example is a setting of Adon Olam [Eternal Master], published for two parts in
Kol Rinnah u’T’fillah (Example 3.1).
48

44
Louis Lewandowski, Preface to Todah W’Simrah, in Goldberg, “Neglected
Sources,” 46.

45
Ibid.
46
Lewandowski, Preface to Kol Rinnah U’T’Filla, in Goldberg, “Neglected
Sources,” 41.

47
Ibid., 41-42.
48
Louis Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah u-T'fillah ein- und zweistimmige Gesänge für
den israelitischen Gottesdienst (Berlin: Bote & Bock, 1882): 22.

95

Example 3.1: Lewandowski, Adon Olam, No. 28 (mm. 1-29) from Kol Rinnah u’T’fillah,
22

The prayer could be sung by as few as two singers, or by an a cappella choir, divided into
high and low voices.
The question of authorship of the chazzanut presented as Lewandowski’s original
melodies in Kol Rinnah fascinates scholars, perhaps because it offers some insight into
Lewandowski’s professional personality and his philosophy on musical ownership and
appropriation. In 1845, the Jewish community of Berlin at last replaced the hapless
Cantor Asher Lion with Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein (1806-1880), who relocated from
Stettin.
49
Lichtenstein’s musical skill far exceeded Lion’s; according to Idelsohn, he had
played violin in a symphony orchestra, had sung tenor in oratorios, and had introduced

49
Idelsohn, 275.
96

Max Bruch to Jewish melodies, allegedly inspiring that composer to write his Kol Nidrei,
Op. 47.
50

When Lichtenstein arrived in Berlin, he brought with him a collection of original
chazzanut, which he himself had ostensibly composed “in the Polish-Lithuanian
tradition.”
51
Although Lichtenstein “possessed a significant talent to create melodies,” he
had not studied composition and “was unable to arrange them for the firmly-established
rituals in Berlin” where Lewandowski had succeeded in integrating a four-part chorus.
52

Lichtenstein’s body of melodies nevertheless became central to the synagogue service in
Berlin, and, according to Idelsohn:
[Lewandowski] studied it; he arranged it; he remodeled it in the course of years,
until his spirit was saturated with it. It became so much a part of him that he
considered Lichtenstein’s chazzanuth as his own. For twenty-five years
Lewandowski worked on Lichtenstein’s chazzanuth, until the material acquired a
new form—the form bestowed by Lewandowski’s genius. And in publishing that
chazzanuth in his work Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah, Lewandowski did not mention even
the name of Lichtenstein, apparently believing that this music was or had become
his. Only by means of Lichtenstein’s own manuscripts do we recognize the
origin.
53

Jascha Nemtsov suggests that Lewandowski’s failure to credit Lichtenstein for the
creation of the melodies may have been deliberate. For example, when the New
Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse opened in 1866, Lichtenstein stayed behind to

50
Idelsohn, 276.
51
Nemtsov, “Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah” in Love Makes the Melody Immortal!, 27.
52
Ibid.
53
Idelsohn, 276.
97

continue serving as cantor at the Old Synagogue on Heidereutergasse.
54
Nemtsov writes
that Lewandowski used his now-significant influence “to keep Lichtenstein out of the
services” at the New Synagogue, and “spread rumors that Lichtenstein had refused to
sing in the New Synagogue because of his conservative beliefs.”
55
In place of
Lichtenstein, Lewandowski supported recruiting “a more mediocre cantor from
Hildesheim, Aron Joachim (1834-1913),” ostensibly so that he could “remain the all-
powerful leader just as Sulzer in Vienna.”
56
Nemtsov argues that in this way,
Lewandowski waited until after the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse had
cemented his power before publishing any of his Jewish music works.
57

Lewandowski’s great choral masterpiece is his collection, Todah W’Simrah
(1876), which achieved publication at “the pinnacle of his fame and power.”
58
He
managed to create for himself at Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue a culture in which he,
the choir director-composer, not only facilitated choral music but created and executed
the overall musical vision of the worship community:

54
Nemtsov, “Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah” in Love Makes the Melody Immortal!, 30.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid, quoting Magnus Davidsohn, “Evaluation of the Life and Works of Louis
Lewandowski,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference-Convention of the
Cantors Assembly and the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America
(New York, 1952), 33.

57
Nemtsov, “Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah” in Love Makes the Melody Immortal!,
30-31.
58
Ibid., 39.
98

For the first time in the history of synagogue music, services were no longer
dominated by the cantor (whose name was often not even mentioned in the
official reports of the Jewish Community), but by the choir director. The cantor
was expected to subordinate himself entirely to Lewandowski and follow his
instructions. Of course, no cantor of any caliber was willing to do this. The few
candidates who showed unmistakable talent and artistic will—like the young
Eduard Birnbaum or Emanuel Kirschner—were removed from Berlin by
Lewandowski through clever intrigues.
59

Lewandowski’s choral-cantorial compositions, unlike Sulzer’s, unmistakably focus on
the choir. Cantorial solos are comparatively simple and not generally at the heart of the
music.
The first volume of Todah W’Simrah, for example, opens with two settings of Ma
Towu (How Lovely Are Your Tents, O Jacob). The first Ma Towu (Example 3.2) is a
triple-meter anthem that opens with an expendable organ introduction and highlights the
choir, triumphantly, straight away.
60
The F-major, Andante maestoso prayer for Shabbat
evening divides relatively simply into four-bar phrases that employ antecedent-
consequent phrase structure. Lewandowski even ventures to approximate a cantor-choir
call-and-response texture without employing a cantor. For example, at the pickup to
measure 17, the tenor section introduces new, melodic, and somewhat virtuosic material
that a composer such as Sulzer would have assigned to the cantor’s part, without
question. Lewandowski, however, not only allocates this motive to the entire choral

59
Nemtsov, “Toda W’simrah,” in Love Makes the Melody Immortal, 39.
60
Louis Lewandowski, Todah W'simrah 1. 1. (Berlin: Bote & Bock, 1876): 3. All
subsequent references to Erster Teil of Todah W’simrah come from this edition.

