Comments on: Journeys from Judaism and Persecution in Mendelssohn and Mahler

By: Lee Eiseman

Lee Eiseman — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:59:57 +0000

Thanks for keeping this interesting thread alive. It seems axiomatic that Mendelssohn was ambivalent about his Jewishness. It’s a real Doppelgaenger dilemma- the Jewish Mendelssohn and the Christian one.

By: P. Cohen

P. Cohen — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:21:52 +0000

On this topic, see:

http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/music/mendelssohns_elijah_both_sides_now

By: e.r.staunt

e.r.staunt — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:38:57 +0000

Newberger’s article, while raising some interesting questions, reveals a lack of familiarity with the extensive scholarship in the field. Unfortunately, this leads to or reinforces a number of misconceptions, as can be seen by some of the comments about Mendelssohn’s sacred works (e.g. “Paulus). For a thorough (and thoroughly researched!) book on the subject, I strongly recommend “The Price of Assimilation” by Jeffrey Sposato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

By: Judith Newman

Judith Newman — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:35:33 +0000

I just thought everyone should know that Mendelssohn was anti-Semitic enough himself that I had to quit a chorus I belonged to that was performing his Paulus because I couldn’t stand to be part of a Jewish mob singing “Stone him to death! He blasphemes God, and those who blaspheme God must die!” about Paul at every opportunity. It even indicated at the end that the Jews would ultimately stone Paul to death, which according to Wikipedia did not happen.

By: Helen Epstein

Helen Epstein — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:43:59 +0000

A small correction that Eli encouraged me to leave, since I’ve researched the Jews of the Czech-Moravian Highlands. Mahler was actually born in the Czech village of KALISTE. The house in which he was born has been rebuilt, spurred on by Jiri Rychetsky’s local Mahlerites. My husband and I slept there a few years ago hoping to encounter ghosts and thought the village was pretty much the same size it had been then: tiny and totally rural, with a church and a pub as in former times. The family moved to IGLAU (I saw that house but did not go in) which was a German-speaking enclave in the Czech countryside, and a city not a village. It was there that the Habsburgs maintained a military garrison. Kaliste probably had a three-piece pub band at best. Mahler had a special place in the hearts of Czech Jews. Several had his adagietto from Fifth Symp played at their funerals as did my mother.

By: Helen Epstein

Helen Epstein — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:09:54 +0000

Great Piece Eli. I particularly liked the quote from Mendelssohn’s father about names as clothing. My family came from the same background and the Czech-Moravian Highlands. My grandfather Emil Rabinek converted a few years after Mahler did in Vienna but like Mahler and Mendelssohn, retained his name — which in his case meant “litte Rabbi” in Czech, i.e. Rabinek. One of the many people who helped me research my family history (published as Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History) was Jiri Rychetsky, who did most of the Czech-area research for Henry Louis de la Grange.

By: Joel Cohen

Joel Cohen — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 08:58:57 +0000

A useful, short book with excerpts from works by Felix’ grandfather Moses is “Moses Mendelssohn: Selections from his writings (The Jewish heritage classics)”

By: Louis Raymond

Louis Raymond — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:06:49 +0000

Hello Eli: What a pleasure to be able to learn more about Mahler’s & Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage and how it inevitably affects, somehow, their lives and work. As then as now, there are plenty of people, let alone countries, who take pride in keeping good people safe from barbarian influences. Let alone barbarians. And yet, there are parallel currents of progress, e.g., the NY Times piece on the popularity of gay marriage in —who knew?— South Africa. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that, over the broadest timeline, the record is ten steps forward and eight or nine back. Shorter-term, it’s hard not to feel like the sum is backward, though. Thanks again for keeping me in the loop. More please!

By: Robert Manning

Robert Manning — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:51:22 +0000

Please forgive the the typos in my originank you for calling my attention to the review.

By: Robert Manning

Robert Manning — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:44:06 +0000

I found this review fascinating and, more importanrly, enlightening. Elt, I abk you for calling it to my attemtion.

By: Bettina A. Norton

Bettina A. Norton — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:32:57 +0000

Is the above a “correction to Lee’s comment”? Or to the author whom he quotes? As the reference is to one of the most cogent events of music history (the “resurrection” of St. Matthew’s Passion, it would be nice to have our facts straight.

And, yes, the 19th-century belief in linear progress is a sham(e). Give up reading the newspapers, folks. Take up Sudoku.

By: Vance Koven

Vance Koven — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:33:59 +0000

Small correction to Lee’s comment: what Mendelssohn wrote was “Judensohn,” “son of a Jew.” Mendelssohn was baptized as a child and did not, in the same sense as Mahler and Schoenberg, “convert” to Christianity apart from his whole family’s conversion. He was a believing Christian for his entire mature life. Mendelssohn was luckier than the later composers in one important respect, that he lived in a period and among a social cohort that was more willing to accept at face value what Christians had always professed to want, the conversion of the Jews. The racialist doctrines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries–the dark underbelly of nationalism–denied this, and therefore set the stage for the rock-and-a-hard-place dilemmas Jewish musicians (and Jewish everyone else) faced then. That’s not to say that Mendelssohn didn’t come up against some of that as well, as did Benjamin Disraeli, since these ideas were gradually developing, but his was a more, shall we say, “enlightened” time. So much for the idea of linear progress, eh?

By: Mark Kroll

Mark Kroll — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:07:19 +0000

The response of nineteenth-century Jewish musicians (as well as writers and painters) to the issue of anti-Semitism and assimilation is indeed a fascinating story, one that is important for our understanding of the entire era. Mahler and Mendelssohn were, of course, not the only Jews who faced this problem, only the most iconic. There were many others, each confronting the challenge in his or her own way. Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Ferdinand Hiller are just three noteworthy examples. Hiller’s case, incidentally, takes on a particularly intriguing and somewhat bizarre twist, since it has a connection to modern history. Despite having converted to Christianity by the early 1800s, the Nazis still considered his family Jewish, and it was because of his grandsons’ last minute escape from the Holocaust in the 1940s that a lock of Beethoven’s hair Hiller had taken from the dying composer in 1827 ultimately reached this country in the 1990s

One further comment, a bit of nit picking, although I don’t want to make a big “megillah” about it: a more accurate transliteration of the Yiddish word for “countryman” is “landsman,” rather than “lantzman.” Although “lantzman” is how it sounds and how our Yiddish grandparents pronounced it (and, I just discovered, how it is written in Wiktionary), it is written in Hebrew characters just like it is for the ?German word “Landsmann,” which is pronounced the same way.

By: Jack Tucker

Jack Tucker — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:04:54 +0000

I do not want to leave the impression that I wrote the comment on Schoenber. I did not. I merely copied the article on Schoenberg’s conversion back to Judaism fom he site, http://www.nigun.info/schoenberg.html .

By: Bob Fagone

Bob Fagone — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:14:19 +0000

This essay will spur me on to read both Mahler’s and Mendelsshon’s biographies. As an RC I’m embarrassed by the weight of the Church’s pull in certain political times and climates. What baptism has to do with music is beyond me. I’ve grown away from my parochial (literally and metaphorically) up-bringing. The more I listen to classical music, the more I’m reminded of the old saw that God is in the details; only now I’ve come to realize (a real epiphany) that god resides in the music. Thanks to Newberger for helping me confirm this.

By: Lee Eiseman

Lee Eiseman — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:58:43 +0000

Eduard Devrient in “My Remembrances” (1869) maintains that Mendelssohn only made only one public reference in his lifetime to his own Jewishness when he said “..it was an actor and a Jew who restored this great Christian work [The Matthew Passion of Bach] to the people.”