Bach’s Passion

I don’t write about every concert I attend, or even every book I read, for that matter. That would be boring and repetitive. However, there are some concerts (and some books) that I feel I really must share with anyone out there who might be slightly interested in what I have to say.

As you probably know by now, I am a great lover of the grand choral music composed by Bach, Handel and various others. I also love chamber music, but that’s another story. This love of choral music is something I acquired (or inherited) from my father, and he in turn inherited it from his father, so perhaps it’s in my DNA. I was taken to performances of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ from a very early age, and have endeavoured to pass on this tradition to my own children and, especially, my grandchildren, with varying degrees of success.

And so when the opportunity arose to hear a performance of Bach’s great St. Matthew Passion in Jerusalem, I was not going to let the opportunity go by and was able, through my husband’s quick reactions and equally dedicated love of music, to be assured of a ticket in one of the first rows in the YMCA auditorium.

The Passion was performed by the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra which was founded several years ago by the organist and harpsichordist David Shemer to play baroque music on original instruments. And so this year, 2016, over the course of five days, we were privileged to witness the first ‘Bach in Jerusalem Festival,’ to mark the composer’s birthday on 17th March, with several concerts performed both in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel.

The Passion was the first concert to be given in the framework of the festival, and was a very special event. The conductor was the American Joshua Rifkin, a world-renowned expert in baroque music, but most of the performers, with the exception of Richard Resch, the excellent German tenor who sang the part of the Evangelist, were from Israel. Rifkin’s conception of the music was based on his extensive research into Bach’s original performance of the work, and somewhat different from performances of the Passion to which modern audiences have become accustomed.

It is common knowledge by now that after Bach’s death in 1750 the Passion was forgotten and not performed for almost a hundred years. It was revived by young Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and performed in Berlin in 1829 after Felix had been given the score by his grandmother Bella Salomon. Bach scored the music for two choirs, two orchestras and two organs, but modern performances generally overlook those instructions, preferring to use an augmented choir and orchestra. Anyway, where are you going to find two organs?

In the performance conducted by Rifkin there was no augmented choir, just two quartets, one on either side of the stage. These comprised excellent singers, each one of them soloists in their own right, who were able to tackle the complex music and thus do double service as soloists and choir. Where the score creates a dialogue between the two choirs this dualism produced maximum effect, with each quartet playing its part in the evolving narrative. The ‘conversation’ thus created was felt, heard and seen to the utmost, and the absence of the large choral ensemble was hardly noticed at all.

In a small exhibition at the nearby Jerusalem Theatre one could see the original score, as copied by Mendelssohn from the one in Bach’s own hand, on loan from the exhibition in the town of Eisenach, Bach’s birthplace. What joy it was, a few days after the concert, to put on the headphones provided, listen to excerpts of the Passion and hear the instructive commentary about how and why Bach came to compose this immense, complex and inspiring music.

For many years there was general reluctance about performing the Passion in Israel because of the story it tells of the taking and crucifixion of Jesus, and it cannot be denied that the gospels accuse the Jews of responsibility for this. But it seems that the grandeur of the music has overcome these doubts, and even Jews like myself can leave the concert hall with a sense of having been spiritually uplifted. Such is the power of music.

 

 

Painfully Honest

 

I was given Elliot Jager’s book, ‘The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness,’ as a gift, and must admit that it is not a book I would have chosen to read in the normal course of my reading experience.

This is a book that is full of pain. First of all, it is painfully honest. Second, it addresses an issue that is a major cause of pain – the fact that the author is unable to have children. The issue assumes additional prominence given the author’s Jewish roots and identity. This last is further aggravated by the writer’s ambivalent attitude to the orthodox Jewish observance with which he grew up and his intellectual and emotional departure from adherence to every minute feature of orthodox Judaism. And over and above all that is the fact that many years ago his ultra-orthodox father (the ‘Pater’ of the title) abandoned eight-year-old Elliot and his mother in New York and went to live in Israel.

I must admit that I felt distinctly uncomfortable reading this book. It is really unfair that most people seem to be able to beget children without so much as a second thought, and in many cases turn out to be unfit or inadequate parents. In this day and age many cases of infertility can be remedied by IVF, and the ‘tragedy’ of being childless averted. In the case of Elliot Jager and his wife, however, this was not the case.

Being unable to procreate raises many questions about God, Judaism and faith in general, and Elliot Jager goes into these subjects at great (some might say inordinate) length, while also interviewing other (mainly observant) Jewish men in a similar position, interspersing those segments with the account of his own experiences as an only child in a single-parent family and his feelings about his absent father. The story is complex, and after a period of thirty years in which there was no contact between the two, Elliot reached out to his aged father and was eventually reconciled with him to some extent.

That extent is limited by Elliot’s rejection of what he regards as his father’s irrational and superstitious version of fanatical adherence to every jot and tittle of Jewish observance, and he even goes so far as to mock it. But somehow their reconciliation also seems to give him some kind of consolation. In sum, the reader comes away with the sense that the author has achieved closure of a kind, or at least found a modicum of serenity and acceptance of his fate.