99

tenor section, but continues thereafter to feature the choir exclusively until measure 40,
when he at last allows the cantor a few measures of accompanied solo.
The cantor’s two lines of solo material in Ma Towu, from measure 40-50, are
quite simple, offering no virtuosity or vocal acrobatics. The memorable thematic
material in this prayer setting is undeniably choral. The organ, moreover, merely doubles
the choir and offers simplistic harmonic support to the cantor.

100

Example 3.2: Lewandowski, Ma Towu, No. 1 (mm. 1-51) from Todah W’Simrah (Erster
Teil: Sabbath), p. 3-5

101

Example 3.2 (continued): Lewandowski, Ma Towu, mm. 25-51

102

Lewandowski’s inclusion of an organ part in his choral music in Todah W’Simrah
resulted from years of evolution in his thinking on the subject. His philosophy on the use
of organ in a large synagogue setting appears in an opinion that Lewandowski wrote at
the behest of the board of the Berlin Jewish Community in 1862.
61
Amidst planning for
construction of the New Synagogue, the board decided that worship services at the new
congregation should include organ accompaniment. They sought several rabbinical
opinions, a community proposal, and professional “assessments” regarding the suitability
of the organ in Jewish worship, including an opinion letter from Lewandowski.
62

Lewandowski’s opinion not only reveals his thoughts on use of the organ in
synagogue worship, but also illuminates his philosophy on the purpose and utility of
choral singing in Jewish music. He begins by summarizing the early nineteenth-century
evolution of notated cantorial music and the use of choirs in worship, obliquely
referencing Sulzer’s quest “to ban from temples and synagogues all the frivolity of the
type of music that prevailed and had accumulated over time . . .”
63
Definitive melodies,
sung by organized choirs, Lewandowski explains, came to “replace the former music and
limit the overly free manner—more like lack of manners—of the prayer leaders.”
64

61
Hermann Simon, “‘Love Makes the Melody Immortal!’ The Life and Work of
Louis Lewandowski” in Love Makes the Melody Immortal, 14-15.

62
Ibid., 15.
63
Ibid., quoting Lewandowski’s opinion, Hermann Simon, trans.
64
Ibid.
103

Choir singing, fashioned according to artistic law, had first of all the purpose of
exposing the heretofore prevalent arbitrariness of the generally very uneducated
and non-musical prayer leaders to the laws of art.
65

Lewandowski then compares the structure of choral culture and use in Jewish ritual to
that, presumably, of Protestant and Catholic worship:
While the rituals of other religions are built from below, that is, through singing
lessons in school that provide for the needs of the service, we must begin building
from above—that is, through fully supplied ritual music performed by the choir—
that educates and forms the congregation for cooperation and autonomy in the
responses and replies created for them. Thus the choir will more and more align
with the leader of the congregation, after first acting subordinate to him.
66

Lewandowski suggests that this format (imposing or overlaying a fully-built four-part
choir onto a preexisting cantorial-congregational unison singing structure) could “suffice
for smaller congregations in limited spaces.”
67
However, Lewandowski continues, “for
larger congregations in larger spaces, this new element has proved quite insufficient over
time.”
68

The congregational singing that has been restructured by the choir can no longer
find certain support and backing in the choir alone, because as large as it is, it
cannot create the material strength that would be needed to control and lead large
masses, especially as the peculiar animation of Jews in general, the exactitude and
punctuality required by the laws, cannot be very favorable and supportive in
introducing congregational singing.
69

65
Simon, Love Makes the Melody Immortal, quoting Lewandowski’s opinion,
Hermann Simon, trans., 15-16.

66
Ibid., 16.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
104

The consequences of utilizing an a cappella choir that cannot, on its own, control a larger
congregation, Lewandowski warns, would be much worse than the “evils” originally
caused by the single, hapless prayer leader. Rather, he writes, the synagogue must find
“suitable, firm and certain support for communal singing, especially as the congregation
feels not merely a duty, but also a natural need, to take active and autonomous part in the
services.”
70
His solution focuses primarily on the crowd-control, rather than the
aesthetic, value of the organ as an instrument in worship: “The organ, the instrument of
instruments, is alone capable, thanks to its broad range of tones, of controlling and
leading large masses of people in large spaces.”
71

