Abstract
A few years ago, I composed a short oratorio for the annual Hanukkah concert traditionally held by the Jewish community in Mannheim, Germany. The text was compiled by my close friend, the community’s cantor, Amnon Seelig, drawing upon liturgical poetry (piyyut), the Book of Lamentations, and the Book of Maccabees. Seelig also performed the solo role in the work’s premiere.
The challenge I faced—balancing the element of lamentation with that of miracle and light—resonates with the complex identity of Mannheim itself: on the one hand, a leading musical center in the 18th century; on the other, a site of painful historical events throughout the 20th century.
Ultimately, I believe the oratorio—which has been performed annually in Mannheim since 2021—also reflects certain musical and aesthetic complexities rooted in my own Israeli and eclectic musical background. In this lecture, I will present the work and explore some of the musical ideas it embodies.
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Good afternoon.
For those who know me and those who don’t: I’m Alon Schab, a lecturer in the Department of Music here at Bar-Ilan University. I joined the faculty here as a musicologist, and indeed, for nearly the past twenty years, I’ve devoted most of my time to research in music. That’s why today’s lecture feels quite strange to me—it’s going to be more about myself and my feelings than I’ve probably ever spoken in all these years.
I wasn’t always, first and foremost, a researcher. In fact, until about twenty years ago, I primarily saw myself as a composer. From around the age of nine, I wouldn’t leave the house without a manuscript notebook—just in case inspiration struck. And it often did: The formative moments of my high school years were the concerts of our music track, in which a few of my pieces were performed. In late December 1999, I showed up in military uniform at the Henry Crown Hall in the Jerusalem Theatre for the premiere of one of my pieces in the “Etnahta” concert series, and from there I headed straight back to base for a night shift. My undergraduate degree is in composition and performance (recorder), and my master’s is also in composition.
The composer-researcher combination is a charged one, primarily because there is a fundamental and mutual suspicion between the so-called-“practical” music community (composers, performers, conductors, singers) and the community of researchers (music historians, analysts, ethnomusicologists, or theorists).
This suspicion, which can be summed up by saying that researchers think musicians are a bunch of talented illiterates, while musicians think researchers are literate but not talented enough to actually make music, is a utilitarian suspicion that has been perpetuated by the professional structures developed over the past two hundred years.
Yes, there are precedents going back to classical Greece, but more importantly, there are so many exceptions to the rule. To avoid falling into the trap of inappropriate comparisons with the universities of 400 or 500 years ago, I won’t bring up Dowland, or Dr. John Blow, or even Herr Doktor Brahms. But let’s start with composer-researchers of the 20th century:
Anton Webern held a PhD in musicology, writing on Renaissance music. Béla Bartók’s research is still considered foundational in ethnomusicology. And of course, there are reverse examples too—like Avraham Zvi Idelsohn, who composed operas, or the eminent English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, who was a prolific composer.
Even without going far afield, our own department was built, in one way or another, by people who did both. Zvi Keren was a composer and a scholar; André Hajdu was a great composer, but also a researcher of Hasidic music; Eitan Avitsur was both a scholar and a composer. Just a few years ago, at the Israel Music Days festival, a piece by Ethan Haimo was performed. Avi Bar-Eitan. Shai Cohen. Most of them, sure, lean more strongly toward one of the two, but they themselves embody the tension between these roles—or perhaps even reinforce the claim that the division itself is artificial. See? Look at me—I’m a researcher and…
“Listen,” said Alon the composer, “I let you off the leash for two minutes and already you're talking about the history of the department, the history of this or that, Ancient Greece, Brahms—and now you're slipping into artificial dichotomies and soon it’ll be ‘Composers and Researchers Refuse to Be Enemies.’”
Alon the researcher blushed a little and replied, “Okay, okay, let me just say one thing about where the tension does show up. I promise I’ll jump straight to what’s relevant to today’s discussion, alright?” Alon the composer reluctantly nodded, and Alon the researcher continued:
In the research world, versatility in a scholar is more accepted than it is in a composer. My enthusiasm for juggling different research topics is already a running joke among my friends—jokes I fully participate in. I enjoy writing about the English Renaissance, Viennese cantorial music around 1840, or Israeli rock operas from the 1970s.
But versatility in composition is often met with more suspicion—sometimes even resistance: Musical theater fans will never praise the late Leonard Bernstein for his symphonies; and fans of Bernstein’s symphonic music will never forgive him for West Side Story. Shlomo Gronich and Yoni Rechter will never be received at Heichal Hatarbut as they are at Tsavta. And when the Israeli Opera commissions an opera from Rechter, it’s because he’ll draw a new audience—not the opera's traditional one. Marc Lavry’s popular songs never attained the same canonical status as his symphonic poem Emek.
