Not everything heard at The Glasshouse was religious music, nor should it be made to appear so. Yet Jean-Baptiste Lully, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Max Bruch reveal fascinating intersections between music, faith, cultural encounter and conflict. Their stories are very different. Lully gives us seventeenth-century France imagining the Ottoman world. Biber gives us both the devotional imagination of a Catholic composer and an extraordinary musical depiction of warfare. Bruch, a Protestant Christian, responds to one of the most solemn melodies of Jewish religious tradition. Together they raise a question that remains remarkably contemporary: How do we listen to a world that is not our own?

Lully imagining another culture

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s March for the Ceremony of the Turks comes from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the comédie-ballet created with Molière and first performed in 1670. Its central character, Monsieur Jourdain, has money but desperately desires the sophistication and social standing he believes should accompany it. He is eventually drawn into an absurd pseudo-Turkish ceremony in which he is supposedly elevated to the invented dignity of “Mamamouchi.” Lully supplies magnificent theatrical swagger. But this is not authentic Ottoman ceremonial music. It is seventeenth-century France constructing its own theatrical image of the Ottoman world, against a background of French fascination with Ottoman culture and diplomatic encounters during the reign of Louis XIV. For the modern listener, that distinction is important. We can enjoy Lully’s theatrical brilliance without confusing representation with reality. Fascination with another culture is not necessarily the same as understanding it.

Biber when music goes to war

Three years later, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber created something altogether more unsettling. His Battalia of 1673 transforms the string ensemble into an extraordinary musical representation of soldiers and warfare. Martial gestures are followed by deliberate disorder. Different popular melodies collide simultaneously, creating a dissonant cacophony as though groups of soldiers are singing their own songs without listening to those around them. Biber uses unusual instrumental effects to heighten the illusion. He even suggests introducing paper around the strings to produce a rattling, percussive sound. It can initially seem almost entertaining in its audacity. Then something changes. The work concludes with a lament for the wounded. The spectacle of battle has acquired consequences. The soldiers are no longer merely characters in an ingenious musical experiment. Human beings have been injured. Battalia itself is not sacred music. That distinction is important. Yet the man who composed it was formed within the deeply Catholic culture of seventeenth-century Central Europe. Biber’s early education was associated with the Jesuit gymnasium at Troppau, now Opava, before his career eventually brought him to Salzburg and the court of the Prince-Archbishop. His Catholic religious world becomes much more explicit in the extraordinary Mystery Sonatas, also known as the Rosary Sonatas. They were not performed at this concert, but they are important to understanding the composer behind Battalia. The collection consists of fifteen sonatas associated with the mysteries of the Rosary, followed by a Passacaglia for solo violin. Instead of conventional titles, the sonatas were associated with devotional images relating to the mysteries of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Biber also employed extraordinary scordatura — altered violin tunings — so that the physical transformation of the instrument itself became part of his musical language. The contrast is striking. The composer capable of contemplating the mysteries of the Rosary through music could also make his instruments imitate the noise, confusion and violence of battle — and then end not with uncomplicated victory but with a lament for those who had been wounded.

For a twenty-first-century listener, that contrast between faith, violence, suffering and the longilng for peace has lost none of its power.

Bruch a protestant encounters Jewish sacred melody

With Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, Op. 47, the religious encounter becomes more intimate. Bruch was not Jewish. He was a Protestant Christian. Yet in 1880 he created one of his most enduring compositions using melodies originating within Jewish tradition. The principal theme derives from Kol Nidre, associated with the solemn opening evening service of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In Bruch’s original conception, the cello assumes something of the expressive character of the cantor. At The Glasshouse, another transformation occurred. The work was composed for cello, but Will Duerden performed the solo on double bass. The instrument’s depth gave the melody extraordinary gravity. A musical voice normally associated with the foundations of the orchestra was suddenly carrying a melody rooted in prayer, repentance and Jewish religious memory. Bruch explained his attraction:

Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement.”

Yet Bruch never became a composer of Jewish liturgical music. He remained a Christian composer responding to a sacred tradition that was not his own. There is another side to the story.

The Jewish musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, writing in Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1929), admired Bruch’s artistry but criticised what happened to the melody when it entered the Romantic concert tradition. He argued that in Bruch’s treatment it had “entirely lost its original character” and concluded: “It is not a Jewish Kol-Nidre which Bruch composed.” That tension deserves to remain. Bruch demonstrates that it is possible to be profoundly moved by another faith’s sacred inheritance. Idelsohn reminds us that admiration does not automatically confer understanding or ownership. Lully, Biber and Bruch therefore present three different encounters: one culture imagining another, a Catholic composer confronting the human consequences of warfare, and a Protestant composer listening across a religious boundary. None provides a simple twenty-first-century answer. Perhaps that is precisely why their music remains worth hearing. Before understanding can begin, however, something else has to happen.

We have to listen.

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References and Sources

Max Bruch and Kol Nidrei
Bruch’s comments on the Hebrew melodies are quoted from his 4 December 1889 letter to Eduard Birnbaum, cantor and musicologist. The Association for Jewish Studies discusses the letter and the circumstances surrounding Bruch’s Kol Nidrei.
Association for Jewish Studies — Kol Nidre: Yom Kippur’s Most Famous Melody

Abraham Zevi Idelsohn
Idelsohn’s assessment of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei appears in Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1929), where he distinguishes Bruch’s considerable artistry from the specifically Jewish character of the traditional melody. Wikimedia Commons

Additional musical reference
Hyperion’s notes on Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 discuss Bruch’s Protestant background, his connection with Berlin cantor Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, and his attraction to Jewish melody.
Hyperion Records — Max Bruch: Kol Nidrei, Op. 47

There is one detail I particularly like about these sources for Gilded Orpharion: they allow us to present Bruch and Idelsohn together rather than deciding between them. Bruch tells us why, as a Protestant, he was moved to make the arrangement; Idelsohn tells us why a Jewish musicologist could nevertheless hear something important as having been lost in that transformation.