Lewandowski then addresses the propriety of use of the organ for Jewish worship,
in particular, criticizing its detractors for their ignorance about the instrument:
The claim has been made on the subject of the introduction of the organ in the
Jewish worship service that the organ cannot be brought into harmony with the
peculiarities of the ancient Jewish style of singing. Such reservations, however,
are based on a complete misunderstanding of the instrument, together with a lack
of any musical understanding. The organ, in its magnificent sublimity and
multiplicity, is capable of any nuance, and bringing it together with the old style
of singing will inevitably have a marvelous effect.
72

His closing argument, again, focuses on the need to fill the expansive sanctuary with
sound, offering the organ as the instrument best suited to support the choir, which
provides direction in the service:

70
Simon, Love Makes the Melody Immortal, quoting Lewandowski’s opinion, 17.

71
Ibid.

72
Ibid.
105

The necessity, in the almost immeasurably vast space of the new synagogue, of
providing leadership through instruments to the choir and most particularly to the
congregation imposes itself on me so imperatively that I hardly think it possible to
have a service in keeping with the times in this space without this leadership.
73

The Berlin community’s executive board issued its decision to allow organ in worship
services on January 29, 1862.
74
By the time the New Synagogue on Oranienburger
Strasse opened in 1866, Lewandowski had added an organ part to the works he had
composed during his twenty-five years at the synagogue on Heidereutergasse.
75
As a
result, much of Lewandowski’s organ writing is superfluous; his compositions may be
performed successfully without it. In fact, Lewandowski provided his own imprimatur
on either performance practice:
The choral pieces [in Todah w’Simrah] can always be performed without the
organ accompaniment. In the community here [in Berlin] they are sung with
accompaniment only in the New Synagogue. In the other community
synagogues, as well as in the private synagogues, they are sung unaccompanied.
76

Lewandowski’s most celebrated work, Hallalujoh, No. 202 (Psalm 150) (Example
3.3), succeeds with or without keyboard accompaniment.
77

73
Simon, Love Makes the Melody Immortal, quoting Lewandowski’s opinion,
17-19.

74
Ibid., 19.
75
Ibid.
76
Goldberg, “Neglected Sources,” 48 (quoting Lewandowski, Introduction to
Todah W’Simrah, Part II (1882)).

77
Louis Lewandowski, Todah W'simrah 2. 2 (Berlin: Bote & Bock, 1882): 227.
All subsequent references to Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge of Todah W’simrah come from
this edition.

106

Example 3.3: Lewandowski, Hallalujoh, No. 202 (mm. 1-9) from Todah W’Simrah
(Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), p. 227

107

The triumphant D-major arpeggio at the opening of Lewandowski’s famous Hallalujoh,
No. 202, as well as the octave leaps on D in the bass in measures 5-6, emulate trumpets
heralding the grandeur of God. The alternation between men’s voices and tutti in a call-
and-response format, beginning in measure 7, on the text, “Praise God for His mighty
acts,” emphasizes and re-emphasizes the number and power of God’s acts.
Though this Hallalujoh is by far Lewandowski’s most famous work, performed
regularly in Hebrew as well as in vernacular tongues, it is not the composer’s only setting
of Psalm 150. Lewandowski’s other Hallalujoh (Example 3.4), also in D major,
effectively offers praise to God, emulating various instruments with different musical
ideas. A delightful, upbeat setting of the psalm, this little-known Hallalujoh deserves the
opportunity to uplift listeners anew. In this lesser-known setting, Lewandowski places
German singing text above the Hebrew transliteration, perhaps appealing to the German
identification of the Berlin Jewish community, or emphasizing the interfaith, universality
of Psalm 150’s jubilation.

108

Example 3.4: Lewandowski, Hallalujoh, No. 201 (mm. 1-8) from Todah W’Simrah
(Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), p. 222.

109

Lewandowski’s identification with German nationality did not end with the
setting of Jewish prayers and Hebrew psalms to German texts. Indeed, according to
Idelsohn:
[W]e find in Lewandowski’s music a real German element, a slavish imitation of
the German folk-song and Lied form. Lewandowski, the Polish Jew, was so far
Germanized as not to be able to distinguish between conscious and instinctive
imitation.
78

Idelsohn finds German elements particularly noticeable in Lewandowski’s psalm settings
(such as those discussed above) and in his several settings of L’cho Dodi [Come, My
Beloved], among others:
All [Lewandowski’s] Lechoh Dodi tunes, his Psalm tunes . . ., his music for the
removal and replacing of the Torah, all his laudations, are based either on German
folk-song or on oratorio.
79

The oratorio style that Idelsohn mentions is mostly Mendelsson’s. Much of
Lewandowski’s output shows a close musical affinity to his great contemporary: “the
entire Lewandowski epoch is entirely impregnated with the romance of Mendelsohn’s
[sic] music.”
80
Like Mendelssohn, one of Lewandowski’s greatest talents as a composer
was in his crafting of singable, memorable melodies. Indeed, according to Idelsohn,

78
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 278.
79
Ibid.
80
Magnus Davidsohn, “Evaluation of the Life and Works of Louis
Lewandowski,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference-Convention of the
Cantors Assembly and the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America
(New York, 1952), 30-31.