All of these reflect a romantic belief that a composer can only have one authentic voice, a single style in which they’re “allowed” to operate—at least at any given point in their creative lives. Ideally, their output should be divisible into “early,” “mature,” and “late” periods: early sounds like their teachers; mature is when they find their own authentic voice; and late should anticipate the future—writing at least one completely incomprehensible piece that, from a safe historical distance, we can declare to have foreshadowed some future trend.
Moreover, a composer writing in a style clearly rooted in the past—i.e., not seen as innovative—risks being labeled a pastiche artist, not to be allowed among us! Even after decades of postmodernism, the reigning ideology in concert halls—and certainly in composition departments—is still that the composer must find an original, innovative voice and remain faithful to it.
Even composition teachers who pride themselves on giving their students stylistic freedom usually emphasize that freedom for good reason: they’re trying to differentiate themselves from what is still considered the norm—a far more conservative one.
Still, the fact that I spend most of my week researching allows me, at least, the freedom to opt out of that discussion as a composer. I can write in whatever style I want, whenever I want, and really just do what I feel like.
“Really?” said Alon the composer. “You, my friend, do not do what you feel like. Your promotions depend on the articles you write and where you publish them. I’m the composer here, so if you don’t mind, let’s say you now feel like stepping off the stage and letting me take over.”
Alon the researcher lowered his gaze and sat down. Alon the composer stood and said:
I’m not insisting that my office door say “Composer.” I’m not seeking commissions. And I quite enjoy the feeling of being beholden to no one—free to write “for the drawer,” if that’s what I feel like doing.
In recent years, I’ve written songs somewhere between folk and pop; neoclassical-style music for recorders; chamber music explicitly inspired by Viennese expressionism; and of course, pieces in historical styles—usually intended to reconstruct, or creatively imagine, what a lost sonata by Buxtehude might have sounded like, or what a “hypothetical,” supposedly “original” version of a Bach partita might have been, if we pretend the surviving version is just a harpsichord arrangement and the original was for ensemble.
Several of my recent works are on Jewish themes—a short motet to the words of the Priestly Blessing; a reconstruction of the song for the dedication of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam; and of course, the Hanukkah oratorio.
So perhaps a few words on Judaism.
Like most secular Israelis, my family was not secular from time immemorial. My mother’s side was religious; my father’s family was very secular—but in the kind of secularism, in my grandmother’s case, that belongs to deeply religious girls who lost their families in the Holocaust. Still, keeping kosher and going to synagogue on the holidays were part of my childhood. Judaism was never absent from my life. But, kind of like after a tough gym workout, when you start to notice muscles you didn’t know existed—that’s how I began to feel my “Jewish muscle” when I left Israel for studies abroad, in 2007.
I belong to a small, little-known Hasidic community called the Mahler Hasidut. It originated in Vienna, and after the war relocated to New York. Its neurotic rabbinic dynasty cycles through figures like Woody Allen, Steve Reich, and Jerry Seinfeld. So everything I’ve done in the realm of Jewish music somehow relates to exile—to performance conditions specific to diasporic, non-Israeli Judaism—or to Jewish music history.
In fact, all my compositions on Jewish themes started after I left Israel for studies—which, paradoxically, is also when I became a researcher.
Alon the researcher perked up: “Listen, I’m the researcher here—and like all composers, you just talk about yourself. Could you at least play a few notes from the start of the piece, so people know what we’re talking about?”
Alon the composer started a video on the computer—a recording of the premiere, made without an audience, during the COVID pandemic in Mannheim, in December 2021.
“We’ll hear a little over a minute of the instrumental opening,” he said. “You’ll notice that although it doesn’t exactly sound like a specific song, the first four notes already hint at a quotation from Ma’oz Tzur.”
From the moment the choir enters, the reference to “Ma'oz Tzur” ceases to be subtle.
“Now that the fugue is beginning, this is a good time to pause,” said Alon the composer. “My colleague the scholar, please take two more minutes and explain what we had in mind when we were asked to write an oratorio.”
Alon the scholar’s face lit up. Suddenly, he felt needed again. He leaned back in his chair and said:
The genre called oratorio is, originally, a Catholic Christian one. (What? Did I say something wrong?) [Alon the composer gave him a tired look and muttered, “Yeah, yeah, go on.” So he continued...] The most common definition of the oratorio is ‘a large-scale, religious, vocal, and dramatic musical work’ — and there’s usually another characteristic added, stated in the negative: ‘it’s like an opera but without staging.’ Indeed, apart from the religious aspect and the lack of staging, I could describe opera in the same terms: ‘a large-scale, vocal, and dramatic musical work (and then I would add in parentheses: with staging...).’
