Happy Ever After

Did Sondheim Destroy the American Musical?

It’s the other national anthem, saying,
If you want to hear -
It says, “Bullshit!”…
It says: Listen
To the tune that keeps sounding
In the distance, on the outside,
Coming through the ground…
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in
To the ball park.
(Assassins)

Sandy Wilson, composer and lyricist, famously declared that Stephen Sondheim “destroyed the American musical almost singlehandedly. He’s turned it into a semi-operatic disquisition rather than an entertainment.” A brief survey of Sondheim’s catalogue, from the first concept musical Company (1970) with its lean view of marriage and flattened chronology, to Assassins (1990), a prickly but sympathetic account of eight American hit men (and women), suggests the composer and lyricist has indeed enacted a radical break with the unabashed good cheer of Oklahoma!’s “O what a beautiful mornin’’. More serious still, to challenge the form of that most American of theatrical celebrations—the Broadway musical—is apparently to challenge America itself. Yet a closer look at the so-called 1940s Golden Age of the musical comedy reveals Broadway’s tangled relationship with the American dream and a complex project of Jewish assimilation through the on-stage depiction of ‘outsiders’. Sondheim has been reticent about his heritage in interviews and commentaries on his work, but has noted an affinity with the outsider, stating “it’s obviously something I feel, belonging to two minorities”(being Jewish and gay). While Sondheim’s works often depict fragmented worlds that seem a far cry from the American creed, peopled as they are by the incompatible, dispossessed or unruly, his musicals do not perhaps disconnect with the musical’s Golden Age as much as Wilson feared: the Broadway “disquisition”on the outsider has been around for longer than might be expected. Just as the American musical of the 1940s began to redraw the boundaries of social inclusion, so Sondheim scores an alternative national anthem, for “the ones that can’t get in to the ball park.” Read more

The Broom and the Kettle: Satire in the Cabarets of Tel Aviv

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause.

In forming Tel Aviv’s first cabaret, Ha’Meiri and Koestler chose the name Ha’kumkum, from a Yiddish saying, ‘Don’t speak nonsense into the kettle.’ Ironically, the choice of name itself seems to indicate a permission to speak nonsense, and thus to disguise the Kumkum’s particular brand of aggression and judgment within humour and play.

The choice of Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem as the site of the Kumkum was an obvious one. Tel Aviv had already become a cultural centre, boasting Palestine’s first opera house, ballet and museum. The British presence was also much less obtrusive in the ‘first modern Hebrew city’. The British governmental offices were in Jerusalem and, though British soldiers could still be spotted walking the streets of Tel Aviv, they were usually there as tourists rather than as law enforcers. Cabarettists felt free to create biting political satire, without fearing undue disruption from the British censor. Moreover, the majority of Tel Aviv’simmigrant population were European and somewhat familiar with satiric cabaret. Tel Aviv’s cabarets, alongside a number of other performance genres, might never have succeeded without the 4th and 5th aliyahs, or mass immigrations to the Jewish settlement of Palestine; the 4th aliyah brought huge numbers of young eastern Europeans to Tel Aviv (such as Ha’Meiri), while the 5th brought German Jews to the city, together with their hard capital, affinity for Weimar cabaret and hunger for sophisticated nightlife. Read more

Sadie was a Lady: Prostitution in Yiddish Song

Der feter iz geshtanen in di rogn
Un di bobe a hendlerke in gas
Eyn brider zitst in ostrogn
Un di shvester tra-la-la-la-la

My uncle stands on street corners
My grandmother does business on the street
One brother sits in prison
And my sister tra-la-la-la-la

Sung by the Barry Sisters, and to audience guffaws at the mention of prostitution, ‘Ketzele Baroiges’ is a popular song from Eastern Europe. But I am English, a Yiddish folk singer recently turned London Yiddish song detective, and in scouring for Yiddish songs that make mention of London people, places and experiences, the subject of prostitution has come up repeatedly. Sometimes, as in ‘Ketzele Baroiges’, it is a comic aside but in other cases it describes a social reality, reflecting Jewish history in London.

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Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Bob

One of the first original compositions that the young Bob Dylan debuted in folk clubs in New York upon arriving from Minnesota in 1961 was ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues.’ Introduced by Dylan as ‘a foreign song I learned in Utah,’ the song consists almost entirely of the singer trying to get the words ‘hava nagila’ out of his mouth. ‘Ha… Va…ha…Va… neh … gee…lah,’ he sings, as if the words were strange and foreign, before putting it all together in a slow and carefully enunciated ‘Ha-va Na-gee-lah,’ immediately followed by an anomalous yodel.