110

Lewandowski “created and developed a noble warm-breathing style of Jewish melody,
purged of the tangled fungous growth of sentimentality.”
81

Nowhere is Lewandowski’s melodic prowess more discernible and lovely than in
the most enduring of his multiple settings of L’cho Dodi (Example 3.5)¸ the Friday
Kabbalat Shabbat prayer that welcomes the Sabbath, metaphorically, as a bride. This
piece comes from the first part of Lewandowski’s Todah w’Simrah collection, which
contains music for Shabbat. Magnus Davidsohn (1877-1958), who served as chief cantor
at the Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin from its opening in 1912 until its closing by the
Nazis in 1936, wrote of the Sabbath portion of Lewandowski’s Todah w’Simrah: “Here
the musician par excellence makes his appearance.”
82

The text of the L’cho Dodi refrain translates to, “Come, my beloved, to meet the
bride / And welcome the presence of Shabbat.” The full poem, which comes from
sixteenth-century Safed, has nine verses; Lewandowski set five of the verses and two of
the choruses to different music before reprising the opening refrain shown in Example
3.5. The major-mode, triple-meter setting of this prayer resembles many of Sulzer’s
popular waltz-like prayer settings.

81
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 277.
82
Davidsohn, “Life and Works Lewandowski,” 30-31.

111

Example 3.5, Lewandowski, L’cho Dodi, No. 13 (mm. 1-22) from Todah W’Simrah
(Erster Teil: Sabbath), 22.

112

The essence of the opening L’cho Dodi refrain is simple, malleable, and
imminently singable. For this reason, cantors and congregations worldwide have not
only presented it as written, but often have sung just the melody (or some variant of the
melody) in unison, and have interspersed other melodies (not necessarily
Lewandowski’s) for the verses in between refrains of Lewandowski’s opening tune.
Accommodations and variations like these, as well as the accessibility of this L’cho Dodi
melody, likely led Artur Holde to write, “Lewandowski’s works are Gebrauchsmusik in
the best sense of the term.”
83

Like Sulzer’s music, Lewandowski’s output is varied and cannot be reduced to
major-mode, triple-meter Sabbath sweets. His Jokor b’ene Adonoj (Example 3.6), which
sets verses 15-19 of Psalm 116 (Table 3.1), for example, opens with four-part men’s
voices in a dark F minor, in piano-dynamic, probing music that reflects the somber nature
of this verse of the Hallel Psalm: “Adonai holds precious the death of those who are
righteous.”

83
Holde, Jews in Music, 22.
113

Table 3.1 Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski, Jokor b’ene Adonoj
(Psalm 116, verses 15-19)
Hebrew Transliteration
(Germanic)
English Translation
15 Jokor b’ene adonoj,
hammowsow lachassidow,
16 Ono adonoj, ki ani awdecho,
ani awd’cho ben amossecho,
pittachto l’mossero.
17 L’cho esbach sewach todoh,
uw’schem adonoj ekro,
18 N’doraj ladonoj aschalem,
negdono l’chol ammo,
19 b’chazross bess adonoj
b’ssochechi j’ruscholojim,
Halalujoh.

15 Adonai holds precious the death of those
who are righteous.
16 Adonai, I am Your servant, Your servant,
the son of your maidservant;
You have freed me from my chains.
17 I will sacrifice an offering of thanks to You
and invoke the name of Adonai.
18 I will fulfill my vows to Adonai in the
presence of all God’s people,
19 in the courts of the house of Adonai, in the
midst of Jerusalem.
Hallelujah.

The solemn, four-bar, F-minor opening to Jokor b’ene adonoj ends in a half
cadence and then gives way to a sequence that weaves the Tenor I and II voices back and
forth in a call-and-response duet. The Largo men’s choir opening section closes on E-flat
major, setting up a modulation to the relative major for the thanksgiving section of the
psalm. Women’s voices join the men’s for a lengthy, triple-meter, Allegro section that
utilizes imitation, voice pairings and one more divisi section in the men’s voices before
ending triumphantly in E-flat major on halalujoh.

114

Example 3.6: Lewandowski, Jokor b’ene Adonoj, No. 22 (mm. 1-43) from Todah
W’Simrah (Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), pp. 45-47.

115

Example 3.6 (continued): Lewandowski, Jokor b’ene Adonoj, mm. 20-43

116

Lewandowski’s setting of Jokor b’ene adonoj receded somewhat into obscurity
by the late twentieth century, perhaps in part because the Hallel psalm that it sets is
recited infrequently; it is sung only on the three pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Shavuot,
and Sukkot) and Rosh Chodesh (the first day of the new month). Moreover, after the
decimation of the European Jewish population during the Holocaust, and as synagogue
choral culture waned in the United States in the late twentieth century, fewer and fewer
choirs could muster the voices for four-part men’s divisi.
Todah W’Simrah features several other works that feature TTBB voices.
According to Cantor Magnus Davidsohn, Lewandowski conducted an all-male choir at
the New Synagogue, which apparently provided him with sufficient men’s divisi forces:
“From the year 1866 to 1892 [Lewandowski] stands at the main pulpit of the magnificent
synagogue. A powerful choir of 100 boys and 25 men surrounds him.”
84

Perhaps the most recognizable setting for men’s voices among Jewish
congregations is Socharti loch [I Will Remember You] (Table 3.2; Example 3.7), part of
a prayer recited in the Musaf portion of the Rosh Hashanah [Jewish New Year] morning
service. The prayer combines verses from the Torah, affirming that God will remember
His people.