While, of course, I don’t envy him. i cannot help admiring his extensive research, wide-ranging knowledge on various allied subjects and his insuperable honesty in tackling subjects whether medical, Jewish or personal.

An exercise in coexistence

 

 Spending a few days in a luxurious hotel by the Dead Sea induces a sense of well-being, of physical and mental peace. The air is still pleasantly warm, and has not yet reached the burning heat of summer. The décor of the hotel is aesthetic and comfortable, and the scenery round about impressive, with the mountains of Moab shimmering on the other side of the water. The food is plentiful, varied and of excellent quality, and if one can manage to restrain oneself it can even be beneficial, as all kinds of healthy options are provided.

Along the roadside trees and shrubs have been planted, providing shade and a visually pleasing vista to all those who, like me, like to start their day by setting out to walk for a kilometer or two or three. At seven a.m. the path is abuzz with people walking, some slowly some fast, in twos or singly, as they enjoy the imposing scenery and gain health benefits in the process.

The guests staying at the hotel while we were there could be heard speaking several languages, with Hebrew prevailing, of course, but English and French were also in evidence. In addition, several of the guests were Arabs, though whether they were Druze or Muslims I was unable to tell. The only way of knowing whether a family is Arab is by observing the attire of the women, as the men dress and behave much the same as any secular Israeli Jew.

Although the Arab families were identifiable there was no apparent animosity between them and the Jewish guests, just as Arabs and Jews travel side by side in buses and trains in Israel, tend to patients in hospitals as nurses and doctors and are attended to by them, and work and shop alongside one another in any and every public place.

I was witness to an interesting exchange between an Arab woman in traditional garb (long black embroidered dress and flimsy white head-covering) and various Jewish guests. The conversation was in Hebrew, so I could understand what was going on. The woman was sitting in the spacious lobby and occupied with knitting a colourful sweater. As I watched, one elderly Israeli woman after another went up to the woman and opened a conversation with her about what she was knitting, admiring her skill and complimenting her on her work. After a while a Jewish man sitting with his family also spoke to her, congratulating her and wishing her well. She seemed to take all this with perfect equanimity, answering their questions in fluent Hebrew.

On another occasion I was intrigued to see an Arab family of not-so-young husband, wife and grown-up son, the latter apparently having some kind of physical and possibly also mental disability being unable to use one of his arms. At breakfast I saw the son bring a plate of scrambled eggs to his father and I immediately assumed that this particular paterfamilias was used to being waited on by the other members of his family. How wrong I was! The father deftly cut up the food on the plate, mixed the eggs with tomatoes and other salad vegetables, then gently fed it to his son. For me this was an object lesson in the way that a caring father attends to his son’s needs.

On our last day the news of the stabbing spree by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa was all over the newspapers. I was in the lift on my way to our room, my eyes riveted to the headlines describing the event when a young Arab couple came in and we began our ascent to a higher floor. Coward that I am, I could not look them in the eye. I’m still wondering what would have happened if I had.

Even More So…

It’s one of the best-kept secrets of British journalism that the Life and Arts section of the Financial Times’ weekend edition contains some of the best-written and most stimulating articles and reviews. So as we were leaving the airport of our almost next-door neighbor of Cyprus for the brief flight home on Saturday night I picked up a copy of the ‘pink’un,’ as it is known among the cognoscenti, to try to retain my connection with the best of Blighty.

Imagine my surprise then when I opened the aforesaid section to find an enormous front-page article entitled ‘More British than the British’ by Ian Buruma, a writer/journalist previously unknown to me, describing the German-Jewish roots of his family (he notes that his Schlesinger grandparents took in ten Kindertransport children). His ancestors came to Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were moneyed professionals and far from being penniless refugees. Their deep-seated attachment to German culture (especially the music of Wagner) did not prevent them from becoming equally attached to all things British – literature, cricket and even Christmas (not solely British, I know), or from identifying with Britain in the tradition of immigrants who become ‘British through-and-through.’

They abandoned their ancestors’ attachment to orthodox Judaism, but could not shake off their Jewish cachet and developed a family code-term, ‘forty-five,’ for referring to matters that were redolent of the insidious and typically British form of anti-Semitism. Although some professional avenues were closed to them, others were not, and their obvious intelligence, abilities and persistence enabled them to climb to social, professional and intellectual heights.

The article, lavishly adorned with nostalgic family photographs, could well have come from the pages of the AJR Journal, and as I read it I felt the strings of the land of my birth tugging fiercely at my heart. The piece ends with some well-considered thoughts about Britain, assimilationism and the lessons to be learned with regard to Islam and the current immigration issue. As Buruma points out, Judaism has nothing similar to violent jihadism but leaving that aside it is possible to hope that the second and third generations of immigrants will find their place in what has become an increasingly multi-cultural Britain.

In what I think is the most telling phrase, Buruma concludes his article by remarking that his grandparents were fortunate in being able to find their place “in a relatively decent society during frequently indecent times. One can only hope that, eventually, other children of immigrants will feel as lucky as they did.”

I cannot help adding that I’m sure I’m not alone in heartily endorsing that view.

(This article originally appeared in the March issue of the AJR Journal.)