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

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Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Jewish Paradox of Russian Music

In his 1931 short story, ‘Awakening,’ the writer Isaac Babel recalls one of the great cultural spectacles of his childhood in fin-de-siecle Odessa. ‘[In] the course of ten years or so,’ he writes, ‘our town supplied the concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies. From Odessa came Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gabrilowitsch. Odessa witnessed the first step of Jascha Heifetz.’ Babel contrasts these Jewish prodigies with his own alter ego’s musical efforts: ‘The sounds dripped from my fiddle like iron filings, causing even me excruciating agony, but father wouldn’t give in. At home there was no talk save of Mischa Elman, exempted by the Tsar himself from military service. Zimbalist, father would have us know, had been presented to the King of England and had played at Buckingham Palace. The parents of Gabrilowitsch had bought two houses in St. Petersburg. Infant prodigies brought wealth to their parents, but though my father could have reconciled himself to poverty, fame he must have.’
‘Fame’ is not a word usually associated with the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. The traditional images—pious yeshiva students, enraptured Hasidim, defiant young socialists, pathetic pogrom victims—leave little room for Jewish violinists charming the Tsars and Russian public alike with their dazzling talents. But Babel’s portrait of the writer as a young, suffering fiddle-player derives from a startling fact of Russian Jewish life: year after year, across both the Tsarist and Soviet eras, a constant stream of musical virtuosi emerged from the Russian conservatories to parade across the stages of Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, conductor Serge Koussevitzky, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, violinist David Oistrakh, pianist Evgeny Kissin—the extraordinary list goes on and on. To be sure, not every Russian Jew was a musical genius, as Babel’s self-mockery suggests. But the Jewish presence in Russian classical music ran as wide as it did deep.

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Said, Barenboim and the West-East Divan Orchestra

Since its formation in 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has prompted an energetic mix of rapture and hostility. Founded by conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and scholar and writer Edward Said, the organisation has provoked considerable debate through its much-lauded aim to bring together young Israeli and Arab musicians to engage in a ‘constructive musical dialogue’. Said and Barenboim’s many statements on the Western classical canon’s power to enable personal and collective transformation have further piqued discussion. In turn, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has become a site (albeit a rocky one) for broader questions as to what the orchestral experience can or cannot accomplish. More recently, a number of scholarly critiques of the orchestra have emerged, unpicking Said and Barenboim’s claims as to Western music’s unique power to transfigure social experience. Does the orchestra stand as a living ‘utopian republic’, as suggested by Barenboim? Or is the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra only a fantasy of social harmony, doing more to gratify its liberal concert audiences than to address the complexity and hardship of the political landscape in which it operates?

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Bloch

I…am a Jew, and I aspire to write Jewish music, not for the sake of self-advertisement, but because I am sure that this is the only way in which I can produce music of vitality and significance — if I can do such a thing at all … I believe that those pages of my own in which I am at my best are those in which I am most unmistakably racial, but the racial quality is not only in folk themes: it is in myself! Read more

‘Entartete Musik’

If Zubin Mehta hadn’t heard the recording, we wouldn’t all be here tonight.’ Thus spoke Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg on October 4th 2009 following the opening concert of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription series, one of the most prestigious series anywhere with a waiting list of fifteen years per ticket.
The central feature of the concert was Erich Zeisl’s setting of the 92nd Psalm which, in memory of his parents who had been murdered in the camps, he had called Requiem Ebraico. Mehta had already conducted the work in Israel before his decision to make it the centrepiece of the opening of the season. Read more

‘Entartete Musik’

‘If Zubin Mehta hadn’t heard the recording, we wouldn’t all be here tonight.’ Thus spoke Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg on October 4th 2009 following the opening concert of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription series, one of the most prestigious series anywhere with a waiting list of fifteen years per ticket.
The central feature of the concert was Erich Zeisl’s setting of the 92nd Psalm which, in memory of his parents who had been murdered in the camps, he had called Requiem Ebraico. Mehta had already conducted the work in Israel before his decision to make it the centrepiece of the opening of the season. Read more

The Jazz Baroness

On the night of 15 October, 1958, a vintage Bentley was pulled over by the Delaware State Police. Suspicions had been raised by the sight of a white woman driving with two black male passengers, one of whom had danced his way into a motel along the road in search of a glass of water. This man was Thelonious Monk and the other man was Charlie Rouse. Monk refused the officers’ request to leave the car and they beat his fingers with blackjacks. When the driver screamed that Monk was a pianist, they beat him harder. Minutes later, the officers found marijuana in a suitcase which the driver, Nica, claimed was hers. Had Monk been busted he’d have lost his cabaret card and the right to perform in New York for up to seven years. Read more