84
Davidsohn, “Evaluation of Lewandowski,” 32.

117

Table 3.2 Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski, Socharti loch
(Jeremiah 2:2, Ezekiel 16:60, Jeremiah 31:19)
Hebrew Transliteration (Germanic) English Translation

Socharti loch chessed n’urajich,
ahavass k’lulossajich,
Lechtech acharaj bammidbor,
b’erez lo s’ru’oh.
W’ne’ěmar: w’socharti ani ess
b’rissi ossoch bime n’urajich,
Wa’hakimossi loch b’riss olam.

W’nemar: Ha’ven jakkir li efrajim
im jeled scha’aschuim,
Ki midde dabri bo, sochor
esk’rennu od.
Al ken homu meaj lo. Rachem
arachmenu, n’um adonoj.
(Thus says the Lord:)
I remember your youthful devotion, the love
of your bridal days
How you followed me through the wilderness
through a land unsown.
I will remember the covenant I made with you
in the days of your youth;
I will establish an everlasting covenant with
you.
Is it because Efraim is my favorite son, my
beloved child?
As often as I speak of him I remember him
fondly.
My heart yearns for him, I will have pity on
him, says the Lord.

Like Jokor b’ene Adonoj, Socharti loch begins in minor and then modulates to the
relative major. This B-flat major material, beginning in measures 32-33 on the text
W’socharti ani ess brissi ossoch bime n’urajich, quotes the High Holy Day nusach
[prayer melody] for the evening service (Example 3.8) before veering into original
material for the consequent phrase. The opening theme returns in pickup to measure 43,
118

followed by a brief Poco lento section, which ends abruptly in G major, creating an
ABA-Coda form.

Example 3.7: Lewandowski, Socharti loch, No. 198 (mm 14-close) from Todah
W’Simrah (Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), pp. 217-218.

119

Example 3.7 (continued): Lewandowski, Socharti loch, mm. 32-close

120

Example 3.8, High Holy Day Nusach for the Evening Service (partial)

A signature characteristic of Lewandowski’s composition is his ability to marry
Eastern-European cantorial styles and Western-European compositional technique within
a single prayer setting. Generally, his choral writing is fully Western, while his cantorial
recitative writing sometimes draws from his Polish background. In Socharti loch, for
example, the choral writing utilizes four-part Romantic harmony. The cantorial part is
sometimes metered and integrated with the Western style, but at one point, in measure
42, it is designed freely, approximating the “tangled flourishes” of Eastern chazzanut in
mode and style.
85

Lewandowski utilized the minor mode sparingly; perhaps the most striking of his
settings in minor is his C-minor Enosch [Man’s days are like grass] (Psalm 103, v. 15-17)
(Table 3.3 and Example 3.9). After a lengthy (but optional) organ prelude, the choir
enters, pianissimo, each voice part at the bottom of its tessitura, as if to emphasize the
lowly earthiness of grass. The wind then blows over the course of measure 30 in a
massive crescendo from piano to forte on an F-minor triad that gusts into a sustained,
dramatic D-flat major chord in measure 31. As quickly as it arrived, the wind disappears
into pianissimo, staccato utterings at measure 32 that seem to return to a tonicization of C
minor, with a diminished-seventh built on the leading tone, followed by a first-inversion

85
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 280.
121

dominant seventh chord. Instead, Lewandowski finishes the thought—that the flower’s
place in the field disappears with its death—by first tonicizing A-flat major and then
returning to C minor.

Table 3.3 Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski, Enosch (Psalm 103,
v. 15-17)
Hebrew Transliteration (Germanic) English Translation
15 Enosch, k’chozir jomow,
k’zier hassode ken jozir,
16 Ki ruach owru bo w’enennu,
w’lo jakirennu od m’komo.
17 W’chessed adonoj,
me’olom w’ad olom
al j’reow, w’zidkosso
liw’ne wonim.

15 Man’s days are like grass;
He flourishes like a flower of the field;
16 The wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
17 But from everlasting to everlasting,
God’s love is with those who fear
Him, and His righteousness
with their children’s children.

For the next section of the text, W’chessed adonoj [God’s love], the music
modulates to the relative major. The new text, “And His righteousness is with their
children’s children,” repeats several times, as if to emphasize that God’s love perpetuates
itself from generation to generation. The A-section text and motivic material then return,
with variation in the texture, as a reminder of human mortality. Magnus Davidsohn
writes that Lewandowski’s Enosch is “in construction immortal:”
His “Ennausch” [sic] in C Minor as also his “Schiwissi” are masterpieces, which
up to this very day have remained unparalleled in their greatness. Of course here
122

too the worldly characteristic is felt, but the feeling in the words of the Psalms is
so devastating that in creative power Lewandowski achieved thereby the highest
that he was able to produce. Musically he shows human life as described by the
Psalm.
86

Example 3.9: Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 227 (mm 25-42) from Todah W’Simrah
(Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), 260-261
.