The oratorio is typically detached from liturgy — its performance is seen as a spiritual act that is in addition to prayer, rather than part of it. The oratorio has a few liturgical sisters or grandmothers: in the Middle Ages, for example, there were liturgical dramas, dramatic interludes during the prayer service that enacted biblical narratives. Then there are the Passions — the two that survive from Bach’s pen are foundational to how the genre is perceived today, and they also demonstrate something about the genre’s adaptability, since Bach, of course, was a Lutheran, not a Catholic.
The most influential transformation of the oratorio occurred within Anglicanism, and here we must mention Handel, who with both hands created a rich oratorio canon: Esther, Deborah, Judas Maccabaeus, Messiah, Israel in Egypt, and more. Yet the oratorio’s power had already been proven in its first few decades, when it was still explicitly Catholic — primarily by composer Giacomo Carissimi in Rome, who wrote marvelous oratorios, including ones about the daughter of Jephthah, the prophet Jonah, and King Hezekiah.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Alon the composer, “but didn’t you once tell me we had some historical connection to Carissimi?”
The scholar chuckled fondly and said:
Yes, yes. Remember how the program says we studied composition with Haim Permont at the Jerusalem Academy? Well, Permont studied with George Crumb in Pennsylvania, and Crumb was a student of Boris Blacher, who studied with Friedrich Ernst Koch, who learned from Waldemar Bargiel, who studied with Ignaz Moscheles, who studied with the famous Czech teacher Bedřich Diviš Weber, who in turn studied with Georg Joseph Vogler, who was the student of Giovanni Battista (Padre) Martini (who also taught Mozart, by the way), and Padre Martini studied with Giacomo Antonio Perti, who studied composition with Giuseppe Corsi — Carissimi’s most famous student. So, my dear composer — if you’ve ever wondered why your oratorios sound the way they do — now you know.
“I knew there was something there,” said the composer. “But honestly, even though you like to mock me and my friends for not being so intellectually inclined, I’ve actually been trying to figure out how it happened that from all those Italian Catholics — Carissimi, Corsi, Perti, Padre Martini, and the rest — oratorio ends up in the lap of Judaism?”
“Excellent question,” said the scholar.
Already in the 18th century we find this genre taking steps away from its native roots. Take Handel, for example: aside from Messiah and Susanna (which are explicitly Christian subjects), many of his oratorios — Esther, Deborah, Judas Maccabaeus, Israel in Egypt — reflect a sympathetic view of the Jewish people. We even find contemporary attempts to ‘Judaize’ some of his oratorios, such as Esther, which was translated into Hebrew.
More broadly, Handel’s posthumous image shifts: he is reappropriated by the German national movement (despite the fact that he left Germany at the first opportunity, spent years in Italy, and became a naturalized Englishman). Jews played a role in this reappropriation, and there were parallel developments in Jewish liturgical music in Germany, including its secularization — a process that also gave rise to a civil, secular form of musical worship in the 19th century. (It’s no accident that Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was the formative moment in that development.)
All of this blurred the genre’s specific religious identification. By the time we get to 20th-century composers, the term ‘oratorio’ is broad enough, para-liturgical enough, and artistic enough to wander freely — not only across different Christian denominations, but even between Christianity and Judaism.
Among 20th-century Jewish oratorios, we can count Ben Haim’s Joram, Lavry’s Song of Songs, and works by Schoenberg and Milhaud. Even the boundary between cantata and oratorio becomes vague... Is Mordechai Seter’s Midnight Vigil a cantata or an oratorio? What about Milhaud’s Cantata of Job?”
- “Can we go back to talking about our oratorio, please?”
- “No problem. Your turn.”
“I got the commission from my good friend Amnon Seelig, the cantor of the Jewish community of Mannheim in central Germany. Mannheim is a small community today — about 450 people — but a very musical one. Historically, perhaps because of Mannheim’s important place in the history of Western music (a subject for another lecture), they’ve always made sure that the community’s cantor was musically gifted. I can attest that my friend Amnon, who studied with me at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, is a superb cantor and an exceptional musician, with a healthy dose of historical awareness.
When he was appointed cantor in 2017, he wanted to ‘restore the crown to its former glory’ and revive the Chanukka Konzert tradition — once a proud institution in many German communities before World War II. These annual concerts, held around Hanukkah, gave communities the chance to celebrate their unique identity and local traditions. Performing new works composed especially for the community was one way of doing that.
Amnon first approached me before the COVID pandemic to ask whether I’d be interested in writing a Hanukkah oratorio. It was not, however, until 2021 that I composed the piece, and it was performed at the end of that year — in the very recorded concert we saw earlier.
