Sounding Judentum: Assimilation, Art Music, and Being Jewish Musically in 19th century German-speaking Europe

Stein, Amanda Ruppenthal

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-eqnq-rq41

Work

Sounding Judentum: Assimilation, Art Music, and Being Jewish Musically in 19th century German-speaking Europe

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

In the nineteenth century, Jews across Europe entered a period of emancipation, at best a vaguely defined term that indicated the granting of equal civil and political rights, though sometimes conditionally and often incrementally. Concurrent to this, art music was dominated by deep divisions of stylistic and aesthetic approaches to composition. One of the most enduringly polemical dichotomies was the debate between the “classical Romantics” and the neudeutsche Schule. This dissertation explores the nexus of these two phenomena—emancipation and music-making—when Jews and those of Jewish ancestry entered, quickly and in large numbers, into modern secular society and into the concert halls and salons so valued by the cultural elite of the Bildungsbürgertum. Through a series of case studies and an archivally-informed historicist approach, I explore different musicians’ approaches to assimilation and acculturation: voiced sonically in their musical compositions, held interpersonally in their social and professional relationships, and expressed inwardly and outwardly in public articles, private diaries, and correspondence with other Jews and with gentile colleagues. As I both engage with and challenge ideas on what it means to “sound Jewish” in nineteenth century art music, my work functions as an intervention on existing narratives within the fields of historical musicology and Jewish studies. Case studies on five musicians from various historical moments of the pre- and post-Emancipation generations allow for a nuanced understanding of these individuals’ musical expressions of ever-evolving Jewishness. Fundamentally, I seek to pre-date the generally accepted narrative on when musicians embraced and expressed Jewish heritage and/or Judaism in sound. Jewish engagement in art music has overwhelmingly been understood using frameworks of the twentieth and twenty-first century that demand works must have narrowly defined sonic markers such as liturgical chant or folk music quotation, Klezmer-esque diversions, or some sort of ineffable Jewish pathos. My dissertation calls this approach into question. The music explored in this study does not “sound Jewish,” but nonetheless “sounds Judentum,” so long as one employs an interpretation of Jewishness, cultural identity, and personal self-expression that allows for a sonic mirror of acculturation and assimilation.

Creator