86
Davidsohn, “Evaluation of Lewandowski,” 33.
123

Example 3.9 continued: Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 227, mm. 31-42

124

As with many prayers for Shabbat and Festivals, Lewandowski wrote another
setting of Enosch (Example 3.10). Like his “other” Hallalujoh, the alternative, slightly
shorter setting of Enosch, using the same verses of Psalm 103, almost never receives
performance. This G-minor Psalm setting, though less dramatic than the great C-minor
Enosch, nonetheless offers a vibrant and captivating view of human mortality versus
God’s eternity. This G-minor setting also opens with organ prelude and a pianissimo
choir entry; in this case, however, the choir begins in unison for its first four bars, as if to
emphasize the simplicity of a single flower or blade of grass.
From here, the construction of the G-minor Enosch becomes eerily similar to
Lewandowski’s (presumably) later version of Psalm 103: the wind blows over the flower
during the course of two measures (15-16). The setting of w’enennu [and the flower is
gone] is rhythmically identical to the other Enosch: two pianissimo eighth-note pickups
lead to staccato quarter-notes—a tiny, understated musical painting of the flower’s
sudden disappearance from the earth. For the next section, on the text, w’chessed adonoj
me olom w’ad olom [But from everlasting to everlasting, God’s love is with those who
fear Him], Lewandowski modulates to the relative major, just as in the great C-minor
setting. The similarities between the two settings suggest that the G-minor setting (No.
34) perhaps served as an incubator for the C-minor setting (No. 227), informing and
inspiring the later version.

125

Example 3.10, Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 34 (Complete) from Todah W’Simrah
(Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), pp. 60-61.

126

Example 3.10, Lewandowski, Enosch, No. 34 (continued): mm.29-close

127

Twentieth-century scholars have criticized Lewandowski’s choral works, along
with Sulzer’s, for being too saturated with Western sensibilities and compositional
techniques, and, in some cases, for “hav[ing] not the slightest sound of Jewishness.”
87

Regardless, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the Western/Germanic character of
Lewandowski’s compositions, the Berlin Jewish community of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries embraced them:
The singability and the freshness [of the prayer settings in Todah W’Simrah] as
well as the elaborate musical form of the choir parts, and last but not least the
German lied style, made them so beloved by the Jewish congregations in
Germany. Lewandowski developed the choral part in the Synagogue song to a
greater degree than did Sulzer.
88

Perhaps the work that most closely fit the German-ness of Lewandowski, the Polish
immigrant, and the German identification of the Berlin Jewish community, is the
Deutsche Kedusha (Example 3.11). The Kedusha is a prayer of sanctification of God’s
name, recited during the Amidah (the central prayer of every Jewish prayer service).
(The biblical verses in the Kedusha ultimately made their way into the Sanctus of the
Latin Mass.) The three constituent parts of the Kedusha (in Sephardic transliteration) are:
Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh Adonai Tz'vaot M'lo Kol Ha'aretz K'vodo [Holy, Holy, Holy,
The Lord of Hosts; The entire world is filled with His Glory"] (Isaiah 6:3); Baruch K'vod
Adonai Mim'komo [Blessed is the Glory of the Lord in His Place] (Ezekiel 3:12); Shema
Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad [Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is
One] (Deuteronomy 6:4); and Yimloch Adonai L'Olam, Elohayich Tziyon L'dor Vador

87
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 283.
88
Ibid., 282.
128

Hall'luyah [The Lord shall reign forever: Your God, O Zion, from generation to
generation, Hallelujah"] (Psalm 146:10).

Table 3.4 German Text/Hebrew Transliteration and Translation for Lewandowski,
Deutsche Keudsha (mm. 1-77)
German Text and Hebrew
Transliteration (Germanic)
English Translation
Chor: Aus jeglichem Munde erschallet
der Ruf
Zum Lobe des Ew’gen, der alles
erschuf.

Solo, Chor: Es jauchzen und jubeln die
Welten im Chor,
So tönt von der Erde zum Himmel
empor:

Chor: Kodosch, kodosch, kodosch,
adonoj z’wo’oss, m’lo chol ho-orez
k’wodo.

Choir: From every tongue the song is
praised
To the Lord of Creation from the ancient
of days.

Solo, Choir: The celestial choirs do tell of
His worth,
Their voices resounding in heaven and
earth:

Choir: Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of
Hosts! The whole earth is full of His
glory. (Isaiah 6:3)

129

Example 3.11: Lewandowski, Deutsche Kedusha, No. 235 (mm.1-81) from Todah
W’Simrah (Zweiter Teil: Festgesänge), pp. 271-273.

130

Example 3.11 (continued): Lewandowski, Deutsche Kedusha, mm. 25-52

131

Example 3.11 (continued): Lewandowski, Deutsche Kedusha, mm. 53-81

132

Lewandowski’s setting of the Kedusha combines German-language praise of God
with choral responses that set the traditional Hebrew Kedusha. The setting is largely in
Lewandowski’s favored triple meter and major mode, and utilizes SATB choir, tenor
soloist, and organ. Although the Deutsche Kedusha now receives performance primarily
as a concert work, the Hebrew responses from this composition have become the
“traditional” melodies used for these texts in many contemporary congregations. In
Berlin, however, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this Deutsche
Kedusha appealed both to the German identity and progressive Jewish spirit of the Berlin
Jewish community: “The Western character of the setting for four-part chorus and the
unison congregational parts of “Toda W’simrah” in no way prevented the acceptance of
this collection by German-speaking Reform congregations.”
89

Lewandowski’s Deutsche Kedusha, a German-Hebrew hybrid, epitomizes the
integration of Judaism and the Jewish experience with nineteenth-century German
society. The early nineteenth century had witnessed an epidemic of Berlin Jews
converting to Christianity, attempting to escape from persistent and nagging anti-
Semitism that would ultimately culminate in Berlin as the headquarters for Nazi
Germany. Yet for Berlin’s active, growing Jewish community in the late nineteenth
century, “Lewandowski’s music was seen as the expression and symbol of the successful
emancipation and integration of German Jewry.”
90