Among the ‘Mannheim’ works performed annually are arrangements of Ma'oz Tzur by Mannheim’s legendary cantor Hugo Chaim Adler, arranged for women’s trio and cello; and two arrangements — to two different melodies — by his son, Samuel Adler, the American composer whose orchestration book is the definitive guide to orchestration.
The concert is usually funded by a combination of the city of Mannheim, the community, and various foundations. The performing ensemble typically includes eight professional soloists and a string ensemble.
The libretto of an oratorio traditionally combines a collage of source texts with original writing — a paraphrased and dramatized version of the biblical story. Dramatically, this collage creates a patchwork of narrative moments and inner reflection. Narrative passages are traditionally conveyed through recitative. Since I didn’t want a Baroque-style recitative with harpsichord, I had to make a decision: what musical device would serve the same function in my music?
Already in the soprano solo that opens the piece, you could hear the direction I took in terms of what we might call ‘cantillation’ — it’s modal, with a flavor of early music.
[Demonstrate by singing the soprano's opening solo "Maoz Tzur Yeshuati, Yeshuat"] And later on: [Demonstrate by singing the end of that solo "Chanukat HaMizbe'ach"]
When the narrative itself begins, it starts with the Hanukkah version of the Al HaNissim prayer: “In the days of Mattathias ben Yohanan the High Priest, the Hasmonean, and his sons, the wicked kingdom of Greece rose up against Your people Israel, to make them forget Your Torah and violate the decrees of Your will…” Let’s listen to how Amnon Seelig sings it:
The entire movement of the melody is modal [demonstrate by singing "Biymey Matityahu Ben Yochanan"]. Each scale, and each mode, has a tone that is the most important one—the tone that functions as stasis, as the resolution of tension. And here it was clear to us when the tension ended.
The compositional trick-of-the-trade is to know—and to be able to convey to listeners—which tones are tones of stasis, and which are tension tones, from which the tension is resolved. In the word Shebashamayim, it's quite clear: it’s the degree known as the "natural seventh" (C leads to D; as in the famous folksong "Ba'a Menucha La'Yage'a"). But in this recitative, I introduced several other tones that are tension tones: [demonstration - "Lehashkicham" F leads to D; "Retson Avihem" - E leads to D]
For reasons history will have to determine, a significant portion of the 20-minute piece is devoted to the destruction that preceded the miracle. It’s not that there isn’t a miracle, and it’s not that there isn’t a happy ending at the end—but still, the next section in the piece is taken from the Book of Lamentations: the sopranos sing, and then the soprano soloist sings, the verses:
"How she sits in solitude, the city once great with people! She has become like a widow; great among the nations, princess among the provinces—she has become a vassal."
And the interjected cries of the choir, "Oy, what has befallen us," from the dirge that bears that name—I composed them in a way that, in retrospect, sounds to me a bit like an Eastern European Holocaust song.
So how did I depict the miracle?
Here, the ensemble—and also a somewhat more modern language—allowed me to tint the deliberately archaic melodies in a somewhat “supernatural” way, let’s call it that. Listen to how the strings create tension, a bit like in a suspense film: "When the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in the sanctuary..."
And after the phrase "and there was only enough to light for one day," I again bring the strings to the forefront, have them play a completely dissonant cluster (a cluster of notes), and then I suddenly clean it up into a familiar, seemingly pure chord: "a miracle occurred, and they lit from it for eight days."
Let’s listen to that:
And of course, after a brief fugue, I arrive at the verse "The Greeks gathered against me in the days of the Hasmoneans" from Ma'oz Tzur, and here the familiar melody is arranged in the most festive way possible without paying for trumpets.
I try to bring this oratorio—with its (perhaps excessive) emphasis on the theme of destruction—to some kind of uplifting conclusion...
So let’s end with that:
[listen from 19:45 to the end, 20:40]
"Alon the researcher, would you like to say something in closing?"
Thank you, Alon the composer. Look...
It’s not every day that I get to talk about my own music, and this split format perhaps betrays a bit of my discomfort with the situation.
In the end, the researcher in me is the one who looks over the composer’s shoulder and offers an opinion—and above all, he's the one who gets the final word.
Just as I come and critique the works of others, so too I come and critique my own works.
I examine them as a point in the historical process that interests me.
I ask myself what led me to emphasize the destruction over the miracle.
I, the composer, don’t always know the answer...
I, the composer, sometimes just do what feels right to me...
Not every issue is one the composer thinks about analytically in terms of tension tones and resolution tones.
And sometimes the researcher argues with the composer...
And sometimes the composer argues with the researcher...
And if that’s not Jewish—I don’t know what is.