89
Nemtsov, Love Makes the Melody Immortal!, 43.

90
Ibid.

133

CONCLUSION
Sulzer, Naumbourg, and Lewandowski Lay the Groundwork for the Next Generations

The cosmopolitanism and the tolerance of society in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries had enabled the Jews to vie with the luminaries of the nations
with whom they lived in all branches of science, literature, and the arts. The
national trends in late nineteenth-century romanticism shattered the dream of
equality and fraternity and the feeling of security harbored by the Jewish
Europeans, and some storm signals disquieted them. But the reaction set in very
slowly and was at first heeded only by a few far-sighted men. The actual
catastrophe occurred—as far as western and central Europe were concerned—
only in the first half of [the twentieth] century. Only then were the processes of
emancipation reversed and the assimilated Jews of Europe taught that their actual
place was within their own community.
1

The strides in synagogue music composition that emerged within the Jewish
communities of nineteenth-century Vienna, Paris, and Berlin spread throughout Europe
and, eventually, to the Americas and Israel, before being crushed by genocide at the
hands of Nazi Germany. Contemporaries of Sulzer, Naumbourg, and Lewandowski
penned and published their own synagogue choral music; among them are Hirsch
Weintraub (1817-1881) (born in Poland; traveled extensively; worked in Germany) and

1
Peter Gradenwitz, The Music of Israel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1949),
183-184.

134

Julius Mombach (1813-1880) (England). Composers of the next generations continued to
develop the choral tradition; among them are: Eliezer Gerowitch (1844-1913) (Russia);
David Nowakowsky (1848-1921) (Russia/Ukraine); Samuel Alman (1877-1947) (born in
Poland; worked in England); and Leon Kornitzer (1875-1947) (born in Vienna; worked in
Palestine). Most of these composers followed the example set by one or more of the
three nineteenth-century pioneers, and infused their own regionally-inspired
compositional style into the framework.
Scholars have long debated who of the three great nineteenth-century pioneers in
synagogue composition was the strongest, or most influential, composer. This inquiry
tends to center around Sulzer and Lewandowski, comparing and contrasting their roles,
influences, accomplishments:
What was the difference in the cultural structure of the musical religious service
between Sulzer and Lewandowski? Sulzer had no cantoral [sic] model—that is
established by Idelson [sic]. In that case it was clear that the influence of his
tutors, of whom it is known they were certainly great musicians, even in part
pupils of Beethoven, had its effect on the compositional style of Sulzer. Without
detriment to the fact that his works comprised partly chasonic masterpieces which
up to this day have not lost their influence, because they spring from a natural
Jewish tradition, we are affected by the responses of the Schir Zion foreign to the
Jewish divine service. Quite different is the spirit of Lewandowski’s creations!
His gift of discovery is coupled with the tradition of his parental home. He works
for years beside a cantor whose flourishing phantasy is undeniably felt in
Lewandowski’s creations.
2

2
Magnus Davidsohn, “Evaluation of the Life and Works of Louis Lewandowski,”
in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference-Convention of the Cantors Assembly and
the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (New York, 1952), 30-31.

135

Most credit Sulzer with instigating the reform, but Lewandowski with perfecting the
genre. Lewandowski, moreover, fought harder and longer to win the opportunity conduct
and compose for the synagogue:
In view of the difference in the circumstances of their labors, we may account
Lewandowski’s personal accomplishment greater than Sulzer’s. The latter started
his career with complete power, as first cantor and official reorganizer of the
Synagogue service. His influence and authority were established from the very
beginning, created by his position and strengthened by his great talent as singing
artist; while Lewandowski started with practically no position, with no office,
with no fame, and with no attracting art—merely as a poor young musical
aspirant. He was just the chazzan’s assistant—his indispensable right hand, while
to the community he still remained the poor singerl. No wonder, therefore, that
for many years he was not noticed at all.
3

During those years in obscurity, Lewandowski studiously revised and reworked his
manuscripts, perhaps improving and perfecting them in ways that Sulzer and Naumbourg,
who wrote and published relatively quickly, accomplished to a much lesser extent. In
addition, Lewandowski’s works, designed to be sung by any cantor, are more accessible
than Sulzer’s, which cater to that great cantor’s own virtuosic baritone voice.
In any event, from the reign of Sulzer, Lewandowski, and Naumbourg, until the
Holocaust (longer in the U.S and Israel), the choral-cantorial model that they instituted
took hold internationally in Reform and Conservative synagogues. Not until the last
quarter of the twentieth century did the tightly woven synagogue choral system fray;
according to Artur Holde in 1974:
The development set in motion by Lewandowski . . . brought about one
disadvantage, in that the congregation, which formerly often took an excessive
part in the singing, now withdrew more and more from active participation. At

3
Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 274-75.
136

present many rabbis and synagogue musicians consider it a primary task again to
give a more prominent place to congregation singing lest the music assume the
character of an independent concert performance. It is now particularly the aim in
services for young people to create the proper balance.
4

Would that the “proper balance” had been reached. Instead, as folk, pop, and other sing-
along synagogue tunes took over liturgical worship in the wake of the Vietnam War,
synagogue choirs and their attendant budgets declined in numbers and in quality:
[F]rom about the 1970’s on, one began hearing increasing demands from young
people for “meaning” in religion and services, for “relevance” and “participation.”
Particularly in the final two decades of the century, chazzônim would hear: “I do
not want to be sung down to,” tragically revealing how totally estranged so many
had become to traditional nusach and chazzônus. Similarly, they would hear: “I
find the choir threatening; it inhibits my ability to participate” or “When I come to
a synagogue service, I do not want to be subjected to a concert,” again revealing a
total lack of understanding of the role of music and chazzanic embellishment of
nusach in enhancing the beauty and, yes, in rendering expression to the deeper
meanings of the prayers themselves, traditionally considered.
5

The attitude prevalent in American Jewish communities in the 1970’s—that
synagogues must cater to the musical tastes of the young Jewish adults—did significant
damage to the choral culture so painstakingly introduced by Sulzer 150 years earlier:
With the return of the [young-adult Jewish overnight summer campers] to
their homes and local synagogues, the less spirited melodies at the services
sounded comparatively dull, unspirited and antiquated. As the youngsters
clamored for their more spirited ruach tunes, parents as well as the adult
members of the synagogue as a whole were more than eager to cater to the
wishes and tastes of the youngsters. In the words of one parent, “As far as
I am concerned, they can have any tunes they want. If that’s what it takes

4
Artur Holde, Jews in Music: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Mid-
Twentieth Century (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1974), 22-23 (emphasis added).

5
Sholom Kalib, The Musical Tradition of the Eastern European Synagogue.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002, 214.

137

to get them in, that’s fine with me.” The age of youth idolization had
reached the synagogue.
6

Although a handful of large congregations with traditional music programs continued to
feature great synagogue masterpieces into the twenty-first century, much of the choral
repertoire from the nineteenth century and beyond became obsolete. Particular canonized
compositions still made appearances in services by special choirs instituted for the High
Holy Days, and high-quality, auditioned community choruses such as the Zamir Chorale
continued to perform the repertoire, which otherwise disappeared from performance.
Ironically, as referenced in Chapter One, infra, a similar trend of Jewish youth
demanding popular musical styles in synagogue had occurred in early-nineteenth-century
Germany and Austria:
[Israel] Jacobson’s model of radical Reform [in synagogue chant and liturgy] was
adopted in many European synagogues. As a result, there was widespread
abrogation of traditional liturgical chant, and a marked preference for formal
hymns, typically written by Christian composers in the German church style. It
should be noted, however, that while the encroachment of church music into the
synagogue was guided in part by rabbis endeavoring to create a Europeanized
Jewish identity, this phenomenon was also spurred on by Jewish youth who, to a
great extent, considered Christian-style worship an attractive alternative to ‘out-
moded’ Jewish rituals. In large numbers, young Jews drifted away from their
heritage, and became increasingly immersed in the larger Christian environment.
As a result, rabbis considered it good policy to embrace Christian musical forms,
along with other customs of church worship, in order to bring these young men
and women back into the synagogue.
7

6
Ibid. at p. 209.
7
Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Introduction: Sulzer, Idelsohn, and the Revival of
Jewish Music,” in Music in Jewish Thought: Selected Writings, 1890-1920, ed. Jonathan
L. Friedman (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 11.

138

Salomon Sulzer helped to stem the tide of the German-hymn-takeover by creating a new,
high-quality Jewish music model that inspired both Jews and non-Jews on an
international level. Choral conductors involved in contemporary Jewish music today,
who seek to re-educate both Jews and non-Jews about the treasure trove of Jewish choral
repertoire, may need to look no further than the great choral works of the nineteenth
century. Specifically, choral music by Sulzer, Naumbourg, and Lewandowski, in its
similarity to Schubert, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn, respectively, may provide just the
entryway to delight audiences anew. These nineteenth-century pioneers in Jewish choral
music may instigate a new renaissance of interest in Jewish music in the twenty-first
century.

139

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In 1623, Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1630) published the world’s first collection of notated choral music for the synagogue in Western, late-Renaissance style. Following this singular achievement in synagogue composition, no significant choral activity occurred in Jewish music until the tenure of Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) in Vienna. Sulzer’s publication in 1839 of the first comprehensive collection of choral-cantorial repertoire for the Jewish liturgy unleashed a wave of interest in synagogue choral music throughout Europe, most notably in two other major compendiums of new Jewish choral repertoire, published by Samuel Naumbourg (1815-1880) in Paris and Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894) in Berlin. ❧ Sulzer obtained both a Jewish and Western music education

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Asset Metadata

Creator Duffy, Coreen S. (author)

Core Title Synagogue choral music of nineteenth-century Vienna, Paris, and Berlin: its repertoire and history

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Musical Arts

Degree Program Choral Music

Publication Date 10/24/2014

Defense Date 10/15/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag choral,Halevy,Jewish,Lewandowski,Meyerbeer,Music,Naumbourg,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sulzer,synagogue

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Advisor Strimple, Nick L. (committee chair), Gilbert, Rotem (committee member), Scheibe, Jo-Michael (committee member)

Creator Email cduffy@miami.edu,coreen.duffy45@gmail.com

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